This article was updated on 01/24/2025
In 1996, journalist John Oppedahl coined the term “content marketing,” but the idea of using content as a way to attract and connect with customers has been around for far longer.
Prior to the advent of the personal computer, brands would publish newsletters, guides, recipe books, and more, all in an attempt to boost awareness of their products or services and provide audience members with helpful information.
Over 25 years later, it’s safe to say that content marketing has staying power, and it’s also evolved significantly. But has your understanding of it evolved alongside it, though? Here are some things you should know.
Table of Contents
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing refers to a business sharing information online with a target market in order to achieve its marketing goals. While this definition may appear straightforward, a deeper understanding is necessary.
What Is Content?
Content is simply information. More specifically, the term “content” comprises stories, messages, instructions, entertainment, and more, delivered in a variety of formats across multiple channels. As it relates to content marketing, content should also be engaging, relevant, and targeted.
Benefits of Content Marketing
Content marketing offers a wealth of benefits for businesses looking to enhance their online presence and connect with their audience. One of the primary advantages is increased brand awareness and credibility. By consistently creating and sharing valuable content, businesses can position themselves as thought leaders in their industry, which helps build trust with their audience.
Improved website traffic and engagement are other significant benefits. High-quality content attracts visitors to your site, keeps them engaged, and encourages them to explore more of what you have to offer. This, in turn, can lead to the generation of high-quality leads and conversions, as well as enhanced customer loyalty and retention.
Compared to traditional advertising methods, content marketing is often more cost-effective. It allows businesses to reach their target audience without the high costs associated with traditional media. Additionally, content marketing can improve search engine rankings and visibility, making it easier for potential customers to find your business online.
Social media engagement and sharing are also boosted through content marketing. When you create content that resonates with your audience, they are more likely to share it on their social media channels, further increasing your exposure and influence. Moreover, content marketing enables businesses to nurture leads and guide them through the sales funnel, providing valuable information at each stage of their journey.
Finally, content marketing offers improved customer insights. By analyzing how your audience interacts with your content, you can gain a better understanding of their needs and preferences, allowing you to refine your marketing strategy and create even more effective content in the future.
What Are Marketing Goals?
Marketing goals are the objectives included in a brand’s marketing plan. They are benchmarks that must be achieved for that plan to succeed and, ultimately, for the company to do well.
Some common marketing goals include:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Boosting engagement
- Earning more qualified leads
- Building customer loyalty
Businesses’ successful content marketing campaigns include content that aligns with their marketing goals. Most importantly, you are providing information that people are searching for, answering questions they might have.
Why Does Content Marketing Work?
Content marketing works because it meets users where they are. It’s a form of inbound marketing, which means that it’s responsive to what users need. Content marketing is something that people encounter because they have asked a question, presented a problem, or shown interest in a particular problem. When executed correctly, content marketing is relevant and organic to the current user experience.
Creating high-quality content is a fundamental component of content marketing, aimed at attracting and nurturing potential customers by producing and curating various forms of content to educate and engage audiences, ultimately leading to increased brand recognition and conversions.
Contrast this definition with outbound marketing methods that often feel intrusive and disruptive to the user experience.
Since content marketing is generally well-received, brands can take advantage of it to achieve outcomes that aren’t possible through other forms of marketing. Through content marketing, businesses can:
- Build customer relationships and loyalty
- Turn customers into brand advocates
- Develop communities around brand and products
- Provide product education
- Increase brand authority
- Boost awareness
These outcomes may not result in sales as quickly as more aggressive forms of marketing, but the long-term results are often much more substantial and lasting.
Types of Content Marketing
Content marketing comes in various forms, each with its own unique way of engaging the target audience. Blogging is one of the most common types, involving the creation and publication of articles on a company blog. This helps attract and engage readers, providing valuable information that addresses their needs and interests.
Video content is another powerful format, especially on social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Videos can range from product demonstrations and how-to guides to live streams and short clips, all designed to capture the audience’s attention and convey messages effectively. Videos are effortless to consume!
Social media marketing involves creating and sharing content on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This type of content marketing is crucial for engaging with the target audience, fostering community, and driving traffic to your website.
Email marketing is a targeted approach, sending personalized emails to subscribers to nurture leads and drive conversions. Infographics, on the other hand, use visual content to communicate complex information in a simple and engaging way, making it easier for the audience to understand and retain the information. As shown here.
Podcasting is growing in popularity, offering audio content that attracts and engages listeners. E-books and whitepapers provide in-depth guides and reports, establishing thought leadership and expertise in the industry. Webinars are another effective format, hosting online presentations and workshops to educate and engage with the audience.
Lastly, case studies and customer testimonials share real-life examples and success stories, building credibility and trust with prospective customers. These various types of content marketing allow businesses to reach their audience in multiple ways, ensuring a comprehensive and effective marketing strategy.
Content and the Marketing Funnel
Content can be deployed to reach prospects at every stage of the marketing funnel. There is content that works well for brand awareness (the upper funnel), as well as content that is more appropriate for mid- and lower-funnel stages. Meanwhile, advertising itself tends to be focused on lower-funnel customers only.
Where Does Content Marketing Happen in 2025?
One of the biggest ongoing changes to content marketing has been concerning where it takes place. Specifically, the channels that are available for sharing content with target audiences have grown exponentially. So, where is that happening in 2025?
Take a moment to consider the content marketing channels that have emerged over the past decade or so. In addition to blogging, guest posting, and native advertising, brands are now able to share their content on platforms like:
- TikTok
- Snapchat
- Twitch
Reddit and other long-running social media sites may have launched prior to 2010, but they, too, have shown growing promise as content marketing channels throughout the past few years. Once in the shadowy depths of the internet, Reddit is now one of the most prominent website in Googles top organic search. Who would have thunk. Additionally, marketing teams shouldn’t ignore the growth of audio content. According to Pew Research, podcasts are steadily growing in popularity.
The benefits these platforms offer extend beyond having more content distribution channels than ever. The choices that brands have access to enable them to precisely target their audiences more than ever before, simply by choosing the right channel, and different channels appeal to a range of demographics, personalities, and interests.
Additionally, social media channels are working hard to gain the attention and loyalty of brands. Most offer dashboards for brands to make it easier to share content, as well as analytics tools to help ensure that content marketing campaigns get results.
Content Marketing Formats
The most important element of content marketing is the content itself, and businesses can choose from many formats to reach audiences. Here are just a few options:
- Blog posts
- Articles
- Guest posts
- Surveys and polls
- Podcasts
- Interviews
- Webinars
- eBooks
- White papers
- Infographics
- Courses
- Manuals
- Native advertising
Tip: Blog posts can generate organic traffic, and you can incorporate many of the above formats to make your content more interesting. Wonder how you landed on this article? This article was designed to answer your search query and others based on research and writing content for SEO purposes. And follows a new Google concept called E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and trustworthiness).
There’s also video, which is its own content marketing category altogether, simply because of its own abundance of forms that include:
- Live videos
- Explainers
- Product demonstrations
- How-to videos—how would we ever build Ikea Furniture without them?
- Video courses
- Short-form videos (i.e., shorts, TikToks, reels)
Content teams can select the specific content formats that will appeal to their target audiences and best allow them to share their messages.
Content Management and Personalization
Content management and personalization are essential to any successful content marketing strategy. It begins with a clear understanding of your audience—their needs, preferences, and behaviors—so you can create high-quality, relevant content that drives engagement.
Using data and analytics helps you track performance and refine your approach, ensuring your content meets audience expectations and supports your marketing goals. Tools like marketing automation software enable you to personalize content at scale, while a content calendar keeps your efforts organized and consistent.
A content management system (CMS) further streamlines operations by centralizing all content, making it easier to maintain accuracy and relevance across multiple platforms. By focusing on strong content management and personalization, you’ll foster deeper customer relationships, boost engagement, and ultimately drive profitable results.
Content Marketing and Search Engines
Content marketing is a cornerstone of SEO, boosting visibility and rankings on search engines. By creating high-quality, keyword-rich content that resonates with your audience, you address their search queries while establishing credibility.
To optimize content for discoverability, use targeted keywords, meta tags, and other SEO techniques. Building high-quality backlinks further strengthens your site’s authority and improves its ranking. Valuable, consistently published content also drives traffic and engagement—key signals that tell search engines your site is a reliable resource.
Tracking performance with SEO metrics and analytics tools provides data-driven insights for continual refinement. Establishing thought leadership through informative content enhances your credibility, making it more likely for search engines to rank your pages higher.
By integrating content marketing with SEO, you create a powerful strategy that attracts more visitors, encourages engagement, and leads to profitable customer actions.
Setting Content Marketing Strategy for 2024 and Beyond
Now that you have a solid foundation of content marketing knowledge, you may feel ready to start developing your own strategy. Follow these tips to ensure your content marketing efforts are successful this year and beyond.
Now that you have a solid foundation of content marketing knowledge, you may feel ready to start developing your own strategy. It is crucial to have a documented content strategy, including a comprehensive 12- to 18 month plan with performance goals and an integrated content calendar, to ensure methodical execution based on data-driven decisions. Follow these tips to ensure your content marketing efforts are successful this year and beyond.
Start with Goals and KPIs
Content without a goal supporting it doesn’t really serve a purpose. You might deliver some pieces that your audience enjoys, but there won’t be any movement toward any sort of positive outcome.
One of the most effective approaches is to use the SMART methodology, setting goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely. Doing so pushes you to set content marketing goals that are well-articulated, aligned with your overall business objectives, and trackable using clearly defined metrics.
Some example goals include:
- Increasing brand awareness by 20% in six months
- Boosting revenue through social media sales by 5% in 90 days
- Earning 25% more email subscribers in one month
After you establish your goals, you can turn your focus to key performance indicators (KPIs), which are specific metrics or benchmarks that your content must reach within a given period of time.
Imagine that you chose improving brand awareness as one of your goals. Now, you can choose KPIs that support that. For instance, brand awareness can be measured by:
- An increase in search traffic using branded keywords
- More social media followers
- Stronger presence in Google trends results
- Brand awareness surveys
- Share of voice and share of impressions
For many of these KPIs, you may need to do a current-state analysis to set benchmarks that you can measure against during your content marketing campaign.
Select Content to Reach Your Audience
What kind of content should you create? You’ll need to take your content audience into consideration alongside your goals and KPIs.
Start by developing buyer personas, which will help you dial in exactly who you are trying to reach with this content marketing initiative. The ultimate goal of content marketing is to drive profitable customer action by creating valuable and consistent content that attracts and retains a specific audience.
Your buyer persona should include details such as:
- Demographic data
- Pain points
- Reasons for needing your product or service
- Where they spend time online
- Marketing funnel stage
- How your brand can uniquely meet their needs
Remember, though, that not every content marketing campaign will be intended to reach all of your prospective customers. You may need to specialize to achieve results.
Once you have a clear view of the customers you want to reach, along with their needs, you can choose the content types that will be most effective.
Select Your Content Channels
You have two things to ask yourself here. First, where will you create and host your content? For example, you can create videos to be hosted on YouTube or blog posts on your website.
Next, which channels will you use to promote or distribute that content? Videos can be shared on Facebook and other social media channels, and you can distribute blog posts to a larger audience by posting them on Medium or other channels in addition to your own website.
Establish a Budget
There are costs associated with content marketing. The precise amount you will spend will depend on the type of content you create, how you are going to distribute it, and your marketing goals, but you can consider these cost factors as you plan:
- Purchasing tools for content creation distribution and analytics
- Cost of cameras or other equipment
- Payments to digital agencies or freelancers
- Paid promotions or advertisements
Fortunately, some of the upfront costs can be spread over multiple campaigns. For example, if you invest in equipment to shoot videos, you will be able to continue using that in future campaigns. The same goes for tools that you may purchase.
Create and Share Content
Put your strategy to work. Start creating and distributing the content you have planned based on your marketing goals. A content calendar is an excellent tool. You can use it to plan a steady output of content to keep your audience engaged and slowly work toward achieving your KPIs.
Employ Ongoing Analytics
Go back to your goals and KPIs. Keep track of these using the methods and analytics tools that provide you with the insights you need, which will allow you to make small changes along the way to get better results.
Bridging a Marketing Gap with Content
People are resistant to many forms of marketing simply because they don’t want to be sold things all the time, certainly not when they are enjoying their time online. Content marketing is a tool that brands can use to gently push past that resistance. We’ve heard it summarized like this: “Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.”
The Content Marketing Institute highlights the impact and effectiveness of data-driven content, noting that an infographic created by Shutterstock attracted massive social shares and site visits, illustrating the value of such content in enhancing user engagement and reach.
What do you want to accomplish with content marketing? We’d love to partner with you as you work toward achieving your goals. Contact Mighty Fine for more information about web design, advertising, branding, and more.
