20 Content Marketing Examples: Complete 2026 Success Guide
Most lists of content marketing examples are padded. Forty-seven entries, half of them the same three campaigns written up slightly differently, and a couple you can’t trace back to any real brand no matter how hard you search.
This one’s shorter. On purpose.
Twenty brands, every one of them real, every project documented publicly so you can check it yourself. Each gets a quick note on what you could pinch. Some are over a century old. One started with a man putting an iPhone in a blender. None of them won on budget alone, and the thing they share is dull but true: a clear audience and a content strategy that stayed put long enough to pay off.
A quick yardstick before we start. The Content Marketing Institute describes content marketing as creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and keep a clearly defined audience. Valuable, relevant, consistent. Hold each of the content marketing examples below up against those three words and you’ll notice they all pass.
The ones that played a very long game
1. John Deere’s The Furrow. John Deere started publishing The Furrow in 1895. It wasn’t a catalogue. It taught farmers how to farm better, and the tractors came later. It’s still going, which makes it one of the oldest content marketing examples around and a content strategy that predates the phrase by the best part of a century. Teach people. They remember.
2. The Michelin Guide. The Michelin brothers launched their guide in 1900 to give French drivers a reason to drive more. More driving, more worn tyres. Simple. It had maps, mechanics’ tips and places to eat, and the restaurant stars came later and grew into a brand of their own. A tyre company ended up as the most feared name in fine dining, which makes it easily the strangest of the content marketing examples on this list (and the one I’d most like to have pitched in a meeting). You couldn’t make it up.
3. Red Bull Media House. Red Bull runs an actual media company, producing films, magazines and live events around extreme sports, and while the 2012 Stratos jump (Felix Baumgartner leaping from the edge of space) is the bit everyone remembers, I’d argue the steady week-in, week-out output matters a lot more. Red Bull’s content strategy is to own the culture its audience already loves, and that’s why it turns up in almost every list of content marketing examples, this one included.
4. The LEGO Movie. Released in 2014, it was in effect a 100-minute brand story that people happily paid to watch in cinemas, and if you’d told a marketing director in 1995 that families would queue up and buy tickets for an advert, you’d have been laughed out of the room. It worked because the story came first. Few firms can make a film, obviously. But you can still ask what your fans would watch with no sales pitch attached.
Free tools, data and genuinely useful stuff
5. HubSpot’s Website Grader and blog. HubSpot built its inbound brand on free guides, templates and tools like Website Grader. The free stuff pulls in exactly the audience that might later buy HubSpot’s software, which is a content strategy bolted straight onto the sales funnel. Of the B2B content marketing examples here, it’s the one most often copied.
6. Spotify Wrapped. Every December since 2016, Spotify turns each listener’s year into a personal summary built for sharing. Your own data, nicely dressed. Nobody’s asked to post it, and everybody does. If your business holds useful data about customers’ habits (a gym, a coffee subscription, a budgeting app), there might be a tiny Wrapped hiding in there. Of all the content marketing examples built on data, this is the one product teams quietly envy, partly because users do the distribution for free and partly because people actually wait for it, like Christmas.
7. Buffer’s open salaries. Buffer has published how it calculates staff pay and shared its salary data openly as part of a wider transparency push. That openness became a content strategy in its own right. Odd one, this, because the thing being marketed is the company’s values, and the audience it pulls in is as much job applicants as customers.
8. Zapier’s integration pages. Thousands of pages, each explaining how to connect one app to another. “Connect Gmail to Slack.” That sort of thing. It’s the least glamorous of all these content marketing examples, and possibly the most effective: lots of small pages, each doing one real job for a searcher who needs exactly that answer. Content strategy at scale, with zero sparkle.
Video, jokes and the odd blender
9. Blendtec’s Will It Blend? From 2006, Blendtec’s founder blended iPhones, golf balls and marbles on camera. Cheap. Ridiculous. Very watchable. It proved the motor’s power better than any spec sheet ever could, and it’s still the reference point for low-budget content marketing examples.
10. Dollar Shave Club’s launch video. In the 2012 launch video the founder strolls through a warehouse explaining why razors cost too much. Funny, blunt, and pitched squarely at an audience fed up with overpriced blades. Point of view beats budget, as so many content marketing examples keep proving.
11. Mailchimp Presents. In 2019 Mailchimp launched an in-house studio making short films, series and podcasts about small businesses. The shows barely mention email. The audience is small business owners, and the content strategy is simply to make things they’d enjoy watching on a Sunday evening. Brave, given most brands can’t resist a plug.
12. Duolingo on TikTok. Duolingo turned its green owl into a chaotic, slightly unhinged character on TikTok. It reads like a person posting rather than a brand, and the audience (mostly younger people who’d scroll straight past an ad) treats it like a mate’s account. Most content marketing examples on social media are polished to within an inch of their lives, and this one works precisely because it isn’t. Tone of voice can be a whole content strategy on its own, it turns out.
When the community writes the content
13. Glossier and Into the Gloss. Emily Weiss started the beauty blog Into the Gloss in 2010, interviewing people about their routines, and when Glossier launched in 2014 it did so on the back of that audience and the conversations in the comments. Build the readership first, then make what they keep asking for. That order is rare, and as a content strategy it’s about as low-risk as product launches get, because the audience has already told you what to make.
14. GoPro’s customer footage. GoPro’s channels are packed with clips filmed by customers: surfers, skiers, cyclists, parents chasing toddlers round a park. Fair warning, though. User content like this only works if the product is genuinely share-worthy, and most products, if we’re honest, aren’t. Plenty of content marketing examples built on customer footage fall flat for exactly that reason, because somebody assumed people would want to film their new kettle.
15. Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke. First run in Australia in 2011, it swapped the logo on bottles for popular first names, so people went hunting through shop fridges for their own name (or their mate’s, or their ex’s) and posted the photos everywhere. The packaging became the channel. It’s one of the rare content marketing examples where the product itself is the media.
16. Dove Real Beauty Sketches. In 2013 Dove had an FBI-trained forensic artist draw women twice, first from their own description and then from a stranger’s. The gap said it all. Of all the emotional content marketing examples people reach for, this is probably the most quoted, and it sat inside a brand message Dove had been running for years.
Teaching people things (and meaning it)
17. Patagonia’s Don’t Buy This Jacket. On Black Friday 2011, Patagonia ran a full-page New York Times ad telling people not to buy its jacket unless they needed it. Then it backed that up with repair guides and its Worn Wear programme. Hard to argue with. It’s the boldest of the values-led content marketing examples here, and it only worked because the company already behaved that way.
18. Canva Design School. Free tutorials and courses on design basics for people who aren’t designers. Every lesson happens to use Canva. That’s the quiet cleverness of this content strategy: it teaches a skill and creates loyal users in the same breath.
19. Moz’s Whiteboard Friday. Moz’s audience is marketers, and for years it has run Whiteboard Friday, short videos explaining SEO ideas on a whiteboard. Simple and repeatable. The consistency is the content strategy. People know when it’s coming and what they’ll get.
20. Notion’s template gallery. Notion hosts a gallery of templates, many made by its own users, for everything from habit trackers to project plans, and each one is both a small piece of content for a specific audience and a ready-made reason to sign up. Probably the neatest product-led entry among these content marketing examples, and a content strategy that more or less grows itself.
So what do they have in common?
Look past the formats (print, film, TikTok, a gallery of templates) and the same pattern keeps showing up in these content marketing examples. Each brand knew its audience properly. Each picked a lane, teaching or entertaining or giving people something to share, and stuck to it far longer than most marketing teams would tolerate. Hardly any were one-off stunts. Even Stratos sat inside years of steady Red Bull output.
And they’re honest. Patagonia’s message matched its repair programme. Blendtec’s blender really did blend the iPhone. If you borrow one thing from these content marketing examples, borrow that.
Now, turning it into your own plan. Write down, in one sentence, who your audience is and what problem they keep bumping into. Then pick one format you can keep up every week or month without hating your life. That’s the bones of any content strategy. Say you run a small accountancy firm. You won’t make a feature film. But you could publish a clear monthly guide to the tax deadlines your clients always forget, which is basically The Furrow, scaled down and with fewer tractors.
People also have to find the stuff. Search still does most of the discovering, so our guide to B2B SEO strategy covers that side for business audiences. Want links from your content? Our piece on link building outreach explains how to promote it without spamming editors. Sharing on LinkedIn? See our LinkedIn guide.
Then measure what the business cares about. Views are nice. Enquiries, sign-ups and repeat customers are nicer.
My honest take? Most small firms don’t fail at content because their ideas are bad. They fail because they stop after six posts. Every one of these content marketing examples took years, and the patient brands that kept going (Moz, Zapier, John Deere for 130-odd years) often did better than the clever ones that peaked once. Pick your one format, give it a year, and judge your content strategy then.
If you’d like help shaping a content strategy for your business, take a look at our services.
