What Is Content Marketing and Why Is It Important?

Content marketing refers to strategically creating and publishing content via social media channels, blogs, websites, podcasts, apps, and more. Content marketing definition: It is a strategic approach that focuses on creating and sharing valuable content to attract and engage an audience. The goal is to reach your target audience to increase brand awareness, sales, engagement, and loyalty.

At its core, content marketing puts the customer at the heart of a brand’s messaging, ensuring that the content resonates with their needs and interests. Quality content creation produces stronger returns over time and establishes expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your business top of mind.

In simple terms: Content marketing is a great way to increase your ROI. Content marketing leads to lower customer acquisition costs for businesses with strong strategies. Additionally, it generates leads at a lower cost than traditional advertising methods, making it a cost-effective approach for businesses aiming to maximize their marketing budgets.

Unlike other forms of digital marketing, such as PPC (pay-per-click advertising), content marketing can deliver long-term results for your business. It can drive traffic and leads for years, unlike Facebook advertisements, for example.

Introduction to Content Marketing

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. The goal of content marketing is to drive profitable customer action by building trust, establishing thought leadership, and developing relationships with potential customers.

Companies with excellent content marketing strategies have an unfair advantage over their competitors, as they can better engage their audience and stand out in the market.

Content marketing allows businesses to share expertise, enhancing their authority in the market and fostering customer loyalty. A well-planned content marketing strategy can help businesses stand out from the competition, increase brand awareness, and ultimately drive sales. High-quality content makes a brand more recognizable and trustworthy over time, leading to stronger brand loyalty.

Effective content marketing efforts can be achieved through various channels, including social media posts, blog posts, video content, and more.

Why Is Content Marketing Important?

The effectiveness of outbound marketing (or anything that visually interrupts your audience) is of the past. Instead, today’s content should naturally reach your audience (in marketing jargon, you call this “inbound marketing”). This is done by telling a story or creating a narrative, focusing on valuable content that is meaningful and engaging for customers. It will make your content more authentic, relevant, and your audience can connect with it.

That is why marketers who make blogging their top priority are 13 times more likely to experience positive ROI. In addition, according to another Hubspot study, blogs are among the three primary forms of media used in content strategies today.

What Are the Different Types of Content Marketing?

There are many types and styles of content marketing you could choose to use in your strategy. It can include even in-person demonstrations of product development, seminars, and physical leaflets. The important thing is that the content supports a business goal by providing information or entertainment.

Here’s a list of some of the most commonly used:

1. Video Content Marketing

Wyzowl’s 2025 research shows that 75% of consumers prefer video to learn about a brand’s products or services. Video content is a powerful method for conveying complex ideas and emotions in a concise and engaging manner. Additionally, 95% of marketers now view video as an essential part of their strategy, with 93% reporting a positive ROI, highlighting its sustained importance since the pandemic-driven surge in adoption. Video content remains one of the most engaging and versatile formats, making it a critical component of any content marketing strategy.

Video marketing can increase conversions, improve ROI and build relationships with your audience. Your video content can be shared on social media platforms, landing pages, or on the website of a co-marketer.

One of my all-time favorite examples of a professional and impactful promo video is by Dollar Shave Club from 2012. It gathered over 27 million views ever since and jumpstarted its business. In fact, their website crashed after 30 minutes of releasing the video because it couldn’t handle the vast amount of traffic.

Their marketing efforts are on-brand, humorous, and entertaining. Dollar Shave Club has seen remarkable growth and brand recognition after making a name for itself via video content marketing.

Industry projections for 2025 estimate that global networks stream over 1.2 million minutes of video content per second, with video comprising 85% of all consumer internet traffic. Video remains the preferred medium for communication as marketing strategies evolve, driven by its unmatched engagement and accessibility. This trend is set to persist, with video now a fundamental part of daily workflows, from remote collaboration to social media, cementing its role as an essential component of modern content strategies beyond large-scale campaigns.

2. Blog Content Marketing

Blogs are a powerful form of inbound content. They allow for creativity in terms of both their topic and purpose. A blog-posting strategy that resonates with your target audience will help you achieve your goals of generating more leads and establishing your business as an industry thought leader.

Each time you create a blog post, you add another indexed page to your website. This is something Google and other search engines love. It is a sign that your website is active. Every page you add will give you another chance to appear in search results, generating organic traffic and introducing potential customers to your brand.

3. Infographic Content Marketing

InInfographics present information and data in a visual format that is easy to understand. They can be a great way of effectively communicating your content. Including detailed descriptions in infographics is crucial for providing comprehensive and specific information that resonates with your audience. Infographics creatively combine text and graphics elements to accomplish various goals:

• Breaking down a complex concept
• Summarizing information
• Make boring numbers and data look beautiful

Here is an example we designed about the benefits of meditation. It gives you a glimpse of how it can improve your health if practiced regularly:

Infographics can be a great tool for marketers to add meaningful design to their visual content marketing strategy.

4. Social Media Content Marketing

Social media marketing is a critical investment, with over 5.2 billion global users in 2025, representing more than 60% of the world’s population. Social media offers a dynamic platform for brands to build authentic relationships with their audience rapidly, fostering engagement and trust. With such a vast and diverse user base, it’s clear why brands must leverage at least one or two platforms to share compelling content about their products, services, and company values to stay competitive and connected. Learn more about social media marketing with AI in 2025.

It has been proven that social media can increase brand awareness through increased engagement. Engagement is a combination of comments, likes, shares, and re-posts.

It may seem overwhelming to determine your company’s social marketing strategy. However, it is possible to avoid being overwhelmed by learning about social media trends and the many available resources on the subject.

5. Podcast Content Marketing

A 2025 survey by Edison Research revealed that 66% of 12–34-year-olds in the U.S. listen to podcasts at least six hours per week, with 21% of Gen Z (13–24) consuming over 10 hours weekly. This surge in listenership has prompted media outlets and businesses to invest heavily in podcast creation and distribution.

Podcasts enable businesses to connect with niche audiences through immersive audio content, fostering engagement via in-depth discussions and compelling storytelling. Audio content excels at captivating listeners with rich narratives, making it a vital tool for podcasting.

Podcasts offer boundless creativity, covering any topic imaginable, with full control over elements like episode cadence, guest selection, advertising platforms, and episode length, allowing brands to tailor content to their audience’s preferences.

Why Invest in Different Types of Content Marketing?

You can reach different audiences by publishing content in different formats. Utilizing different platforms, such as blogs, social media, and landing pages, ensures that your content is tailored to maximize engagement and effectiveness. Publishing various types of content allows you to be “everywhere” that your audience spends their time online.

For example, someone may miss your latest blog article when you share it on social media. But they might see it on their phones during their lunch break. Some things work better in certain formats. It all depends on what the content is and the message you want to communicate.

Developing a Content Marketing Strategy

Developing a content marketing strategy involves several steps, including setting goals and objectives, researching competitors, and auditing existing content.

A successful content marketing strategy should be aligned with the business’s overall marketing goals and objectives. It should also take into account the target audience, their needs, and their preferences.

Setting Goals and Objectives

Setting clear goals and objectives is essential for a successful content marketing strategy. This involves defining what the business wants to achieve through its content marketing efforts, such as increasing website traffic, generating leads, or driving sales.

The goals and objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). For example, a business may set a goal to increase its website traffic by 20% within the next six months through its content marketing efforts.

Researching Competitors

Researching competitors is an important step in developing a content marketing strategy. This involves analyzing the competitors’ content marketing efforts, including their social media presence, blog posts, and video content. By researching competitors, businesses can identify gaps in the market and create content that is unique and valuable. For example, a business may find that its competitors are not creating content on a specific topic, and therefore, it can create content on that topic to fill the gap.

Auditing Existing Content

Auditing existing content is also an important step in developing a content marketing strategy. This involves reviewing the business’s existing content, including its social media posts, blog posts, and video content.

The audit should identify what is working and what is not, and provide recommendations for improving the content. For example, a business may find that its social media posts are not engaging its audience, and therefore, it can create new social media content that is more engaging and relevant. By auditing existing content, businesses can ensure that their content marketing efforts are aligned with their overall marketing goals and objectives.

What Are the First Steps of Creating a Content Marketing Campaign?

1. Define Your Target Audience

The first step in any content marketing campaign is to identify your target audience. Who are you trying to attract?

Most people I have met are clear about what they want to share with their audience. But many of them stumble when I ask them the simple and direct question: “Why should they care?” To get the results they desire, they realize that they must change how they originally wanted to approach the topic.

Figuring out your target audience isn’t a hard or complicated process. If you’re in contact with your audience regularly, you will probably have a good idea about the types of desires or problems they have that you can satisfy.

In marketing, you call this step creating your “Buyer Persona.” Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations based on research and data of your ideal customer. These personas help you concentrate your time on qualified prospects, guide product design to meet the needs of your target customers, and align all work within your organization. I even have a shortened version of a buyer persona questionnaire in the contact form, so I’m up to speed with our new collaboration.

HubSpot’s “Make My Persona” tool can help you understand your audience. This tool is free and allows you to create a customer avatar you can share with your team.

2. Create Content Tailored to Your Audience

Once you know who your audience is, it is time to create content that appeals to them by understanding the audience’s interests. Thanks to the research that went into our buyer persona, we now have a blueprint of the audience’s pain points. This is usually the most straightforward way to create engaging content that really leads to conversions.

Keyword research is another way to find issues your audience cares about. What do people do when they need to find something? They search Google.

My pro tip: If you want to dig deep, you use search listening and social listening tools that help you understand why, where, and how these conversations are happening and what people think – not just when they’re tagging or mentioning your brand. This will help you create future campaigns, improve your content strategy and messaging and outpace your competitors, build an influencer program, and establish more powerful brand partnerships.

Answer the Public does a perfect job at this. It is a keyword tool that visualizes search questions and suggested autocomplete searches in an image called a “search cloud.”

In the above example, I was searching for the term “weight loss.” I ended up with many interesting results that could help me with my next content ideas. These are four question examples from the 80 results of the query:

• can weight loss cure sleep apnea
• can weight loss lower blood pressure
• are weight loss pills fda approved
• how weight loss affects cholesterol

Although Answer The Public is not the “end all, and be all” of keyword research, it can help you find questions that can be converted into organic traffic and boost your content marketing campaign success.

You might focus on building topic clusters, creating evergreen content, or leveraging newsjacking. It will give you ideas for both of these strategies.

3. Start Working on Your Content Marketing Plan

Since you now know your audience and the type of content they consume, it’s time for you to implement your learnings into a content marketing strategy. An effective content marketing strategy is crucial for engaging and retaining audiences, ensuring that your content aligns with customer needs to maximize conversion and brand trust. The more consumers engage with your content, the more likely they are to trust your brand and buy your products.

You want to create content that is relevant to people at different stages of your marketing funnel. Yes, that’s right, we even refine our strategy further. 😉

Each step in a marketing funnel has the goal of encouraging people to move on to the next. And in a perfect world, people would consume your content or go to your website and start from the top of the funnel. But in reality, people enter your content marketing funnel at lots of different stages, and that looks more like this:

This is precisely the reason why you want to have content that appeals to people at each stage. So, let’s start to break down each step and go into more detail.

Top of the Funnel: Attract

At the Top of the Funnel, you will likely encounter primarily random people. This is where a prospect seeks to solve problems, find answers, or fulfill a need.

They want top-quality educational content to direct them to the solution. This type of content attracts customers by providing valuable information that engages and retains them. They are not likely to buy from you, so their value as leads is low. However, they may continue to the middle of your funnel if they find your content engaging and helpful.

You might consider these types of Top of the Funnel content for your attract stage:

• Blog & Social media posts
• YouTube videos & Live content
• Podcast episodes
• Viral content
• Infographics

The power of Top of the Funnel content lies in two key reasons:

First, this content is highly in demand. This means you can use Top of the Funnel to drive substantial amounts of traffic directly to your website. Additionally, this content can also be used to establish your company as an expert in your field.

Middle of the Funnel: Engage

While the Top of the Funnel is intended to educate prospects, this stage is where you should show your prospects why your solutions are the best. During the initial stage of the sales process, it is crucial to address the audience’s concerns and pain points through engaging and educational content. Once someone enters from the Middle of the Funnel, it is a sign that you have their attention. They are aware that they have a problem, and they are trying to find the best solution. As they evaluate their options, the need to make a purchase commitment in the future becomes more apparent.

You might consider these types of Middle of the Funnel content for your engagement stage:

• Email marketing newsletters
• Case studies & Product demos
• Ebooks & whitepapers
• Landing pages

Bottom of the Funnel: Delight

It is important to continue marketing after a prospect has become a customer. Establishing and nurturing relationships with both prospective and existing customers through effective content marketing is crucial. Customer relationships that go beyond the sale can result in higher customer lifetime values, as well as word-of-mouth referrals.

It’s important to exceed expectations and offer a simple and seamless customer experience. Although this may seem like a linear process, you can target different stages through multiple contents. So you may be able, for example, to still delight someone who’s still a prospect.

You might consider these types of Bottom of the Funnel content for your delight stage:

• Webinars
• Sales emails & pages
• Live chat
• Loyalty programs

Understanding your audience is key to creating a funnel that works for your industry and audience. Then, create a content marketing strategy that maps custom content to each stage of the funnel.

If you do it well, this will have the greatest impact on your customer relations and conversions. Thinking outside the box is one of the greatest joys in content creation.

4. Repurpose Your Content for Different Channels

If you do it well, this will have the greatest impact on your customer relations and conversions. Thinking outside the box is one of the greatest joys in content creation.

4. Repurpose Your Content for Different Channels

As I mentioned above, typically, you want to reach different audiences by publishing content in various formats. Creating optimized branded content for various platforms, including social media and email marketing, can enhance brand loyalty and effectively communicate your business’s unique value and identity. If you are repurposing content for a prospect at a different stage in the Content Marketing Funnel, it is important to adjust the content format and angle to match the information they consume.

For example, you can repurpose an ebook intended for those in the engage stage into a blog post for leads in the attract stage. Or you can repurpose a heartfelt story from an email newsletter into a video, as we did for a client here:

5. Make Your Content Desktop and Mobile-Friendly

According to a Statista study, mobile devices generate about half of all website traffic globally and have consistently accounted for about half of all global web traffic since the beginning of 2017. So it’s important your content doesn’t just work on all devices but looks appealing and doesn’t lose its functionality (Responsive design).

According to a Statista study, mobile devices generated 62.69% of global website traffic in January 2025, a steady increase from the 50% threshold first crossed in 2016, reflecting the dominance of smartphones and tablets in internet access. So it’s essential your content doesn’t just work on all devices but looks appealing and doesn’t lose its functionality (Responsive design).

6. Keep Your Content Production Consistent

To reach your audience, consistency is a must. Creating compelling content that resonates with the audience is equally important. Although a few pieces of content may help understand a topic, they will not help you connect with your audience on every level. They won’t help build a lasting relationship. Creating engaging content is increasingly difficult, but it is essential for building meaningful connections with your audience.

Being a consistent content creator is the best way to achieve that. Blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, and other media are all driven to the top 1% by consistency.

This doesn’t mean you need to publish a thousand blog posts to be successful with content marketing. Instead, you should publish great content regularly. It could be once a week, or once per month. As important as consistency and sticking with your content is, it doesn’t matter how many you post.

Conclusion

We hope you found this guide helpful, and it answered your question, “What is content marketing?”.

Measuring performance and establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) are crucial for successful content marketing. Regularly measuring content performance allows marketers to refine their strategies and focus on successful content types. Use analytics tools to gather data and review metrics regularly to ensure your strategy is on track and delivering results. Measuring the ROI of content marketing can be complex, but it is a necessary step to ensure your efforts are effective. Content marketing is not a strategy you can implement overnight, but when it starts to get traction, you’ll attract more potential customers, leads, and traffic.

Marketers are investing more in content marketing than ever before. In 2025, 93% report actively using content marketing, up from 82% in 2021. However, 35% of those who have not yet invested in content remain uncertain about starting in 2025, citing challenges in measuring impact. Businesses must establish a clear budget for their content marketing initiatives to effectively measure return on investment (ROI). Setting a budget not only helps in tracking ROI but also ensures that resources are allocated efficiently to achieve marketing goals. Businesses should always set a budget for their content marketing initiatives so they can measure return on investment (ROI).

Video leads content marketing strategies, with 91% of businesses prioritizing it to engage audiences through compelling storytelling and visuals, followed by blogs (used by 65% of marketing teams) and infographics, which deliver value through diverse formats. For more information on how to get started with video marketing, read this article.