What comes to mind when you think of content marketing? Blog posts, white papers and landings pages, perhaps? Writing for SEO?

All are quintessential examples of content that can be used to help generate and engage leads.

But so are mediums you might not immediately associate with marketing—podcasts, virtual conferences, online coursework or even just happy customers talking into their webcams about your brand.

Remember: Content is anything you create or distribute that informs, educates, entertains or inspires your target audience. The written word doesn’t have a monopoly on any of those things.

With that in mind, here are 6 examples of the most inventive (and adaptive) content we’ve created in the past few months:

1. Shibumi’s Virtual Summit

Twice per year, Shibumi hosts a Partner Product Advisory board. Dozens of experts come from around the world to attend these events, which are held in Europe and the United States. For obvious reasons, 2020 was looking like a bust.

But instead of a raincheck, Shibumi called an audible. With Brafton’s help, the program management software company decided to take its event online. And so, the first-ever Shibumi Virtual Summit was launched.

“What we ended up doing was having Brafton actually coordinate the whole process,” Andrew Wiltshire, Director, Asia Pacific at Shibumi, said. “That included setting up time with the presenters, helping them with the IT challenges that are inevitable, recording them and then ultimately doing the behind-the-scenes editing to bring the videos together.”

The result was a smashing success, with positive feedback pouring in from attendees.

You can get access to the finished product here. And if you haven’t already done so, we recommend you watch the testimonial about the virtual event at the top of this section.

2. Lexia Learning’s Podcast

Sonic content marketing is a thing, and we do it.

For more than a year, Brafton has helped Lexia Learning produce its own branded podcast, LexiaTalks.

In Q4 we’ve elevated our production quality. In addition to mixing the audio and polishing each segment, we now also commission the host for the podcast.

LexiaTalks regularly interviews experts in education who share insight on a range of issues that are important to our educational infrastructure, educators and learners.

If education touches your life in some way (which it surely does), the podcast is worth a listen.

3. TM Group’s remote video testimonial

Short of a close friend’s recommendation, a real customer vouching for your brand on camera is the most intimate form of social proof.

But in our age of travel restrictions and risk mitigation, many customer contacts are working from home. Even when they aren’t, letting a vendor conduct an on-location video testimonial isn’t always feasible.

Cue the remote video testimonial. It’s a unique product we’ve launched specifically for COVID times. We’ve completed a number of these for our clients, and more recently, created a few featuring our clients (including The TM Group) talking about how our services have helped them.

The remote video testimonial is safe, less involved than an on-location testimonial (asks no more of the interviewee than a video conference would) and every bit as compelling as a shoot conducted in-person.

4. Concentric Market’s eBook about prescriptive analytics

At first glance, the above excerpt from an eBook we created for Concentric Market might not look like much.

But this 36-page behemoth is one of the most successful eBooks we’ve produced all year:

  • It was downloaded thousands of times.
  • It has a conversion rate of nearly 50%.
  • Most important: It helped our client achieve their goals.

The clean, simple design, which features only a small amount of text on each page, makes this asset easy to look at and even easier to digest.

Plus, it’s full of specific and real examples of how prescriptive analytics have helped businesses achieve marketing and revenue goals (like a car manufacturer reducing go-to-market time for a hybrid launch by 3 months).

If you want some inspiration for your next high-value asset launch, we’d recommend looking at one that’s wildly successful.

Here you go (it’s worth downloading).

5. ThoughtTrace’s socially distant video shoot

Technically we shot this on-location video in Q3. But if you’re willing to look past that, you’ll see a rather impressive feat on the part of our video team.

First off, the video came out great. Our client contact told us that an employee said, “I’ve been sending it to my family all day!”

Secondly, nothing about this shoot was business as usual. Some of the steps we took to responsibly produce this opus included:

  • Remotely coordinating with a local production company to avoid unnecessary travel.
  • Scouting interview locations via video conference and reference photos.
  • Remotely managing the video shoot by literally video-conferencing into the set and providing virtual direction.
  • Spacing out interview times and locations to minimize the number of people on set.
  • Editing from our home offices.
  • Including COVID testing in the process for all on-site video personnel.

Throughout the process, we made sure we were in complete control of the creative vision. Our in-house team completed all the post-production work.

In other words, we created the video you see above without ever leaving our home offices, and without any interstate travel.

6. Our free target audience email course

This free marketing email course takes inventiveness to new heights.

It’s a 6-day, instructor-guided course complete with video tutorials, resources, templates and email support.

And when we say 6-day course, we mean that the 6 parts of the course are delivered over the course of 6 days. Participants can complete it whenever they want, over as many days as they need.

Day 1 of the course is an intro email that explains everything to come. Think of it as the syllabus. Days 2 through 6 are the actual course content with links to video instruction and resources.

This course has helped us generate hundreds of leads. It’s helped us brand ourselves to other marketers as an authoritative source on the topic of “target audiences.”

If email is an important part of your marketing strategy, we highly recommend you sign up for our course, if for no other reason than to get some inspiration for your own email marketing strategy.

You’ll learn a ton about marketing to a target audience in the process.

More to come in 2021

2020 has been a year full of extenuating circumstances.

But if there’s one silver lining to being a marketer in this day and age, it’s the call to be more inventive and adaptable than ever. We’ve seen it within our own agency and within our clients’ marketing teams, and we look forward to seeing more of that creativity and ingenuity in the year ahead.

Need help with your own marketing project?

If you have special projects you need help with, whether it’s a podcast, a virtual conference, a remote video testimonial or something else entirely, just fill out the form below and we’ll get in touch!

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Dominick Sorrentino, Brafton's Brand & Product Manager, is based in Portland, ME. He likes language, playing guitar, birding, taking his dog on scenic strolls, traveling, and a good conversation over a great cup of coffee. He promises he's not as pretentious as he sounds.