You want people to know about your business and all the ways it can improve their lives. However, competition is fierce, and the chaotic nature of the Internet makes it difficult to build your brand. Fortunately, content marketing helps you cut through the noise and achieve top-of-funnel (ToFu) goals that let you build an audience, establish yourself in the industry, generate leads, and increase sales.
Below is a thorough exploration of content marketing, its advantages, and the best tips to get started in 2025.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is what fuels inbound marketing. It’s a marketing strategy used to plan, create, and distribute valuable content to a target audience with the goal of inducing positive customer action.
By using this marketing strategy, you can:
- Establish authority.
- Nurture your audience.
- Increase brand awareness.
- Build customer trust and loyalty.
- Walk your audience through the buyer’s journey.
- Drive more sales.
As a subset of inbound marketing, content marketing is a great way to scale a business, especially if you want to reach a wider audience.
One of the most popular examples is the Spotify Wrapped campaign, which has helped the company increase its brand awareness exponentially.
This campaign works because, while the company is known for providing users with a global experience, Spotify Wrapped is all about making the user feel unique through this personalized and fashionable event.
The good news is that you don’t have to be part of the music industry to pull off a campaign like this. In fact, anyone in any industry can use content marketing to create something as impactful as this.
You also don’t have to create something like the Spotify Wrapped campaign to make content marketing work for you.
You can use content marketing on your blogs, social media accounts, ebooks, videos, and more. No matter what industry you’re in or who your customers are, content marketing is for everyone.
How To Get Started On Content Marketing in 2025
As of October 2023, nearly five billion people use social media, which is 61.4 percent of the world’s population.
In other words, almost everyone is online these days, and if you’re an entrepreneur or marketer, using social media to reach your target audience is not only recommended but encouraged.
However, as I mentioned, with so many people and businesses out there, it’s hard to cut through the noise with little to no knowledge of digital marketing—especially content marketing.
We’ve already established that content marketing helps you get your brand in front of the right people and unlocks many other beneficial outcomes, such as tough leadership and sales growth.
So if content marketing is the vehicle that will take your brand to the next level, how do you hop in?
Here’s how:
Know Your Audience
Before you post anything, you need to understand the people you want to reach. How else would you create content for them?
Knowing your audience is what makes your content stand out. For example, if you’re in the food industry, you need to narrow down your content and post for people with a niche interest within that industry.
Let’s say your company sells healthy vegan desserts. Instead of taking a generalist approach and posting for everyone with a sweet tooth, you should get very specific and target vegans who love dessert but also care about their nutrition.
That way, your content will reach that specific group faster, and you’ll reap the benefits of content marketing sooner.
So, research your audience. What are their motivations? How old are they? Which social media platforms do they use? What are their pain points? How much money do they spend each month? How can you improve their lives?
Once you feel like you know them, make it official and create a persona so you and your team can get on the same page.
Create a Content Marketing Strategy
Once you know what your audience really wants, it’s time to create a content strategy that will guide you through the process of creating the type of content they want.
A content strategy, or content marketing strategy, involves the planning, creation, distribution, and maintenance of relevant content. It prevents you from wasting resources on content that may underperform or be irrelevant to your target audience.
Typically, content strategies have four stages: planning, creation, maintenance, and removal. Each stage is equally important and will help you keep your content fresh and relevant.
Some of the requirements for creating a content strategy include:
- Identifying the format in which you want to share your content (e.g., blog posts, short or long videos, how-tos, ebooks, and case studies).
- Creating a style guide
- Holding brainstorming sessions with your team
- Creating a content calendar
- Encouraging ongoing content monitoring
In short, if you ever get lost in the world of content marketing, a content strategy will keep you on track by thoroughly describing your company’s mission statement, target audience, content goals, and your plan to achieve those goals through the content you publish.
Choose Your Platforms Wisely
According to this article from Buffer, there are 23 social media platforms you should consider using for your business. So if you’re a solopreneur or someone with a small content team, how are you or your social media manager going to manage 23 sites (not including the content on your website) without losing it?
The good news is that, first, you don’t have to sign up for all these sites, and second, depending on your industry and customer base, only a few of these platforms will be right for you.
For example, a B2B company should get more traction using LinkedIn instead of Tumblr or Twitter instead of Douyin.
The same goes for a B2C company; instead of putting all its efforts into LinkedIn, it should focus more on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.
The advice I always give to everyone is to focus on the 1-2 platforms that fit your business model, grow your numbers there, and then expand later.
Always Go for Quality Over Quantity
With the rise of AI, new algorithms, and millions of businesses with thousands of followers, it’s natural to feel like you need to post as much as possible to stay relevant.
But churning out content isn’t the best way to go about this. Think about it: the chances of being the first niche business in your industry are slim to none. Someone before you has probably created a business similar to yours and created content about it.
This means that there are already countless articles, videos, and posts on your core topics. Instead of regurgitating the same content, find either an angle or the blind spots in their content and create from that approach.
If you decide to create informational or entertaining content without an angle anyway, make sure you’re giving users content that’s worth reading or watching.
Also, remember that on some social media sites, your posts will perform better if you space them out.
So take the time to create content you’re proud of and show your audience that you don’t take them for granted.
Set Realistic, Quantifiable Goals
Part of using content marketing to scale your business is tracking your efforts to know what kind of content works best.
Setting realistic, quantifiable goals prevents you from wasting resources or time on projects that may not yield a high ROI.
It also prevents you from setting expectations that are too high, such as:
- Reaching 1 million subscribers within the first week of launching a newsletter
- Getting 100K followers with your first post on Instagram
- Getting 40K impressions with your first blog post
The goal of setting realistic goals is to maximize your content marketing efforts, save time and resources, and still leave room for surprises (like going viral or getting more traffic than usual).
Research Your Competitors
When I first started in digital marketing, the mere thought of seeing what other people in my field were doing made me feel like a fraud.
Looking back, I can’t help but laugh, because the truth is that researching your competitors is necessary when it comes to content marketing.
It has nothing to do with copying their intellectual work or strategy but with familiarizing yourself with the current environment in your field and identifying opportunities.
By researching your competitors or the companies that are doing well in your field, you’ll be able to see what’s working, the user-customer interactions, the type of content that works for them, any gaps or needs you can fill, and more.
Do A/B Testing
Even if you think you have your target audience figured out, you’ll soon realize that theory can only take you so far.
Once you start creating content consistently, you’ll find that sometimes the type of content you thought would perform well is irrelevant.
And that’s where A/B testing comes in. In essence, A/B testing in marketing refers to the act of creating two or more versions of the same content to see which one performs best.
That way, you’ll know which content format your audience prefers and the best channels to distribute it.
You can think of A/B testing as content recycling, but instead of trying to maximize your reach, you’re doing research to know where to focus your efforts.
Recap
With more than half of the world’s population online, using content marketing to reach your target audience can be the difference between an ordinary business and an internationally recognized one.
Creating a profitable content marketing strategy, setting realistic goals, and staying consistent for at least a year is how you can harness the power of content marketing.
Whether you’re the first company in your niche or the 50 millionth, content marketing helps you get your brand out there and reap the benefits of creating quality content.