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CookSmarts.com

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This infographic caught the team’s eye from day one. ‘50 Simple Salads For Every Season’ was featured by Lifehacker – a great placement for any campaign!

But what captured my attention the most was how CookSmarts created a powerful, real resource page to accompany the piece.

The infographic was simply an added benefit – it included further details about the dressings, with tips and a video explaining how to make a vinaigrette.  

The infographics were also broken down by season – winter, fall, spring and summer – which not only provides additional assets for publishers to use, but also offers another potential opt-in for their list – which appeared to be the key aim of this campaign.

The team at CookSmarts proved this multi-infographic concept worked with the ‘Ultimate Guide to Spices’.

Back in 2014, the piece achieved 44 referring domains and was shared widely across the web, with three unique infographics plus supporting content.

Not happy with just one home run, the brand pushed to build upon what had already been produced,, and applied it to other pain points for its audience.

One other thing that I personally loved about CookSmarts’ approach is that it provided an A4 printable version of the infographic in exchange for a user’s email address – genius!

It would be great to know what kind of numbers were achieved through such a simple process.

How is it affecting search?

I really like the way CookSmarts is simply marketing its site through content – it’s a relatively new domain with only 605 total linking domains, so it gives us great insight into how content marketing efforts are affecting search results.

Using SEMRush we see a gradual increase in search visibility – something every SEO team member wants to see.

Movoto.com

Movoto was producing visual content marketing way before it became cool.

Working within what most would call an unsexy industry – real estate – Movoto has produced some amazingly creative campaigns, but more importantly it has been doing so regularly for the past two years.

The top performing piece of content with regards to placements is ‘These are the 10 most stressed out states in America’. Movoto calls this study its ‘kind of a big deal’ list.

Firstly, the company gives details on how the data is pulled together for these type of lists here - something I have never seen before outside the publishing world.

For this particular infographic, a number of data sources were collected, which are defined as supporting ‘stress’, such as unemployment figures, commute times, percentage of income spent on housing, etc… and from this Movoto provided an average for each state for the final list.

Following on, visuals were created for each, together with a table of data to show the full breakdown. All of this provides total clarity as to how it produced the research.

Finally, Movoto visualise all of this data in a very simple interactive infographic, which is also available as a static image.

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For most content marketers out there, this is serious ‘next level’ stuff. No tricks, just thorough, time-intensive research to create something meaningful based on a concept that people truly care about, and then shared using easy-to-understand visuals.

How did it do?

372 domains – a serious home win.

But even greater when you see this strategy has been used over and over by Movoto to create similar content about ‘caring small cities’ (318 domains) and ‘exciting cities’ (291 domains).

How is it affecting search?

Someone forgot to tell Movoto that it’s getting harder to get search coverage in 2015. They are currently killing it with 600,000+ worth of monthly estimated search traffic.

A true case study to share with clients who think sending out a hamper to bloggers will fix the ‘link building’ problem! 

Bellroy Wallets

When you have an awesome product aimed at solving a known issue facing a wide community, then you simply need to tell everyone.

Bellroy is one of the best examples of a company doing this through visual content marketing.

Each specific product has its own landing page with a dedicated video and accompanying imagery.

The site includes an awesome interactive tool to see how big your wallet is compared to a Bellroy.

There is even a basic HTML interactive infographic about how to travel light, which then provides two of the brand’s products as potential solutions.  

Anyone in the ecommerce game should take note of Bellroy’s approach. The whole site is targeted at combating its audience’s problem (big wallet syndrome), and based on the number of times I’ve emailed hints to my girlfriend I expect the site converts incredibly well.

I really like the fact that Bellroy doesn’t hide its products – in fact each piece of content brings the user back to those amazing looking landing pages.

The core goal I’m sure was sales, but just out of interest let’s see how Bellroy did for links and search.

Nearly 2,000 domains for a product that was released in January 2013 is impressive, but what’s even more impressive is that it’s the product pages themselves that drive the majority of the links.

Yes – those boring ‘money’ pages that SEOs had to buy/cajole/beg for links to are the biggest driver of inbound links for Bellroy.

How about search visibility?

Another huge upward curve with number one rankings for key terms like ‘slim wallet’ and ‘travel wallet’ – a great example of how awesome content, combined with laser targeting to a clear audience, is also key to search success.

Some honourable mentions:

Made.com is another one to watch in the ecommerce arena – its product pages include videos of professional photo shoots, images of the products in real homes via its ‘unboxed’ platform, and pro shots from every angle.

Having these content-heavy landing pages helps to explain how Made.com achieves so many editorial mentions for its products.

Blog.uber.com has been producing some interesting visuals in its uberdata category.

As with Movoto’s ‘kind of a big deal list’, it takes problems like everyone taking taxis during New York Fashion week and extracts data focusing on how the company’s product could make a difference, and then displays the information through videos and imagery.  

Some takeaways:

When you get a home run, don’t just pat yourself on the back… see how you can apply the same process across other concerns of your target audience like Movoto did, such as the nerdiest, best to raise a family or worst dressed, or how CookSmarts did with its resource infographics for salads, herbs and spices.

Make the most of your landing page – try out the concept in different formats such as videos, articles, printable pdfs, and even simple interactives to create an immersive experience like Bellroy.

Understand who your audience is and make sure your content is targeted at them.

Your product should make sense and shouldn’t be hidden away from the user – in all of the three examples above the companies are open about who they are and why they are creating the content.

Publishers want to know these things, don’t make it hard for them. Work with them to help them understand the value you can offer to their audience.