Have you ever encountered a tweet that read like it was from a person, but was actually from a brand? Maybe it was this one: “meatloaf is the exact opposite of soup.” It sounds like your wacky cousin, but it was actually brought to you by Denny’s social media team.
“Brands now behave like real people with idiosyncratic personalities on social media platforms,” Adam Alter, a marketing and psychology professor at New York University, told Vice.
Top Content Marketing Companies
- Seismic
- Buzzfeed
- Semrush
- Movable Ink
- Bazaarvoice
- Yotpo
- Nativo
- Column Five
- Outbrain
- Skyword
And it’s worked well for the nationwide diner chain, which has amassed over 447,000 Twitter followers and 263,000 on Instagram.
It’s just one of many modern companies that promote their brands and products via content marketing on various platforms. Besides social media, they also release mixtapes, like Hamburger Helper’s Watch the Stove, and podcasts, like Inside Trader Joe’s — which made it to number three on the iTunes podcast charts in 2018.
While this practice dates back to the 1800s, it has flourished in an age of ad-blocking software. Content marketing evades ad blockers because it’s not an ad — at least by ad-blocking standards. It doesn’t interrupt the flow of other content with a pop-up or a “word from our sponsors.” Instead, it seamlessly blends content and promotion in a way that’s folksy and familiar.
Most, if not all, major companies have embraced digital media to varying degrees, and helping them garner attention in an intensely competitive marketplace has become big business. Over the last couple of decades, there’s been a profusion of content management platforms, content marketing agencies and hybrids to serve the thriving sector.
Here are some companies to watch in the content marketing industry.
Content Marketing Companies to Watch
Location: New York, New York
Share Local Media specializes in direct mail marketing for e-commerce. It offers services including solo direct mail, co-branded and shared mail, programmatic mail and insert media for clients like Lyft, Grubhub and Casper. The company handles all facets of direct mail, from creative development, production and postage to audience targeting and testing.
Location: New York, New York
GrapevineAI creates whitelisted social media content campaigns, working with brands to launch and analyze them. It also collaborates directly with content creators on connecting with brands and growing and monetizing their followings. The company specializes in working with multiple social media channels, including TikTok and the Meta family of platforms.
Location: San Diego, California
Seismic is helping companies fine-tune their sales and marketing content strategies with an enablement cloud platform. Marketing and sales teams can collaborate via the platform to develop clear go-to-market plans, personalize content for target audiences and execute outreach strategies. In addition, Seismic’s platform can automatically mix and match approved content, saving marketing and sales teams even more time.
Location: New York, New York
BuzzFeed may publish news and cultural criticism, but much of the company’s revenue comes from content marketing: brand-sponsored quizzes, listicles and Tasty videos. The marketing team’s near-scientific grasp on virality and huge social media following have attracted major brands in recent years. For example: Mattel sponsored a “Which Barbie are You?” quiz, and the team created an assortment of Radler-related Tasty recipes to promote Bud Light’s new Radler.
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
Companies like eBay and Overstock.com use Semrush’s signature product, an all-in-one marketing toolkit with a bunch of content marketing features. These include topic and headline recommendations, a shareable editorial calendar and content analytics. The platform even boasts a digital SEO writing assistant, which plugs into Google Docs and offers writers real-time suggestions for maintaining a brand’s tone and optimizing on popular search terms.
Location: New York, New York
Movable Ink specializes in personalizing online visuals, which have a huge potential impact in content marketing. Copy needs imagery to draw the eye, but no single image appeals to everyone. With Movable Ink’s tools, brands don’t have to choose one image. Instead, they can tailor visuals to individual digital users on email, mobile or desktop. That can mean presenting images linked to a user’s location and its climate, or to their recent browser history.
Location: Austin, Texas
Bazaarvoice uses user-generated and social content to help strengthen clients’ brands. With a data-first approach, Bazaarvoice compiles insights from competitor analyses and audience sentiments. Businesses can learn from these data points to adjust their content marketing strategies while also showcasing content, such as reviews and social media posts, on their landing pages.
Location: New York, New York
Yotpo’s e-commerce marketing platform leverages enthusiastic user-generated content — like reviews, social media posts and community Q&As — to spark interest in a product. Used by companies like fashion house Steve Madden and luggage brand Away, the Yotpo platform makes it easy to transform user praise into sponsored social posts, or showcase it in custom displays on a company’s website.
Location: El Segundo, California
Beneath many articles on premium sites like Popular Science, you’ll find a grid of sponsored articles. (Exhibit A: “Eating Outdoors This Summer? There’s a Drink for That,” by Coca-Cola.) This is Nativo’s doing. The company specializes in placing branded content in front of human eyeballs. And it has an advanced A/B testing tool — its machine learning algorithms automatically optimize thumbnail images and headline wording.
Location: Hollywood, California
Column Five’s leaders believe so fervently in infographics, they wrote a book about their unique visual-yet-numerical allure. However, that’s not all their agency makes — they work on everything from animation to white papers to social media copy for brands like Red Bull and Toyota. Whatever the project, Column Five’s interdisciplinary team prioritizes experimentation, one of the five key values or “columns” that bolster the business.
Location: New York, New York
Outbrain works with clients like Microsoft to place native advertising — so, branded content in the style of the host publication — with top-tier outlets, like the Washington Post and Conde Nast magazines. The company’s recommendation technology empower businesses to advertise to wider audiences while tailoring product feeds to meet the preferences of consumers.
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
Skyword’s signature content marketing platform, Skyword360, was designed with coherence in mind. Global enterprises like IBM often publish massive libraries of content, and Skyword360 offers a bird’s-eye view of it all so leadership can ensure that it tells a single, cohesive story. Built-in tools range from ideation management (which essentially organizes and centralizes brainstorming) to reviewing and editing functions.
Location: Delray Beach, Florida
Fractl has created some highly visible content for itself: its market research on the emotions that viral content stokes and the perks that job applicants most value has appeared in the Harvard Business Review and the New York Times, respectively. The company’s team strives to create similarly high profiles for their clients, basing their content campaigns on rigorous research that includes biofeedback metrics, UX testing and focus groups.
Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts
This company’s cloud-based software was designed with content marketing in mind. Back in 2006, the MIT graduates who founded HubSpot saw the marketing tides turning, flowing away from old-school promotional interruptions and towards helpful branded content. Their software enables that through myriad channels, with editing and publishing tools for email marketing, blogging and posting on social media.
Location: Austin, Texas
Optimizely supports marketing teams with a digital experience platform that simplifies content management. A cloud-based content management system enables faster approval workflows, direct edits to content and one-click publishing of media across various platforms. With more efficient and digitized processes, marketing teams can shorten their campaign cycles and improve their quality assurance standards.
Location: San Francisco, California
Cloudwords’ platform streamlines content marketing translation, a major boon for global enterprises like McDonald’s. Though the exact workflow varies — some companies rely on pure machine learning algorithms for translation, while others incorporate a human review component — every CloudWords client enjoys improved content scalability, even companies in niche fields with specialized jargon.
Location: Austin, Texas
OutboundEngine specializes in content marketing for small businesses. The company’s team of experts pens industry-specific expert content for more than 10,000 small businesses. The works burnish clients’ reputations, and OutboundEngine’s platform manages the content distribution and tracks engagement closely so clients can follow up with intrigued readers.
Location: Miami, Florida
S&G Content Marketing can shepherd companies through the entire content life cycle, from concept to distribution. The company’s team of journalists, digital artists and designers can produce original video, a deeply researched blog post, an infographic or a media kit. What’s more, they do it while dodging industry cliches, finding fresh new language for even the most storied concepts.
Location: San Diego, California
Bop Design is a B2B marketing agency that supports businesses with a range of content marketing capabilities. Besides offering SEO and copywriting services, the company produces content for emails, social media and blogs. Businesses can then collaborate with Bop Design to determine their preferred channels, tailoring their content to meet the wants and needs of their target audiences.
Location: Phoenix, Arizona
Convince & Convert is a marketing consulting firm that works with major clients like Nike, Hilton and Cisco, and content marketing is a house specialty. The team starts by researching the brand’s base, then constructs a strategy that “delights and informs” that audience. They don’t create the actual content, though — they focus on the road map.
Location: Fully Remote
On the Talenthouse website, brands recruit creative talent to execute content marketing strategies. Talenthouse’s freelancers work with more than 120 brands, making custom content, graphics and video on a project-by-project basis. The workflow typically begins with an open call for submissions, followed by a selection process.
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
Brafton is a content marketing agency that started with storytelling. Some would call it copywriting, but the team thinks of it as an art that can forge a genuine bond between companies and consumers. Today, Brafton creates comprehensive content marketing campaigns for clients, pairing their copy with video and slick graphic design. The company distributes content, too, with SEO optimization and analytics-driven strategies.
Location: Des Plaines, Illinois
SGK helps organizations develop clear-cut brands by promoting marketing strategies that emphasize simplicity. In addition to content marketing, the company works with clients to establish brand identities, guidelines and other essential brand elements. With SGK’s holistic approach to content marketing, companies can create more focused messaging that communicates what makes them and their products unique.
Location: San Diego, California
NextLeft is a digital marketing agency that invests energy in every step of the content marketing process. The company begins by conducting a content audit, noting any content that isn’t bringing in traffic. After locating where optimizations are needed most, NextLeft applies SEO strategies, produces new content and builds out link networks to improve a company’s online site performance.
