Content Marketing Success: How Sears and Outbrain Reached Out to Customers

Content Marketing Success: How Sears and Outbrain Reached Out to Customers

Uses of Social Marketing Techniques for Your Business

Sears is a successful chain of department stores that sells a wide variety of products from clothing and jewelry to home appliances and garden supplies. Their successful advertisement of their exercise equipment through social media garnered much sales success and profit.

According to Julia Fitzgerald, Chief Digital Officer of the Fitness, Sporting Goods & Toys Department, Sears undertook online marketing campaigns through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Shop Your Way. The company combined that with traditional advertising and paid distribution methods to attract people to their shop. To further encourage customers to buy fitness equipment, Sears also provided a rich online library of fitness content. These library resources can be accessed through the social media sites where people can use to further educate themselves about proper exercise and fitness.

Sears’ use of online marketing tools to inform potential customers about their products has paid off well. It can be debated that their offer of free educational fitness articles further enticed potential customers to open up their wallets and buy equipment for themselves. Sears also unveiled FitStudio.com, a social website where customers can communicate with each other and get advice from fitness experts and nutritionists. This motivation to help customers get in shape has helped Sears successfully promote their brand and earn high revenues.

On the other hand, Outbrain, a content discovery platform company, has depended upon using content marketing strategies on a trial-and-error basis. Gilad de Vries, Vice President of Brands and Agencies, tells how they learned much from involving customers in their content creation plans. He says, “Getting as many people as possible to engage with our content helps both with building brand awareness and brand affinity to SEO and social strategies.”

De Vries’ advice to businesses interested in going into content marketing is relatively simple. He recommends that it is all right to start small and involve customers as soon as the content is created. This helps in gathering insights about the target audience’s (1) preferred activities, (2) location, (3) how long they stay reading the content, (4) what call to action statements are most effective, etc., etc. Once businesses have analyzed the data gathered, their marketing analysts can continue to create content that will evoke positive reaction from consumers.

In the end, what do content marketing beginners and professionals can both learn from Fitzgerald and De Vries?

  1. The use of social networking sites can drive more traffic to your website and actual store;
  2. Involving customers and making them well-informed fosters close customer-business relationships;
  3. If you have enough resources, utilize traditional marketing methods in conjunction with social marketing techniques;
  4. It’s all right to experiment with the content and learn from your customers; and,
  5. Customers are not just buyers of products and services. They can also be considered as partners in building up your business.