Content Marketing Isn’t New: 5 Old Lessons That Still Work Today

Source: Neil Patel

Content marketing is one of the best ways to grow your business.

I’m not just saying that.

I don’t believe it’s just a trend. It’s not a shiny new tactic or anything.

Content marketing has been around forever.

Some of the biggest brands in the world used it in their early days.

It helped them to break through the noise. It helped them get their first few customers.

And it even helped them transform into billion-dollar brands.

Don’t believe me?

I’m going to show you some of my favorite content marketing examples from the past few decades.

Then I’ll show you how each ‘template’ is also being used today.

You can still use many of the same lessons. They just need to be dusted off and updated.

1. What Nike can teach you about content marketing

Nike’s “Just Do It” is one of the most well-known taglines of all time.

It was originally created over 25 years ago. Yet it still pops up on almost every single ad the company runs.

It’s also the broad theme that guides all of their content.

Here’s how it became so popular.

Nike spent $300,000,000 on ads over a ten-year period.

What happened to their market share increase over that same time?

It went from $877 million to over $9.2 billion.

Not a bad ROI, right?

And Nike still uses the iconic phrase as often as it can. Here’s an example from just a few days ago.

“Just Do It” works because it’s simple. It’s easy to remember and share.

Utter those three words, and every single person within hearing range knows what you’re referencing.

However, it’s also not very original.

That’s nothing against Nike! I’m wearing a few of their products right now.

What I mean is that we’ve seen a tagline just like it before.

Not recently. You have to go back a few decades to find it.

You’re not exactly sure why you know that iconic image. But you know it.

This ad originally dates back to World War II.

It was a rallying cry to bring women into the workplace.

Men went off to fight the war in different parts of the world. They were leaving their jobs behind.

That mass exodus threatened to shut down companies and grind the U.S. economy to a halt.

The U.S. government actually sponsored this ad idea in response.

They wanted to make sure that our factories, schools, and post offices still ran as normal.

This “Women in War Jobs” campaign remains one of the most successful campaigns of all time.

And the “We Can Do It!” tagline sounds eerily similar to Nike’s “Just Do It,” which came a few decades later.

Artist Norman Rockwell painted another version of this character for the Saturday Evening Post to grab attention.

This muscular woman working with some kind of rustic machine stood out in those days.

That’s why this ad and cover immediately grabbed attention.

See?

“Content marketing” might get a lot of attention right now. However, it’s been used for decades.

The trick is that content marketing doesn’t sell products.

It sells ideas and movements.

The product or service becomes the ultimate solution at the end.

You don’t want to steal content. That’s obviously a bad way to start a marketing campaign.

Instead, you want to borrow the themes that are proven to work. Reshape them to fit your own campaign. That’s called innovation.

There’s no sense reinventing the wheel, right? Innovation is different. You’re building upon ideas that already exist.

The best content marketing today leverages the classic principles.

Start with copywriting strategies that can skyrocket results.

2. How storytelling keeps people glued to your content

If you are going to create content, it might as well be long.

But there’s a problem with long posts.

Not everybody recognizes it at first.

It’s hard to keep content interesting when it stretches out over thousands of words.

Think about it.

You might have to spend an hour reading something that long.

How do you keep readers interested for all that time?

Storytelling is the solution.

If you’ve been to a conference recently, you were probably overwhelmed by all the awesome content.

All of those speeches, often given back to back, make it tough to remember each one.

There are probably a few, though, that stick out.

You’re not exactly sure why. Maybe there were a few tips or tricks that stuck in your memory.

Those speeches probably also involved storytelling to some degree.

You may not have even realized it at the time.

However, stories make it easy for us to remember facts. Our brains are literally hardwired for them.

That’s exactly how you get people to pay attention when they’re reading long blog posts, too.

Storytelling is one of the best writing tactics to instantly improve your content results.

Copywriters have known this for a long time. They’ve been using storytelling to get consumers to buy products since well before the Internet appeared on the scene.

Here’s a perfect example from Pepsi-Cola in the ‘40s.

There is a bottle of Pepsi-Cola on the ad.

However, the ad is talking about how much celebrities love to drink it.

Basically, the ad is saying that if celebrities and millions of other people like it, you will too.

They mention the “catchy flavor” once. But there’s no other mention of the product’s other features or benefits.

That same lesson can apply to the ads you run today.

Don’t lead with the product.

Tell a story about what makes the product useful. Or why others should give it a try.

This Marketo example below does something similar.

It presents the “challenge” with a solution to fix it.

However, there’s no mention of their tool or product just yet. That will come later.

First, they simply want to capture your attention.

Storytelling is like the bridge that gets you to click “Download.”

3. Zero in on the problem before providing the solution

What is the difference between companies that convert over 10% of their traffic and those that barely convert 2%?

The answer lies in the offer they’re giving people.

And that offer isn’t just a “free consultation.”

Instead, it’s something that focuses on a customer’s…

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