The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing in 2025

Did you enjoy playing WWF trump cards when you were a kid? Were you curious to watch Pokemon and collect Tazos in your childhood?
If you answered yes to that, let me tell you that these are some of the great examples of content marketing in the 20th century.

Surprisingly yes. Content marketing is older than the internet itself. When it comes to content marketing, most of us think of it as blogs, SEO, social media, but that’s not what it is all about.

So what is content marketing?

Content marketing is all about the storytelling of your brand. It is not abnormal for the audience to prefer a better storyteller (a better brand image). The reason why more people buy Patanjali products over the competition is that the story of Patanjali is more convincing to them. The way you present your product in the market will ultimately define how your target audience perceives your brand.

WWF started in the early 1950s, however, the Pokemon universe dates back to 1996. How is that to use content to market your product? Both of these are still present in either form of content may it be a tv show for WWE or in the form of toys and mobile games for Pokemon.

Both of them had a background story to each character ( like the dead man- Undertaker or the thunder attacking pokemon Pikachu) that somehow succeeded to get hold of the audience’s interests for a good number of years.

Well, it’s not that bad. But what worked in the 19th century, will work in 2022 as well?
Well, of course not! Let us now learn what will.

Let us dive deep in my ultimate guide to content marketing and find out what really is content marketing and what’s trending in 2022 with some examples.

Feel free to jump to any section if that interests you.

⦁ Definition
⦁ Overview
⦁ Content marketing strategy
⦁ Origin
⦁ Why content marketing?
⦁ Content mapped to consumer funnel
⦁ Awareness stage content
⦁ Consideration stage content
⦁ Purchase stage content
⦁ Other forms of content marketing

Definition:

Content marketing institute an online resource for information, explains content marketing as…

“… a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action”.
The keyword here is ‘valuable and relevant’. If you read the definition without the words ‘valuable and relevant’ that becomes general marketing What is the use of distributing content that doesn’t spark a conversation or is not relevant?

Aren’t all these companies trying to bombard you with ads and offers that are probably not relevant or valuable to you, in other words – spam.

We are already experiencing ad blindness due to overexposure to ads on all devices. It’s so normal in our families to start chatting or ignore the tv when the ad commercials are going on. The same happens on the internet.

Now you’d ask me, do ads still work?
I’d say yes, they do, but with valuable and relevant content.

Overview:

Imagine you recently viewed jeans on Amazon and you are getting emails and remarketing ads for baby diapers. Would you be frustrated? This is what the importance of relevant content is.

Let us now talk about being valuable.

You need to feed your audience with what they are feeding on the internet. Of course, it would be relevant to your products or service. One of the handy online tools that let you do that is Answer the Public. If you are thinking about what topics to write on, this tool can help you get an idea of what people are demanding on the web.

Imagine getting a mail from magic bricks on ‘5 documents you must verify before buying ready-to-move flats’ while you are searching for a new flat in Mumbai.

If the user opens it he/she will get educated with the content and boom. Now he/she knows a brand as a thought leader in the real estate space which they can rely on further moving on to submitting a lead form to Magicbricks.

Now, that’s an example of valuable content. Add value, that’s the secret of content marketing.

The internet today is so noisy, with people putting out hoards of content online. And with the dead organic reach of social platforms, you gotta be valuable and relevant to stand out of the clutter.

Have a look at this great content marketing example by Behrouz Biryani.

[Video] https://youtu.be/wdIbloH6-Gc

Good content or Advertising?
A combination of both.

Rebel Foods the parent company of BehrouzBiryani is a 2011 founded company, but the image that they are trying to convey with this brand story is about being a 2000-year-old traditional brand. And undoubtedly the story is amazing.

I do not say that the product and its quality does not matter, but the brand story or the packaging has to be unique. Remember, people see the brands first and then the products. It is the brand story that has to impress the prospect first.

Content marketing strategy for 2020

The reason why you need a content marketing strategy is, it’s not la-la land. Content marketing is a wide term. By wide I mean it can mean many things to many brands and marketers as well.
The reason why you shall find tons of content marketing strategy framework on the web.

Let me list down some handpicked content marketing strategy for you that I use for my clients as well.

One of the strategies I suggest everyone who is new to content marketing is to develop ‘the core content strategy statement’.

This statement includes the business goals, target audience, and audience needs all in one sentence. Developing a core content strategy statement will help the whole team to stay in line with the brand and its content marketing objectives.

Then the content team can start brainstorming on the ideas and make a content plan further keeping this core content strategy statement in mind.

Create a brand guidelines document

Suppose you wish to change the content marketing agency your brand is working with for some reason and give it to a new one. A new agency means a new content team.

Does that mean the brand voice changes? How do you make the new team understand the brand’s personality?

The answer is a brand guidelines document made by branding & marketing experts.

A brand guidelines document lists the dimensions of your brand personality and the target user personas, so everyone knows exactly who the target audience is. Some of the dimensions of brand personality by ‘Trendjackers’ is shown below.

Define some of these attributes that match your brand personality so your content team very well understands the personality of your brand and creates and distributes content accordingly.

Say for example Zomato can associate the brand with ‘Excitement’ as they portray a young, cool and trendy image of the brand with the type of communication they leverage on their social handles.

Check out your favorite brand Zomato’s brand guidelines here.

While there are no defined steps to a content marketing strategy, it all depends on the brand that is doing it. However, all these strategies have something in common.

Think of content marketing strategy as an outline of your key business needs, your audience needs and a detailed plan of how will you address that with content.

Let me give you these 5 points I’ve found out to be common in all the content marketing strategies:

⦁ Purpose and goals: Why are you creating content and in what way it is valuable to your audience
⦁ Audience: Who are you creating content for and how it is going to benefit them
⦁ Story: Define specific, unique, and valuable content ideas you will build your content assets around
⦁ Process: How do you plan to manage and distribute the right content to the right audience
⦁ Measure: What are the key performance indicators or the KPI’s you’ll track to gauge the performance and optimize your content marketing efforts

Some of the tips by content marketing institute itself to consider while creating a content marketing strategy

You need to determine the most effective way to reach out to the audience with your story. Then keep on measuring the results and optimizing your strategy.

Many people ask me what good content is all about. And my reply to them is that the content is good when people want to read it. However, it is great if people are willing to pay to read it.
Want to know examples of great content? Go back and think about things you have paid to see, experience or read recently.

If you have watched the ‘Lego’ movie this year you’d probably become the victim of one of the greatest content marketing to date. Oh, you think they made a movie to sell movie passes?
Think again. It was a witty 100-minute commercial of the toy brand that you’ve paid to watch.

You may not have the budget to make a film for your brand but hey you can still provide your audience valuable and relevant information in the formats they consume easily.

In the world with so much noise and the endless platforms to reach out to the audience, the strategies you can use to attract people are as varied as the animals in the jungle.

Hubspot has listed down the content formats that you put to use in your content marketing strategy.

While you can see that there are tons of options out there you don’t need to confuse yourself.
Our motto has to be only one. I.e. driving revenue to the brand using great content.

To understand more about how you can do it for your brand, you first need to understand the origin of content marketing and why it is so popular today.

Origin

What would your answer be, if I ask you how old do you think content marketing is?
I personally used to think content marketing has its roots in the 20th century (1900-2000) and I was very wrong about it.

According to the content marketing institute itself, the first content marketing dates back to 1732 when a man by the name Benjamin Franklin published his first version of annual ‘Poor Richard’s Almanack’.

Do you think he did just to show-off his writing skills?
The main motto behind starting this annual publishing was to let people know about the new printing business that he had started.

He figured out the effective way to this is to publish his own almanac and to encourage readers to publish their versions.

That was almost 300 years ago. Well, I never thought of content marketing to have an origin 300 years ago. And I bet most of you did not know this either.

For many, content marketing seems to be a hip and trendy modern-day practice. However, though the term is new, the practice isn’t.

The big green tractors brand ‘John Deere’ adopted content marketing in 1895 with its own lifestyle magazine for farmers called ‘The Furrow’

Shooting up sales was one of the many byproducts of the content marketing strategy used by ‘John Deere’. Have a look at it.

Source

As you can see in the bottom left the magazine was complimentary. The company has understood the heart of content marketing that is,

‘What goes around comes around’

Putting into simple words, if you create valuable content for the audience they will like it, share it and probably even buy it.

Another company that adopted content marketing early was ‘Jell-O’
In 1904 Jell-O decided to put out a recipe book for its target audience that included ways to make desserts.

Source – https://www.searchenginejournal.com/evolution-content-marketing/202478/#close

Well, of course, all the recipes, had Jell-O in it. This became the major flip for the company giving them massively sales as they knew for the fact that, people do not know what to do with Jell-O, an awkward jelly substance.

The examples of content marketing history can go on and on. Though the practice is old, the formula for a great content marketing strategy is the same:
⦁ Define your audience
⦁ What you wish to achieve
⦁ How will you promote it

Let me show you what the more modern great content looked like.

If you analyze this article it has 3 stages that make it great content.

⦁ Pinpoint on the pain
⦁ Agitate the pain
⦁ Solve their pain

This is a very simple yet effective way to make your content drive results. You can apply this in your email copies and sales copies, presentation and reports as well.
Remember this men’s fairness cream ad commercial that cam in 2012 when the men’s fairness cream was a new market filled with great potential?

‘Gora banna chahte ho?’ – Pinpoint the pain
‘Mard ho kar ladkiyo wali fairness cream lagate ho?’ – Agitation
‘Presenting Emami Fair & Handsome for men..’ – Solution

Now you understand, content marketing has come a long way since centuries. One of the examples of modern content marketing is Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” series on Youtube.

Here is a video where they try to blend an iPhone. You gotta see it to believe it.

Even the whole of the Marvel Avengers is a content marketing game which had started in 1963 with the first release of their comic issue. This is almost 57 years ago.

https://www.marvel.com/comics/issue/6951/avengers_1963_1

They have portrayed such a powerful background story and the presentation of each character, the whole world is a fan of it till date. Starting with comics to animes to games now movies, series, and whatnot.

They’ve just been refreshing the characters with some new looks and introduced some new ones to spark more engagement. You guys know it better than I do.

Content marketing does a great job getting the attention of the target audience who care about your product and might even want to buy them.

Why content marketing?

Okay, content marketing is the fad and has been used by a business for hundreds of years.

But does your brand need content marketing?

What worked hundreds of years ago might not necessarily work today. You cannot say that content marketing is right for your business just because many B2B and B2C companies use it.

By the end of the section, you shall be in a position to answer whether it is the right fit for your business.

To find out let us look at some of the latest content marketing trends in 2020:

A study conducted by Hubspot shows that 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing.

Now think, why would 70% of marketers invest in content marketing?
Well probably because companies are finding value from content marketing.

Roughly 60% of marketers stated Content Marketing is ‘very important’ or ‘extremely important’ to their overall strategy.

Whether or not the content marketing strategy is working for a brand, they know the power of content marketing well. They are seeing the results, it’s just that it’s not up to their mark. They probably feel that they are doing okay, but they very well know that they can do better.

Why would ‘creating more engaging content’ be a top priority of 73% B2C content creators?
Well because the internet today is very noisy and there is a lot of buzz around everything in the market.

This also means that the companies are struggling to produce engaging content that makes them stand out in the crowd. You can either consider this as a reason to not start with your content marketing efforts or understand that if so many brands are on to this, it definitely drives value. All you need is to do is invest time efforts and energy into it.

With this our speculation of companies struggling for engaging content solidifies. Many companies today are lacking the engagement factor in the content being too pushy to sell rather than providing value to customers.

Another struggle that companies face is to measure the effectiveness and ROI of content marketing efforts.

Paid advertising is the most overrated marketing tactic followed by social media organic.

Can you think of why paid marketing is the overrated marketing tactic?

Because many brands are more and more relying on paid marketing to increase their reach. Why? Because their content doesn’t get organic reach. This is the problem of most of the startups in digital space if not all.

This points out to a solution to implementing a content marketing strategy which will make the content valuable and engaging that you won’t have to rely on paid marketing alone to boost its reach.

Again to support the statement that ‘content marketing is working for many brands’, watch this.

Growing SEO and Organic presence are the top priorities followed by blog content creation. This shows how many companies today are emphasizing on content marketing.

By now you might have understood that ‘content marketing’ is a need for today’s brand. Whether you are a poultry farm, a resort, a tractor company or a blender brand, there are strategies and ways to benefit your ROI.

For every search you do on Google, millions of pages present themselves but you can see only the top 10. The landscape of content marketing is as competitive as it can be with brands pouring in thousands of dollars to get their content seen.

So, how can you stand above all other online noise? We’re going to discuss the same in the next section.

Content mapped to consumer funnel

This model of consumer funnel by CoSchedule will help you understand mapping better.

Let me give you a quick example to explain this:

Stage 1: Unaware
Search Keyword: My back pains while working on desktop
Action: Makes a search – User reads a few articles and finds out that the pain lies in the chair.

Stage 2: Pain Aware
Search Keyword: Chair for back pain
Action: Makes a search – User reads a few articles and finds that the solution to this is ‘Rolling chairs with back support’

Stage 3: Solution Aware
Search Keyword: Rolling chairs with back support brands
Action: User conducts research and finds out that ABC company chairs are the best and comes with cozy back support.

Stage 4: Product Aware (Consideration Phase)
Search Keyword: ABC brand rolling chairs with back support
Action: Visits ABC brand’s website,browse through options

Stage 5: Most Aware (Purchase Phase)
Search Keyword: Buy ABC rolling chairs with back support
Action: Visits website and makes a purchase of the chair.

Interesting. Isn’t it?

Now, what do we mean by mapping content to consumer funnel?

Content mapping is a process where we decide the most apt content for a person at any stage in the consumer funnel. If you really think that same content should work throughout the funnel, you are wrong.

A detailed list on the type of keywords used by the audience while on different stages of funnel is shown below. You can relate it to your search and buying journey as well.

So what different forms of content work on each phase of consumer funnel?

Awareness Phase –
This includes all the top of funnel phases unless the person becomes product aware and enters the consideration phase. The content that you put out has to make the audience believe that, while they can solve the problem themselves, your product would make it easier.

Some of the best content formats recommended for Awareness phase are:

⦁ Blog posts
⦁ Podcasts
⦁ Infographics
⦁ Social media posts
⦁ Videos
⦁ Microsites
⦁ Guides

While the recommended formats throughout the Awareness phase remain the same, the message that you portray will not be the same. Remember that the content that you will publish in each stage has a motto to drive the audience correctly to the next stage of consumer funnel.

Consideration Phase –
Once the people become aware about the brand they enter the consideration phase. At this phase the audience is actively thinking about your brand as a best solution to his problem.

The person might also be considering one of your competitive brands also along with yours.
What would you do?
Simple. Make content to convince him about the superiority of your brand and its offerings and why you are a good choice over your competitors.

Some of the best content formats recommended for Consideration phase are:

⦁ Case studies
⦁ Product Trials
⦁ Demos
⦁ Product video
⦁ White papers
⦁ Product Comparisons

Purchase Phase –
This is the last phase of consumer funnel where your prospect is ready to make a purchase.
Probably they are making a search with their cards out of the wallet. All you need to do here is to give a push or nudge towards conversion.

Some of the best content formats recommended for Consideration phase are:

⦁ Sales page
⦁ Offers to create urgency
⦁ Webinars
⦁ Customer stories
⦁ Pricing pages
⦁ Testimonials
⦁ Reviews