Digital marketing case studies show how businesses and brands produce great results with the benefits of digital targeting, media selection and data analytics.

Here are a few reasons why companies are moving in this direction.

• 86% of women turn to social networks before making a purchase (Alist daily)
• 49% of organizations do not have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy (Smart Insights, Managing Digital Marketing research report)
• 40% of marketers say proving the ROI of their marketing activities is their top marketing  challenge. (HubSpot, State of Inbound)

Here are examples of companies large and small, B2C and B2B to help spark great content, creative thinkingand execution at your organization, 12 inspiring digital marketing case studies that prove ROI.

1. BRITISH TELECOM: Managed to save £2m per year by routing around 600,000 contacts per year through social media instead of its call centres. This also improved the customer experience, as these people preferred to deal with BT via social instead of phone or email.
2. CLEAN & CLEAR: Used Snapchat to help raise awareness of its Morning Burst facial cleanser among females age 13 to 24. Clean & Clear partnered with Snapchat to run animated Snap Ads that reached the right people at the right time. Clean & Clear used Snapchat’s Lifestyle Categories to optimize its Snap Ads between Stories campaign and reach Snapchatters more likely to be interested in beauty. Clean & Clear’s Snap Ads and Filters campaign generated an 11.2% lift in Aided Awareness (5.5X higher than Millward Brown Norms) and a 7% lift in brand favorability (3.5X higher than Millward Brown Mobile Norms).
3. CREME EGG: Switched ad spend from TV to Facebook in this example of digital marketing case studies. A seasonal social media campaign invited people to ‘Have a fling with Crème Egg’ on Facebook, created a long series of one-off posts that fed into an overall narrative across the three months. Facebook matched TV in driving brand consideration for a third of the cost increasing sales by 7% as a result.
4. FISHER TANK: A welded steel tank constructed with a sales cycle of 12 months to several years. They used an Inbound Marketing approach would attract more (and more qualified) prospects to their website and give the company a chance to demonstrate how they think and what they do. They developed a more visually attractive site, and one that was a magnet for search engines. They included calls-to-action to download content of interest and value to prospects (primarily engineers, owners and facility and project managers) and integrated a blog with social sharing abilities, established company social media profiles, and optimized the site with the right long-tail keywords to get Fisher found in more searches. As a result, 1) website traffic increase by 119%, 2) quote request increased by 500% and 3) drove up the value of qualified sales opportunities by $3.4 million.
5. HCC MEDICAL INSURANCE SERVICE: Infographics have been overused in recent years, but they’re still an effective medium for content marketing.HCC Medical Insurance Services (HCCMIS) managed to increase blog traffic and email revenue using an infographic aimed at its travel customers. Compared to its normal sales emails the infographic achieved a 96% lift in email revenue, while on Facebook the post that featured the graphic had more than 2,000 interactions compared to an average of 10.Overall HCCMIS’s blog post featuring the graphic achieved 3.9m views, of which 90% were new visitors.
6. IBM: trained its sales people to use LinkedIn and Twitter, and also gave them access to a content calendar so they had relevant things to share. In this example of digital marketing case studies, the program resulted in 4x more sales year-on-year, though there are a few caveats to take into account.
7. KLM: Noticed, from one of its employees, that a lot of people were asking about social payments, so they spoke to KLM’s IT and accounts teams to see if it was possible to set it up.This resulted in a new social payments tool, which cost €3,500 to setup and now takes €80,000 per week in sales.
8. MANN FAMILY DENTAL: A comprehensive family care and cosmetic dentistry practice, wasn’t generating leads that would convert to patients. The creation of a blog on their website saw an immediate rise in phone calls. They used social media to strengthen and increase that organic referral web by engaging with their patients on Facebook. They focused on long tail keyword with local geographic terms. Mann Family Dental saw a: 1) 270% increase in web traffic 2) 10X increase in leads and a 3) 50% increase in patients generated from the website.
9. NEUTROGENA: Used shopping basket data to identify competitor products loyal customers were already buying that were within their own range. Neutrogena knew they had a loyal base of customers, but 75% of shoppers were only buying items within a single segment of the Neutrogena range. They created a “product pairings” campaign delivered through video, banner ads and coupons to drive sampling. Consumers were targeted based on their personal buying habits. They saw an Increase in incremental sales with 18.1 million households reached and a  £5.84 return on advertising spend (ROAS).
10. NILLA WAFERS: used Facebook to reinvigorate its Nilla Wafers brand and boost sales. A study showed Nilla Wafers sales increased 9% in test market locations among consumers who saw Facebook ads versus a control group of consumers over the course of a five-month campaign. The Facebook ad campaign for Nilla Wafers also was able to reach 11.3 million households through 190 million total impressions (16.8 impressions per household).
11. SNICKERS: Targeting fat-fingered typists, this clever search campaign from Snickers used misspelled words in Google keywords to capture hungry office workers’ attention during the working day. The chocolate bar brand managed to reach 500,000 people within just three days of launch, without any seeding and for less cost than bidding on brand keywords.
12. W HOLLYWOOD: Knew their luxury condominiums were expertly-crafted. Vibrant homes in the L.A. spotlight are eye-catching to many people. They created a lead-generation strategy which included SEO and Facebook ads to drive engaged visitors to the site. Google AdWords campaigns targeted specific areas within the California region and other cities where qualified lead potential was determined. The campaign resulted in: 1) 115% increase in conversions from Google Adwords, 2) 63% increase in site visits from SEO and 3) 1,800 goal completions from Facebook.

Do these digital marketing case studies inspire you? Did they prove ROI to your satisfaction? Could a creative digital marketing program help increase business in your organization?

Digital marketing is an umbrella term for the marketing of products or services using a digital strategy, technologies and tactics that include search, paid advertising, social media and many other properties.

But channels and technologies don’t do justice to the ways some brands are putting it all together.

Here are the 10 most inspiring digital marketing stories of 2016.

1. ALWAYS: Girls’ confidence takes a nosedive once they hit puberty, Always’ commercial launched an efforts to  help teach confidence to girls and young women through a variety of means. They’ve partnered with TED to create a series of educational videos on confidence that are shared with teachers and students worldwide, and even created the Always Confidence Curriculum, which was unveiled at the Always #LikeAGirl Confidence Summit. Meanwhile, the company continues to push out short, inspiring message via the hashtag #LikeAGirl.
2. AMERICAN EXPRESS: Open Forum is a collaborative website, on which American Express invites guest authors from a variety of sectors to share their business knowledge and wisdom.  The result of this digital marketing is a content-rich mega-site that’s popular with the search engines – all created without American Express needing to shell out cash to content contributors.
3. DACIAS: A subsidiary of Renault is one of Europe’s fastest growing car brands. Best known for their functional cars that offer amazing price-to-value ratios, the customer market grew by 60,000 cars in the last three years. By using Facebook’s boosted posts, Dacia placed ads related to their Sandero, Logan, and Stepway models. They focused on both desktop and mobile users. By incorporating data from past activity, the company ensured that a wide variety of ad testing was done, essentially optimizing the advertisement’s impact based on where their customers were in the buying cycle.
4. DALLAS PETS ALIVE: Renamed shelter dogs after the most searched and trending topics to increase their chances of adoption — with pooches being named everything from Obamacare to Kim Kardashian’s Butt. The push was promoted by a funny online film and a Paid Search campaign. The digital marketing campaign grew traffic to its website by 98% and increased adoptions year-on-year by 200%.
5. DOMINO’S: Really wants to make it easy to order pizza. The company let customers request delivery of their favorite pizza by tweeting to the @Dominos Twitter account, or by using the hashtag #EasyOrder. The tweet-based order system earned Domino’s media coverage from the likes of USA Today, Forbes, and Good Morning America, not to mention a Titanium Grand Prix award at Cannes. More than 50 percent of Domino’s orders come from digital marketing channels today.
6. GIRL SCOUTS: Noticed that a lot of customers had issues with finding their nearest Girl Scout Representative when Cookie Season was in full swing. They wanted to drive cookie booth searches on their official website and also boost the number of downloads for their Girl Scout Cookie Finder mobile app. This would not only benefit the organization but also, be a massive help to consumers looking to buy cookies. @GirlScouts used an App Card (showcasing their delicious products) in a Twitter App Install campaign, which easily and conveniently allowed users to download and open the Girl Scout Cookie Finder app from their Twitter account. The result was 19,500+ Twitter-driven app installations.
7. KRYLON: A spray-paint company, sent “DIY experts” to buy 127 “worthless” items along the route and transform them into something desirable, according to the company. After the yard sale ended, Krylon listed all of its transformed items for sale online, becoming the first brand to use Pinterest’s buyable pin feature. All of the proceeds (roughly $2,000) went to charity.As a result, Krylon’s Pinterest following increased by 4,400 percent, and the company estimates it gained $2.7 million in earned media on a $200,000 budget
8. PWC: Has managed Oscar balloting for 82 years. For the 2016 awards ceremony, the company sought “to create a modern and savvy campaign” aimed at millennials by using Snapchat “to generate buzz internally and increase external visibility around the firm’s involvement with the Academy Awards,” according to the company. In its first two weeks, PwC’s Snap Story on Snapchat jumped to over 700 views. Within three weeks, the campaign received 1,062 related tweets on Twitter and 406 Instagram mentions.
9. SPOTIFY: Created a very clever personalized video in December of 2015. They called it ‘A Year in Music, what did your 2015 sound like?’. This message was posted across the companies social channels, along with a generic video supporting that message. It then encouraged users to login to listen and watch their personal video, which was comprised of the users most played and favorite sounds of the year. The benefits for Spotify were that this built elements of customer loyalty, making users feel a little bit special – and it also made a lot of their users login when they may not have planned to previously.
10. THE WIRECUTTER: Affiliate marketing can be a bit sleazy, but it can generate big results when done properly and genuinely. The Wirecutter has set the standard since its launch just five years ago. Labeling itself a simple “list of the best gadgets—like cameras and TVs—for people who don’t want to take a lot of time figuring out what to get,” the site generated $150 million in e-commerce transactions in 2015.

Do these make your list of best digital marketing stories this year? Are there any others you would add to the list? Do they inspire you to create a digital marketing story for your brand next year?