Zillow’s Content Marketing Rocks

Laura Rippy of Zmags pointed me to Spencer Rascoff’s blog… So I checked out Zillow and was very impressed with how the company and its employees approach its content marketing strategy.

The first thing I liked was the extensive use of blogging across a wide spectrum of employees. Not only does Zillow have its corporate blog, so do the senior managers and many other employees. Blogging is becoming a super important channel for exposing insightful content dynamically, in consumable bites. As we at OpenView have learned from our own blogging initiative, creating brand awareness is all about pushing lots and lots of insightful thoughts through blogging. And it takes an enterprise-wide effort. Blogging should not be limited to a lone marketer managing the corporate blog.

Second, I liked how the senior managers use video to personalize their profiles on the website. The human touch goes a long way.

Third, is the way the company re-purposes content. I checked out the FAQ site, and realized that the employees responsible for answering the FAQ’s have their pictures attached to the answer (personalizes the company) and provide a link to their bio’s. And, they use the answers to the FAQ’s to feed their own Zillow blogs.

As I navigated further, I got to Zillow’s Facebook account… Other than the usual content on the Wall and such… they also have a Sweepstake running… and an iPhone App tab.

Then I went to Twitter, and sure enough… healthy volume of helpful tweets, and a handful of employees listed their own Twitter accounts.

The grand slam was getting the Zillow iPad app to be featured not only by Steve Jobs when he announced it at the OS 4.0 Event but it was also featured on Charlie Rose as he talked ipad with Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal! 

And it went on and on… Zillow has a super best practice process around content management marketing, and using it for competitive positioning. Makes me wonder how their lead generation system handles the traffic on the back-end.

Kudos to the Zillow team…