What Is Content Marketing? My Guide to Creating a 2025 Strategy That Works

Content marketing is when a business creates and shares content to build a connection with their desired target audience – often inspiring customers to engage with a product or service or become a repeat buyer. Examples of content marketing content include:

• Blog posts
• Guest posts (blog posts you publish on another company’s website to increase brand awareness)
• Emails/Newsletters
• Social media posts
• Videos
• eBooks
• User-generated content
• Podcasts
• Infographics

Overall, you’ll want your content marketing strategy to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, build trust in your brand, establish your market authority, and of course, boost sales and conversions.

Now that you understand what content marketing is, it’s time to put together your marketing plan and think about the key steps you need to take to achieve your goals. I’ve summarized them below:

1. Identify your Target Audience

One of the most important parts of creating a content marketing strategy is determining who your target audience is, so start thinking about who is your content for. Having a strong idea of your audience enables you to create content that truly resonates with them and their needs.

To determine your target audience, first take a look at your existing customer base and create detailed user personas for them. You should think about key parts of their identity, like:

• Location: Where do they live? This might include their country, state, or town
• Demographic information: What characteristics do they possess? Consider information like their age range, gender, education, and profession
• Psychology: What is their general outlook on life? Think about their attitudes and what would motivate them to make a purchase
• Online presence: Which online platforms do they use? They might frequent TikTok, take part in Facebook groups, or use forums to learn more about a brand

Chances are, you’ll realize that you have more than one type of audience demographic to target with your content marketing. Because of this, create multiple, fleshed-out personas and keep them at the heart of your brand.

Additionally, you can also conduct market research and take a look at your competitor’s target audience to check if you are currently missing key demographics.

2. Create your Content

Once you’ve narrowed down your target audience, its time to start creating your content marketing strategy and putting together engaging media to share. Before you start, make sure that you’ve answered these important questions first:

• What problems does my content solve? Pinpoint your audience’s needs to make sure that your content actively solves their problems. For example, if you’re a travel agent offering holiday packages, your audience might find it difficult to choose a holiday destination. Producing travel guides, then, offers a clear solution by helping customers make an informed decision.
• What makes my content unique? Aim to create authentic, useful content that offers your audience a unique perspective or helpful information that isn’t already on the internet. That may sound like an impossible task – after all, it seems like every topic possible is already covered in depth online, but think carefully about your brand’s Unique Value Proposition and use this to your advantage.
• What type of content will I create? The content you create will depend on your skillset, brand, and audience. For example, if you love making videos and want to connect with your audience in a personal way, you could start a vlog. However, if you don’t have video creation skills or don’t have the budget to hire someone who does, it’s better to focus on the content you’re skilled at creating rather than putting together something of low quality.
• What tone of voice will my content have? The most important thing is that your content reflects your brand personality. If you’ve built a formal and professional brand, don’t suddenly start creating informal videos and social media posts. Similarly, if you’ve created a fun and informal brand, your content should reflect the same vibe.

3. Distribute and Promote Your Content

Once you’ve created batches of content to share, it’s time to decide where you’re going to publish your content and promote it online. This might include:

• On your own website
• On other, relevant websites in the form of guest posts
• On social media networks such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and TikTok
• Through email marketing
• Through influencer marketing to tap into an internet personality’s audience and followers

Before you dive in and get posting, there are two important factors I want you to consider when deciding on the right platform for your content.

The first is to determine which platform and distribution method actually works best for the content you’ve created. For example, you can’t post your latest blog write-up on TikTok, but you would want to share your most engaging, short-form video content on there. Similarly, an infographic may work well on Facebook or Pinterest but may not engage users the same way on Instagram.

Here are some platforms to consider:

• Social media websites like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn – Also look into these platforms’ additional features to increase your reach. LinkedIn allows you to post newsletters from your profile, while you can create a dedicated company page on Facebook.
• Email – You can engage with your current audience by sharing content in your emails. You could include original content, or include links to your other content platforms.
• Video platforms like YouTube or Twitch – You can post long-form videos, or schedule in some live streaming sessions to provide your followers with live content.
• Publishing websites like Substack or Medium – From these sites, you can create a free account and publish written content such as long-form articles and listicles.
• Forums like Reddit or Quora – To build your brand’s authority online, you can share relevant content on these platforms if it helps answer specific questions for users, but do it sparingly. Post too much and you may come across as spammy.

Secondly, you need to ensure you’re using platforms that your target audience actively uses too. Consider what you know about how they behave online. For example, older audiences aged 40+ are more likely to be active on Facebook and enjoy reading longer-form articles, while younger, Gen Z or Millennial audiences might prefer consuming short-form, video content on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.

It’s all well and good creating amazing content but if you’re publishing it on the wrong platforms, your target audience will never see it.

4. Track Your Content’s Analytics

As time passes, your content marketing strategy will need to evolve to keep on top of the competition, any industry updates, and your overarching goals. The best way to monitor your content strategy is by keeping track of key metrics that will enable you to analyze how well your content is performing overall.

Key metrics to monitor include:

• Website traffic… to see how many users are visiting your content pages
• Bounce rates… to see how many users leave your site after clicking on one page (I recommend using this metric to gauge whether visitors are clicking through to other content)
• Dwell time… to see how long users stay on a site before clicking off
• Email open rates… to see how many subscribers are opening your emails
• Click-through-rate… to see how many subscribers are clicking on a call to action, ad, or hyperlink in your emails
• Social media engagement… to see how often your social content receives likes, comments, shares, and saves

You can use these metrics to identify what’s working and what needs to be changed. For example, if you can see that the dwell time on your website is short, you can presume that users aren’t reading your longer-form content and that this may need improvement.

I also recommend monitoring your social media posts to see which types of content attract the most views and engagement, and which aren’t as popular. You can then continue creating and distributing the content types that prove popular with your audience for the best long-term results.

Content marketing is an ever-changing principle, and creating a content marketing strategy for your business isn’t a one size fits all approach.

Instead, as I’ve discussed, you’ll need to commit to finding out who your audience is and what kind of content they want to see from you. If you do that, you’ll be able to create a content marketing strategy that evolves with your business and results in increased brand awareness, deeper and more meaningful relationships with your customers, and higher conversion rates.