Content marketing examples: what it looks like when it works
An example of content marketing is Bunnings publishing free D.I.Y. project guides and how-to videos: the content helps someone finish a job, and the tools and materials are sold at Bunnings. Content marketing is publishing useful content that draws an audience toward a purchase instead of interrupting them with an advertisement. This guide defines it, walks through ten Australian brands doing it well, explains why it works and shows how to use it for long-tail SEO.
What is an example of content marketing?
The clearest example of content marketing is a brand answering a question its customers already have, in a place the brand controls, before those customers are ready to buy. Bunnings does this with project guides: someone searching for how to build a raised garden bed lands on a Bunnings page that lists the steps, the tools and the materials, and every item on that list is on a shelf in the nearest store.
Nothing about the guide is an advertisement. It does not ask for the sale, and it works whether or not the reader buys anything that day. What it does is put Bunnings in the room at the moment the project is being planned, which is the moment the shopping list gets written.
The same pattern shows up in different formats across the examples below: a design course from Canva, a recipe from Woolworths, a benchmark report from Culture Amp. The format changes with the audience. The mechanism does not.
What content marketing is (and what it is not)
Content marketing is the practice of publishing content that is useful on its own terms, so that the people who need it find you, trust you and buy from you when they are ready. Advertising interrupts what someone is doing to put a message in front of them. Content marketing is the reverse: the audience comes looking, and the content is what they were looking for.
The main formats are guides and how-to articles, video, podcasts, email newsletters, original research, tools and calculators, templates, customer stories and interactive content such as quizzes. The format matters less than the test behind it: would someone use this if they never bought from you?
That test also draws the line. A product page is not content marketing, because its only job is to sell. A buying guide that compares three types of product, including the ones you do not stock, is content marketing, because it helps first and sells second. A press release is not. A case study written to teach the reader something about their own problem is.
10 content marketing examples from Australian brands
These are Australian brands whose content channels are live today, described in our own words. None of the descriptions rely on the brands’ internal numbers.
Canva: Design School and free templates
Canva publishes Design School, a library of free courses, tutorials and guides that teach graphic design, social media content, presentations and video editing, with certificates for completed courses. Alongside it sit thousands of free templates. The lesson teaches a skill and the template is the tool for practising it, so the content and the product are the same object. Someone who learns to make a presentation inside a Canva tutorial has already started using Canva.
Atlassian: Team Playbook and Agile Coach
Atlassian publishes the Team Playbook, a set of free workshop formats called plays that teams run to set goals, make decisions and fix how they work, each with step-by-step instructions and templates. Its Agile Coach guides explain scrum, kanban and agile project management to anyone, not only Jira customers. The content owns the question “how should our team work?”, which every buyer asks before “which software should we use?”. By the time the software question arrives, Atlassian has already been the answer once.
Bunnings: D.I.Y. Advice and how-to video
Bunnings D.I.Y. Advice covers project guides, planning tools and calculators, video walkthroughs, a community forum called Workshop where customers answer each other’s questions, and in-store events. It works because every project has a shopping list, and the guide writes it. A person who reads how to lay pavers knows what to buy and where. The content sits upstream of the purchase and hands the customer to the store.
Who Gives A Crap: brand voice and impact reporting
Who Gives A Crap sells toilet paper, a product nobody researches, and turns the choice into content. The packaging, emails and social posts are written in a consistent, irreverent voice, and its impact page reports where the money goes: the company states there that it gives half its profits to water and sanitation partners, with annual impact updates and partner stories. For a commodity product, the content is the reason to pick this brand over the one on the supermarket shelf.
Frank Body: customer photos as the campaign
Frank Body built its coffee scrub brand on photos customers posted of themselves using the product under branded hashtags, and it still runs The frank Files, a blog on skin and body care written in the same cheeky voice as the packaging. Customer photos cost the brand nothing to produce and carry more trust than a studio shot, because the person in the picture is not being paid to smile. The brand’s job became curating the content rather than making all of it.
Woolworths: Fresh Ideas recipes and magazine
Woolworths publishes Fresh Ideas as a print magazine in store and as a recipe hub online, with expert articles and a section of recipes submitted by customers. Recipes are built around what is in season and in store. The reason it works is simple: a recipe is a shopping list with a picture, and the shopping list points to the aisles of the supermarket that published it.
Qantas: Travel Insider destination content
Qantas Travel Insider publishes destination guides, neighbourhood guides written by locals, travel tips and the Qantas magazine online. It captures the “where should we go?” moment, which happens weeks before the “how much is the flight?” moment. A reader who has spent twenty minutes inside a guide to a city has already half-decided to go there, and the airline that showed them the city is the first place they look for the fare.
Culture Amp: research and benchmark reports
Culture Amp publishes research reports, benchmark data drawn from its own employee survey platform, practical guides on performance management and inclusion, webinars and a blog for HR and people leaders. Original data earns links, citations and press mentions that a product page never will, and it positions the company as the source rather than one vendor among many. The report is read by the people who will later decide which platform to buy.
Envato: Tuts+ tutorials
Envato runs Tuts+, a library of free tutorials and courses on design software, web design, coding, video and photography. Tuts+ teaches the skills that use the fonts, templates and graphics Envato sells through its marketplace and its subscription service. Education creates the buyer: someone who learns to edit video from an Envato tutorial needs footage, music and templates, and the tutorial has already shown them where those are.
realestate.com.au: property guides and market insights
realestate.com.au publishes advice on buying, selling and renting alongside news and market analysis built on data from PropTrack, its own property data arm. The guides answer the questions people have months before they bid at an auction or list a home, so the site is already the habit by the time the listing search begins. It is content marketing for a marketplace: the content brings the audience, and the listings are what the audience came to use.
The pattern behind all ten
Every example answers a question the buyer already has, inside the brand’s own territory, at a moment before the purchase. None of them start with the product. They start with the project, the skill, the recipe, the trip or the decision, and the product arrives as the natural next step. That is the whole method, and it scales down to a Perth plumber writing about hot water systems as well as it scales up to Qantas.
Why is content marketing effective?
Content marketing works because useful content is found and trusted before the sale, and because a piece that ranks keeps working without further spend. Three mechanisms sit behind that.
Compounding. A guide published this month is still earning search traffic in two years, and every new piece adds to the total rather than replacing it. Paid campaigns start from zero each month. Content starts from wherever it finished last month.
Trust. The reader has been helped before they have been sold to. By the time they enquire they have read your explanation, seen your examples and formed a view of whether you know your subject. The sales conversation starts further along.
Reuse. One well-researched piece feeds an email, a series of social posts, a sales deck slide, a webinar and the answer a salesperson sends to a prospect’s question. The cost is paid once and the asset works in five places.
We see this in our own client work. For Diabetes WA, health content written around the questions people with diabetes search for was one part of an SEO program that lifted organic search visits by 61% year on year, and the Diabetes WA case study on our work page sets out what was built and what moved.
Why content marketing is more cost-effective for exposure than paid media over time
Paid exposure stops the day the budget stops, and content that ranks does not. In the first months the comparison favours paid: an ad can be live tomorrow, while a new article may take weeks to rank. Somewhere after that, the lines cross. The cost per visit from content falls every month the piece keeps ranking, while the cost per visit from ads stays flat or rises with competition.
Paid is still the right choice when time matters more than cost. A product launch, a seasonal window such as end of financial year, a new location that needs enquiries this month, or a test of demand before you commit to content: those are paid jobs. The mistake is running paid forever because the content was never built.
Types of content marketing strategy
Most content marketing strategies combine a few of the following types, chosen for where the audience is and what the business sells.
Educational and how-to content. Guides, tutorials and explainers that teach something the buyer needs to know. Bunnings, Canva and Envato are built on this.
Pillar and cluster hubs. A long pillar page on the head topic, supported by cluster posts that each answer one sub-question and link back. This is the structure that turns a blog into a search asset, and it is covered in the long-tail SEO section below.
Original research and data. Surveys, benchmarks and reports that produce numbers nobody else has. Culture Amp is the example above, and it works at small scale too: a survey of 200 of your own customers is still original data.
Customer-generated content. Photos, reviews, recipes and stories produced by customers and curated by the brand. Frank Body and the Woolworths customer recipes both rely on this.
Video and short-form. Walkthroughs, demonstrations and short clips for TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, which suit a mobile audience and travel well when shared. Behind-the-scenes video of the team and the process builds trust with people who want to see who they are buying from.
Email and newsletters. The one channel the brand owns outright. A newsletter turns a one-off reader into a repeat one, and it is where most content marketing programs make their money.
Interactive content. Formats that ask the reader to do something rather than read, covered next.
Interactive content: quizzes, polls, interactive video and infographics
Interactive content turns a passive reader into a participant and collects data at the same time. A quiz that asks what type of content suits your business and returns a recommendation is a lead magnet and a research tool in one. A poll asking what your biggest marketing challenge is gives you next quarter’s content topics.
Interactive video lets the viewer choose a path, so a single video can answer different questions for different people. Interactive infographics let readers click, hover and filter a data set instead of scrolling past a static image, which holds attention longer and earns more shares than the static version. All three work best when the interaction produces something the reader keeps, such as a result, a score or a personalised list.
Content marketing for long-tail SEO
Build a pillar page for the head topic and answer each long-tail question in its own cluster post, linked both ways. The pillar page ranks for the broad term. The cluster posts rank for the specific questions, and the internal links tell Google that the whole group belongs together.
The questions come from your own data. Open the Performance report in Google Search Console, filter queries to those containing “how”, “what”, “why”, “can” or “should”, and export the list. Group them by topic, give each question its own H2 and answer it in the first sentence under that heading. Where a page answers several distinct questions, add FAQ markup so the answers are eligible for rich results. This is the keyword mapping process applied to questions rather than head terms.
How to improve your website’s SEO with content marketing
Publish content that matches the intent of the queries your service pages cannot answer, link it to those service pages, and refresh it on a schedule. A service page for hot water system installation should not try to rank for “why is my hot water system making a noise”, but a blog post can, and that post links to the service page for the reader who decides they need a plumber.
Refreshing matters as much as publishing. A post that ranked at position eight last year and sits at fourteen now usually needs an update, not a replacement. Check the date, the examples and whether the top query has drifted, then republish.
Pillar and cluster models for corporate blogs
The platform matters less than the structure. WordPress with a clean category setup and deliberate internal linking delivers a pillar and cluster model for most corporate blogs, and so does any CMS that lets you control URLs, categories and the links between pages.
What the structure needs is one pillar URL per head topic, one cluster post per sub-question, a link from every cluster post back to its pillar, a link from the pillar to every cluster post, and no two posts targeting the same query. If the CMS can give you that, the platform is fine.
How to measure whether content marketing is working
Measure content marketing on five numbers, and read them together rather than one at a time.
- Organic sessions to content pages. The trend over six and twelve months in Google Analytics 4, filtered to the blog or resource section.
- Assisted conversions. Enquiries and sales where a content page appeared somewhere in the path, not only as the last click.
- Rankings on the mapped queries. The average position in Search Console for the specific queries each piece was built to answer.
- Links and citations earned. Referring domains pointing at content pages, plus mentions in AI assistant answers, which now form part of how content is found.
- Email sign-ups. The number of readers who chose to hear from you again.
Weight them to the goal. A brand awareness program is judged on reach and rankings, and a lead program on assisted conversions and sign-ups. Our guide to the digital marketing metrics worth tracking covers the wider set.
When to hand content marketing to an agency
Three signals mean it is time. You know the topics your customers ask about but publishing has stalled for months. Content exists but none of it ranks or gets cited. Or marketing produces content the sales team never uses.
PWD builds content programs from a keyword-mapped plan, so every piece has a query it is meant to answer and a page it is meant to support. Writing, design and video are produced in-house in Perth, and there are no lock-in contracts. Our content marketing services in Perth page sets out the process from discovery to reporting.
Frequently asked questions
How do you do a content marketing audit?
List every piece of content you have published, attach twelve months of traffic, ranking and conversion data to each, then decide whether to keep, update, merge or remove it. The full process, including the spreadsheet columns and the decision rules, is in our guide to running a content audit, which covers the two extra columns a content marketing audit needs.
How can you optimise content for featured snippets?
Answer the question in the first sentence under a heading that matches the query, keep the answer to about 40 to 60 words, and use a list or table where the question asks for steps or comparisons. Our guide on how to get a featured snippet covers the formats Google pulls from and how to check which pages are eligible.
How often should a business publish content?
As often as you can publish something that answers a real question well, and no more often than that. For most small and medium businesses that is two to four pieces a month, with an equal amount of time spent updating older pieces that already rank. One strong article a month beats four thin ones, because the thin ones will not rank and will need to be pruned later.
Is video or written content better for SEO?
Written content ranks in web search and is what AI assistants quote, so it does the SEO work. Video builds trust and holds attention, and it ranks in YouTube and in video results. The practical answer is to publish both from the same research: write the guide, record the walkthrough, embed the video on the page and transcribe the key points into the text.
Book a content strategy session with PWD
A content strategy session starts with a content gap review: we pull the questions your customers search for from Search Console and keyword data, compare them with what your site answers today, and show you the gaps. You leave with a list of the pieces worth writing first and why.
Book a content strategy session with PWD or call 08 6146 0195. The work is planned, written and designed by our in-house team in Perth, with no lock-in contract.
