The continued obsession with social media channels like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter makes it easy to overlook the role of content marketing in your brand’s customer engagement activities. Using these channels to start a conversation with customers is an important first step but the novelty can soon wear off if you stop feeding your customers a regular diet of quality content that draws people in and keeps them coming back. A good digital marketer knows how to develop content that serves a human need, solves a problem or inspires passion.
 
Rebecca Lieb describes the importance of content marketing:

“Using content to sell isn’t selling or sales-ey. It isn’t advertising. It isn’t push marketing, in which messages are sprayed out at groups of consumers. Rather, it’s a pull strategy – it’s the marketing of attraction. It’s being there when consumers need you and seek you out with relevant, educational, helpful, compelling, engaging, and sometimes entertaining information.”

Australia Day (26 January) provides a good opportunity to compare three approaches to content marketing that utilise a mix of social media channels but to vastly different ends.   
 
First up is the National Australia Day Council (NADC), the coordinating body for Australia Day celebrations across the nation and for the Australian of the Year Awards. NADC should be commended for jumping into social media by creating a Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube channel and Flickr pool. Yet from a content marketing point of view there’s little in the way of compelling content or story to really capture people's imagination. 
 
Meat & Livestock Australia is continuing their campaign to promote lamb consumption on Australia Day using sports commentator Sam Kekovich in a series of irreverent ads. The campaign is multi-channel across television and social media and centres around a brash viral video “Barbie Girl” that Kekovich performs with pop singer Melissa Tkautz. The video has received over 500,000 views on YouTube and garnered lots of public attention for being outrageous. 
 
The Havaianas Australia Day Thong Challenge is a marketing campaign to break the world record for the longest line of inflatable airbeds on the ocean using Facebook and online. People will be competing on Australia Day across NSW, Vic, Qld, SA and WA for the title and Havaianas is sending out backyard packs of inflatable thongs for people to use at home. The event will generate media coverage and photos and video to be used in further promotion of the brand.
 
MLA and Havaianas case studies demonstrate the importance of creating content that is compelling, fun and entertaining; content that pulls people in and encourages them to share with their friends. MLA and Havaianas have done a great job of capitalising on a national holiday to turn the spotlight on their brands and provide content that enables the public to celebrate the festivities through the frame of their products (lamb bbq & thongs). What are some other good examples of content marketing that you've come across?

Happy Australia Day!