What is Content Marketing & How Does it Work?

Content marketing is a strategy in which businesses create and share valuable, relevant, and engaging materials for their customers and prospects. This could be articles, social media posts, videos, or podcasts. The goal is to attract, inform, and build trust with their target audience.

Instead of solely focusing on selling a product or service, content marketing prioritizes building relationships with customers to drive brand loyalty and awareness. This leads to longer-term engagement and, ultimately, more sales.

Content marketing and content promotion often go hand in hand, but they’re not the same thing.

Content marketing refers to the planning, creation, and delivery of useful information that resonates with your audience’s interests and pain points. Its goal is to build trust by showcasing your expertise and helpfully guiding potential customers through the buyer journey.

Content promotion, on the other hand, is how you get your content seen by the right people.

It involves content distribution across various channels including social media, email newsletters, and paid ads.

The main goal is to ensure visibility. While content marketing sets the foundation by producing quality material, content promotion is the all-important amplifier that helps it reach a wider or more targeted audience.

The distinction between content marketing and content promotion is critical for small businesses. Investing time in thoughtful content creation is essential, but it's all for naught without a suitable content promotion strategy.

Since you’re putting in so much effort, you don’t want the content to go unnoticed.

An intelligent strategy that backs up your content marketing efforts with a plan for promotion ensures those efforts yield meaningful results. For small businesses, that typically means generating more leads or boosting conversions.

When we consider the types of content marketing, we really mean the content formats that can make up a content strategy.

Choosing the ‘right’ content type(s) depends on your business goals, the resources you have available, and your audience's preferences.

It will also depend on content marketing trends. Few content marketers ten years ago would have predicted the power of TikTok. Now, brands targeting Gen Z and a younger audience could be missing out by not making the most of this channel.

The takeaway is to stay flexible and up-to-date with your audience.

A mainstay of inbound marketing, blog ideas help you share industry insights, offer beginner’s guides, or tackle customer FAQs. A comprehensive blog strategy built on SEO fundamentals can work wonders for your organic search visibility.

Whether short or long-form, videos are digestible and engaging, well-suited to a younger demographic. Video content can help explain complex products through tutorials or communicate your brand story in a visual form.

Short videos are fantastic for social media engagement, particularly through popular platforms like TikTok. Video marketers use longer formats to establish thought leadership through explainers, often giving a voice to key personalities within your business.

Audio content caters to busy customers who can listen on the go. Interviews with industry experts, deep dives into niche topics, or fun chats can build credibility and brand awareness.

Visual content such as infographics summarizes complex data in a clear, shareable format.

They’re great for presenting statistics, comparisons, or step-by-step processes. Brands that create great, shareable infographics can build an authoritative reputation purely on this foundation.

Platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok enable bite-sized content to engage directly with your audience.

Each platform has its own quirks and weaknesses/strengths, with different audience behavior and demographics. For a small business, it may not make sense to devote time to building a presence on all of these platforms; it’s better to choose one or two that align with your audience.

Use social media content to highlight success stories, promote offers, or share quick tips.

Longer, more detailed forms of written content provide in-depth knowledge. These informative pieces cover specific subjects related to your market or field of interest. Content writers of ebooks and white papers should offer value to the reader while positioning your business as an industry leader.

Ebooks and white papers are often used as part of lead generation — part of an offer to exchange contact details for valuable content. For example, ‘Sign up to receive this free ebook detailing the seven key steps of a content marketing strategy.’

Interactive formats where customers can ask questions in real-time, learn from experts, and gain trust in your brand’s content and expertise.

Your business should look to mix and match these content marketing types to keep your audience interested and engaged. Since a large element of your content strategy is to teach about your brand, product, or service, we need to be aware of different learning styles.

Different content formats also lend themselves to various stages of the customer journey — a beginner’s guide blog may serve as a great entry point, while a video demonstrating a specific product’s benefits might sway a customer to make a purchase.

The right types of content delivered in the right place help businesses stand out and build strong, long-lasting relationships with their communities.

We’ve hinted at some of the benefits already, but let’s delineate them here for clarity:

• Building trust: Quality content establishes you as a reliable source, boosting credibility and brand loyalty — a key benefit of content marketing.
• Increasing visibility: By attracting organic search traffic and social media engagement, content increases brand awareness.
• Boost conversions: Informative content nurtures leads, guiding them toward purchases without aggressive sales tactics.
• Enhancing customer experiences: Helpful, relevant information addresses customer pain points, improving satisfaction and retention.
• Cost-effective growth: Compared to paid advertising, content marketing often delivers long-term results at a lower cost.

By investing time and effort into creating valuable content, you’re building a foundation that can pay dividends well into the future.

Each piece of content sets in motion a series of positive feedback loops: trust drives loyalty, which boosts visibility; visibility attracts more potential customers, leading to higher conversions; and enhanced customer experiences encourage further engagement and repeat business.

Over time, this virtuous cycle allows your brand to grow sustainably and cost-effectively, ensuring that every article, video, or podcast contributes to long-term success.

Here’s the key pillar of content marketing. You need to provide as much value as possible and be consistent with this.

Value should always be your watchword when you are planning, creating, and distributing content. There has to be a reason for your target audience to take time out of their day to spend time with your brand.

Instead of simply pushing products, offer other reasons to engage, such as unique knowledge, content that’s entertaining, or expert insider insights.

Think about either offering light relief or fixing a problem for your audience, all while aligning with your broader brand voice and story.

Over time, showing up with this authenticity will build trust in your brand, positioning it as both a trusted source of information and, potentially, a source of entertainment, too (the balance here depends on your brand personality).

So, that’s the theory of content marketing. In terms of the mechanics of how it works, there are several stages:

1. Starts with keyword research or market analysis to identify topics relevant to your target audience and buyer personas.
2. Content production that fits the bill.
3. Distribute content.
4. As customers interact with the content, they gradually move along the buyer’s journey.
5. Customers develop stronger loyalty, increasing the likelihood of future purchases and boosting customer lifetime value.
6. Track various metrics (engagement, conversion rates, time on page, social shares, etc.)
7. Refine your approach accordingly based on what you see to be working.

However, many businesses ultimately fail to reach their goals through content marketing. To give you the best chance of getting it right, you need to start with a comprehensive content marketing plan.

Don’t dive into the deep end and start writing blogs without a clear strategy. This is a surefire recipe for disaster. Instead, create a life raft built on a foundation of clear goals for your content marketing efforts.

This is the best way to ensure you ride the tide of steady customer engagement and achieve meaningful results.

What are you hoping to achieve from your content? For example, are you looking for a boost in brand awareness? Or are you looking to generate more leads or improve customer loyalty? Each goal helps to dictate and inform not only the nature of your content but also what types of content you want to create.

A B2B marketing agency will likely want to create content that primarily generates leads. This B2B business would care considerably less about widespread brand awareness than a restaurant chain. The same content marketing strategy wouldn’t work for both businesses.

Once you’ve defined aims, you would then need to define your buyer personas (a critical aspect of your overall sales process):

• Who are they? (age, gender, nationality, profession, ideals, etc.)
• What are their pain points?
• What type of content do they want to see?

Having a clear idea of who you are trying to target makes it much easier to create content that resonates with them. You can literally ask yourself, “Will Dan, the 35-year-old teacher from San Diego, be interested in this blog content?”

Content marketing planning is all about research. You can use tools like Google Trends or keyword research software like Semrush or Ahrefs to find content ideas your customers care about.

You may feel like you intuitively know your audience's interests, but using these tools will show you the precise phrasing and keywords they are using in search engines.

These tools also show you what your competitors are doing in terms of content. Analyze their output and look for gaps you can fill with unique content.

Forming your content around primary and secondary keywords related to your industry is the foundation of good SEO, which helps you appear ahead of competitors in search results.

After the first two steps, you should have a better idea of what content formats and marketing channels suit your business goals and audience. Of course, you’ll need to consider your resources, too.

Many business owners would love to create long-form videos, but do they have the time and skills to follow through on that aim? Do they have the funds on hand to outsource?

Land on a balance that fits your aims, audience, and achievability.

For example, two blogs per week that answer relevant FAQs about your product might be an appropriate amount to achieve your aims and please your audience. Don’t put pressure on yourself to do more that may detract from other business activities.

Once you’ve decided on your formats, you’ll need to choose the right distribution channels for promotion (social media platforms, newsletters, etc.)

Again, the focus should be on alignment with your target audience. One of the golden rules of marketing is to share your message wherever your audience is most likely to see it.

A perfume brand aimed at Gen Z may focus on Instagram, whereas a law firm might prioritize LinkedIn. However, the best approach is to include multiple channels for distribution still to ensure a wide reach.

A content calendar is the result of your first three steps and the beating heart of your content marketing strategy.

It’s the written-down visible plan of your content:

• What will be created?
• When will it be created?
• When will it be published?
• How will it be promoted?

Your content calendar can be as simple as a Google Sheet, or you can use more complex tools like content management software or Slack Lists to plan sophisticated campaigns.

If you have created content in the past, conducting a content audit will be worthwhile to assess what you already have to see what worked well and if there is anything you can repurpose with a fresh update. These previous pieces can help inform your new content calendar.

You can also use the latest AI tools, often as part of a content marketing platform, to help you generate content ideas.

The point of your content calendar is to ensure consistent delivery. You and your marketing team plan in advance to deliver content that builds trust and keeps your brand visible.

A populated content calendar is only a fraction of the work. Now it’s time to get writing. Focus on producing content that’s:

• Original, fresh, and insightful.
• Accurate (e.g., backed up by citations from trusted sources).
• Relevant to your audience (e.g., you’re targeting the right psychographics and target audience).
• Adds value. Content needs to be helpful for people to engage with and share with their friends.

Quality content means you need to stick to a few guiding principles to elevate your content above what competitors are sharing:

• Back up your points with data where possible.
• Use customer stories to provide social proof of the usefulness of your product or service.
• Ensure your message is clear and concise.
• Add industry insights only you can provide.
• Get the basics right: well-structured, error-free content.

Following these guiding principles should ensure your content stands out amid online noise and distractions.

Share your content across multiple channels (with a focus on alignment, as mentioned earlier). This could be done through your email database or on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn. If you have a Slack community, then you could also consider sharing content there as well.

Consider social media advertising, guest blogging content, or influencer partnerships to expand your reach. Remember, promotion is as important as production.

The seventh and final step is an iterative one. You need to review your content marketing statistics to make adjustments regularly.

Analytics tools like Google Analytics or built-in CRM dashboards can be used to track content performance metrics over time.

Salesforce offers comprehensive AI-driven analytics to give you insights into how your content performs.

This isn’t rocket science: Identify what’s working and what’s not, then refine your strategy accordingly. Yet, a content strategy takes time to achieve results. Don’t expect skyrocketing sales just because you wrote a fantastic white paper.

Show up consistently with valuable content, and you should start to see a general trend toward boosted traffic, engagement, and conversions over the coming months.

Let’s spotlight a few brands that are nailing their content marketing campaigns:

Red Bull has spent a long time cultivating its brand reputation. It is known for producing exciting videos, articles, and social media content about extreme sports and thrilling adventures.

Red Bull spotlights brand ambassadors who are living life to the fullest, making this positive association with their brand. You’ll see them sponsor high-octane sports like Formula 1 and cliff diving tournaments, too.

It’s easy to forget that Red Bull only sells energy drinks because their pitch to their audience is about lifestyle.

Even small businesses can think beyond their core product and tap into larger ideas that resonate with their audience’s lifestyle or interests.

By aligning your brand with a concept — like excitement, adventure, or creativity — you can create content that inspires and engages, even without a huge marketing budget.

Partner with local ambassadors or community events to bring this vision to life in your own unique way.

Bupa spends a lot of effort on its health and wellness blogs. They supplement this written information with podcasts and expert interviews that provide customers with valuable health information.

Through these expert insights in various formats, the Bupa brand builds credibility as a go-to resource for wellness guidance.

This is a smart choice for Bupa due to its alignment with its audience’s pain points. Their readers and listeners want to trust their healthcare provider. By offering added value, the brand cements its reputation and builds its whole brand personality around trust, which is an absolutely critical trait when it comes to healthcare.

Small businesses can replicate this by producing informative content, such as how-to guides, mini podcasts, or interviews with specialists.

Even if you’re not in healthcare, your customers still need to trust your judgment regarding your products, services, or industry.

The best way to demonstrate this is to show through helpful content rather than tell through pushy promotions.

Koala is an online furniture retailer that publishes engaging content about innovative product design and also home improvement tips.

Since users find these tips useful and applicable in their daily lives, they return to the site for repeat visits to gain further advice.

We wanted to highlight this because it’s slightly different from just supplying information. These are actionable tips.

Highlighting practical tips and user-friendly ideas can set you apart, regardless of your product category.

For smaller businesses, consider how your products fit into customers’ daily lives. Offering content that addresses real-world challenges or improvements (like home improvement in Koala’s case) can create deeper brand loyalty and spark repeat visits — even if your product offering is modest in scale.

Consider checking out our marketing blog for more insights related to small business marketing practices to continue your learning journey. That said, here are 5 best practices you should apply to your content marketing efforts.

1. Be consistent: Publish regularly to keep audiences engaged with fresh insights.
2. Quality over quantity: Consistent doesn’t mean flooding the zone. Provide well-researched, accurate, original content that truly helps readers. Provide quality content at regular, realistic intervals.
3. Keep an eye on analytics: Track your content marketing metrics to understand what resonates over time. Do more of what works.
4. Optimize for search engines: Implement SEO best practices to boost online visibility. This is the best ‘free’ way to reach more potential customers.
5. Promote strategically: Share content across multiple channels, from social media platforms to email newsletters, ensuring it reaches the right people at the right time.

The overarching theme here is that a successful content marketing strategy should focus on value.

When your brand publishes content, you’re invading a potential customer’s headspace. It’s helpful to remember this because it should remind you that your content should be beneficial.

This converts an ‘invasion’ into something more benign, something they might even appreciate: gained knowledge, something humorous, or advice they can put into action.

Fulfilling this primary purpose of content marketing will give you a better chance of fulfilling the overarching secondary purpose — sales and growth for your brand.

By choosing the right formats, maintaining consistency, and using data-driven insights, you can establish trust, build brand loyalty, and improve long-term growth.