A Complete Guide to Content Marketing in 2024

Content marketing gets people on your side. By consistently meeting audiences where they are with helpful info, it boosts visibility, establishes your brand’s authority long-term, and generates a steady stream of leads and conversions.

After all, when you provide folks with genuinely insightful content that deals with their pain points and anticipates their questions, you build the kind of goodwill that’s hard to accomplish via ads or cold outreach. Associating yourself with clarity and reassurance in your target audience’s minds is a surefire way to create real trust.

Add some good content marketing software to the mix and you’ve got an efficient, streamlined way of reaching those marketing and business goals of yours.

If you’re just getting started, I’ll guide you through everything you need to know. I’ll cover what content marketing is, how it works, and how to get started in 12 comprehensive steps.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a form of advertising that builds long-term brand loyalty by offering people useful information. It falls under inbound marketing, a collection of business tactics organized around offering audiences value upfront instead of pestering them with ads. Ultimately, it uses a wide variety of formats to establish brands as industry experts.

Why is content marketing important?

An effective content marketing strategy boosts your business in multiple ways and generally puts you on the map as a brand that truly has something to say. Strategize with empathy for your users and you’ll see the rewards pouring in. Here are some of the main benefits of well-made marketing content:

Increase brand awareness and visibility

As you publish quality content, you increase the chance that potential customers will discover you.

If your content is optimized well for SEO, you can also achieve high rankings in popular search engines which leads to more organic traffic to your website.

It’s worth promoting your content to maximize its impact. For example, you can try social media platforms, forums that are relevant to your niche, and paid ads.

Many marketing tactics ultimately come down to building awareness and online visibility. However, content marketing leans more towards developing trust in your brand for long-term benefits.

Establish trust and authority

When you wield the (often) long-form nature of content marketing, people do more than simply know you exist. They incorporate the info you provide into their processes, then return for more on related topics.

You become top of mind whenever they have a question that needs an answer or a problem that needs solving.

The more you show up in their bookmarks, the more you know your brand is building something sustainable.

If folks on your team are comfortable with holding more public-facing roles, it’s worth positioning them as thought leaders on subjects they excel at. This goes beyond humanizing a brand (though that’s definitely worth a lot). It also means that you showcase the individual expertise that’s at play behind the scenes. Once again, building trust.

Build a relationship with your customers

Offering help and useful advice builds relationships IRL, and the same applies to brands.

The transparency you display when high-quality content reflects people’s lived experiences goes a long way when it comes to establishing a connection.

And if you keep things interactive with social media engagement and good community management, you’ll find that the reciprocal nature of human behavior works in your favor.

Customer loyalty comes more naturally when a brand answers questions in a nurturing way. People will not simply remember and return but also recommend your service to others.

After all, who is it that we remember? Those who are there for us.

Give people what they want

The ROI of outbound marketing has been on the decline for a long time.

Ask anyone around you how they feel about ads and you’re unlikely to get a positive answer, even if you happen to ask an expert or someone in the industry.

Digital ads especially keep getting more annoying and intrusive, so it’s no wonder that ad blockers have become par for the course.

People’s relationship with outbound marketing tactics versus inbound marketing pretty much reflects our relationship with advice. Unsolicited advice from a stranger is often rude and is easily perceived as criticism.

Solicited advice, though? Answer that query well and you’re no longer talking to a stranger.

When your content is informative and educational, when you provide real answers and resolutions to problems people are facing, that’s when folks genuinely appreciate your output.

Generate more leads and conversions

It’s a given that people prefer to buy from those they know, like, and trust.

Not only do these verbs reflect the stages of the classic marketing funnel, but cultivating each one with the right type of content will deepen your relationship with your target audience.

Many content formats work with a mix (aiming to be known, liked, and trusted at the same time, even if not in equal measure). But the more you’re aware of the emotional response a specific piece aims for, the more you can calibrate your approach and maximize its impact.

All of this works in your favor when it comes to generating both leads and conversions. A successful content marketing strategy boosts both these metrics consistently and cost-effectively.

How content marketing works

The marketing funnel can be split into multiple stages, depending on the level of detail you want to work with. But the three below are essential. Your goal with content marketing is to guide potential customers through these stages, while preemptively addressing their questions and answering their search queries upfront.

Awareness stage

In the awareness stage, aka top-of-funnel or TOFU, people realize they have a problem and they start looking for specific solutions. This might be the first time users interact with your brand, so establishing authority in a smooth, natural way is as important as always.

Well-made educational and informative content is the way to go. Create content on topics that are relevant to your brand, then preemptively address the most common pain points, challenges, and questions folks might have about those topics.

Visual content also works well at the awareness stage. Consider our good friend the infographic. It’s easily repurposed across social media channels, blog posts, and paid advertising, but its biggest perks are that it captures attention and puts people’s issues in context.

The more you help folks understand that they’re not alone in the struggles they face, the more likely they are to feel drawn toward your brand.

Consideration stage

In the middle-of-funnel or MOFU stage, aka the consideration stage, the user has some idea of what brands or products might help with their issue and they’re comparing possible versions.

They’re aware of your general industry and category, but this is where you need to persuade them that your specific brand is the best choice, all via helpful info.

How-to guides are a great fit here. Especially if you can show how to overcome a particular problem, or achieve a certain goal more easily, in a way that features your brand’s offering.

However, you need to make sure you create content that has a logical throughline. Only position your product or service as a helpful solution if there is a direct connection to the pain point being addressed.

Newsletters are another great choice for this stage. All of your other useful content can be included in an email sequence, and you can nurture people’s trust as time passes. Just remember to be respectful of their inbox and serve up real value.

Decision stage

In the decision stage or bottom-of-funnel aka BOFU, people likely have a shortlist of options and are almost ready to click that “Buy now” button. Content marketing at this stage needs to focus on bringing home the idea that a purchase will truly solve the problem, closing the deal.

This is when it’s a good idea to focus on details. Create content that shows your brand or product in context and let it shine. Success stories, customer testimonials, and content that emphasize your expertise, plus the differentiating benefits of your product, are always good options.

Case studies work wonders here. Walk people through the most important ways your brand solves issues, show the positive impact you’ve already had on the lives of people in similar positions, and highlight exactly how your offering made a difference. The more vivid the picture of what things can look like after a purchase, the more people are likely to get on board.

10 popular types of content marketing

Time for a tour of some of the most impactful types of marketing content.

The way you mix and match them should be guided by your product/service. You should choose the formats that can put its top features in the best possible light.

Also, consider the strengths of your content marketing team and you’ll narrow the list down to a few options that pack a lot of punch.

1. Blog posts

It’s no wonder blog posts top a lot of lists when it comes to content marketing formats. Their versatility is unparalleled. First off, they build your authority and position your brand as generally knowledgeable and helpful.

Then, if you optimize for search engines and your keywords are on point, they drive more traffic to your website. In turn, this helps generate more leads. And over time, brand awareness increases.

For example, Selah Creative Co. is an independent creative studio that constantly puts out easily digestible blog posts. They simplify and demystify widely-used marketing terms in a way that’s straightforward and helpful.

The blog post is an underrated source for social media marketing content too. You can use a single post as a source of inspiration for multiple pieces of social media content. Always look for ways to repurpose relevant and compelling content.

You can also explore content syndication as a way to expand the reach of your top-performing blog posts. That’s where you repost existing content on other digital publications, with a canonical link back to the original piece.

2. Social media posts

Engaging directly with your audience will always be valuable. Through your social media channels, you get clear insights on what matters to them and what moves them into action.

Start by generating goodwill and creating strong communities around your pages. Then, you’ll find that it’s easier to drive traffic toward promotions, sales, or giveaways you might have going on.

When content marketing strategy and social media strategy are both rooted in a deep understanding of your audience’s interests, you can embark on brand building in a far more powerful way.

For example, Planable’s TikTok strategy includes posts that acknowledge the woes of social media jobs but also posts that poke a little fun at them.

@planableapp no comment 👀 #socialmedia #socialmediamanagement #socialmediamanager #workinsocial ♬ original sound – squadbymamamia

Social media is your best opportunity to experiment with interactive content and short-form visual content. It’s also fantastic for repurposing other assets from your content marketing strategy.

If you use a tool to schedule social media posts, you create social media content in batches. The right tools provide even more control over everything from content planning to distribution and analytics.

3. Web pages and landing pages

When creating web pages and landing pages for your website, treat them as forms of content with a very clear focus. Most landing pages lead to a single call to action and serve as a destination for website visitors who have clicked on an ad, a button in a newsletter, or a social media link.

They help you convert by generating leads and gathering demographic info about your audience. They’re also crucial for tracking website metrics that are important for your brand, including conversions but not limited to them.

Content marketers use them in a variety of situations, including showcasing a specific service, encouraging newsletter sign-ups, or promoting seasonal sales.

There are a few key things to think about when creating a landing page:

• How is your brand’s messaging and value proposition presented?
• Is it clear how the pain points of potential customers are addressed?
• Are you able to include social proof that encourages visitors to convert?

4. Video content

Video content holds a leading position in many brands’ content strategies. Its ability to hold viewers’ attention and truly spotlight a product/service is undeniable, so marketers often position it as hero content. While producing it definitely requires more effort compared to other formats, it engages viewers in a unique way.

You can harness the power of video in several impactful ways, such as:

• Product demos to highlight features or use cases
• How-to guides that help users troubleshoot specific issues
• Video podcasts with subject matter experts on relevant topics
• Interviews with the team to show behind-the-scenes goodness
• Video ads that target a particular pain point of potential customers
• Quick explainers to post on social media platforms and beyond

Short-form videos perform particularly well on social media. Just look at Instagram Reels and the rise of TikTok. Adding these to your online content marketing strategy could be a great way to show off your brand personality.

If you’re looking to schedule reels or TikToks, you can’t go wrong with a tool like Planable. Your videos are easily organized via the calendar and you can quickly repurpose them for other platforms.

5. Podcast episodes

The podcast industry has been growing steadily for years and it’s easy to see why.

High-quality content in audio form is portable in a way no other format is; people can easily integrate it into already very busy lives in a way that doesn’t intrude but enhances many activities.

Interview podcasts are a very popular route into podcasting. They can be done well, but you’ll need a great host and a strong vision. Many brands over-rely on guests to provide the content’s value. This can negatively impact quality.

If you want to explore podcasting as part of your content marketing strategy, try to focus on an approach where success is not dependent on external factors. Any guests or interviewees should add to the valuable information or entertainment you’re able to provide.

Explore the possibilities of documentary-style pods, shows that dig into the history of your industry, anthology pods, game shows, or pop culture criticism with a consistent crew on board (if appropriate to your brand).

For example, the speaker brand Sonos has a podcast that is, technically, interview-based (Object of Sound). But host Hanif Abdurraqib is such an insightful interviewer, and so astute at placing each subject in its historical and cultural context, that the quality is reliably high from episode to episode.

6. Infographics

Infographics are great for crystallizing large chunks of information into an easily digestible format.

The otherwise important but difficult-to-skim contents of, say, a market report, can really sing when good data visualization enters the chat. Whenever you’ve got something complex to communicate, this can be truly valuable content for your target audience.

Infographics can work as standalone content or enhance other formats, like blog posts, newsletters, or social media posts. They’re endlessly suited to repurposing as long as you keep an eye on platform-specific requirements.

Plus, here’s the kicker: if you’ve got good infographics on your website and other people embed them, their description will include a backlink, which is great from an SEO standpoint.

Here’s a neat little meta example: a B2B marketer made an infographic about the importance of infographics.

7. Newsletters

For every content marketing goal, there’s a newsletter strategy to match it. The key is to come up with a concept that your target audience would want to subscribe to.

Once you have that, newsletters are a fantastic way of building a community around relevant content, delivered in your brand voice. It’s an extremely powerful content marketing tactic that allows you to deliver content directly to potential customers who want to hear from you.

Just make sure you measure everything and extract the most important audience insights.

Beyond newsletters, email marketing helps you reach various segments of your audience in a quick, versatile way. You can match email blasts to stages of the sales funnel, generate new leads, or nurture existing ones. You may even give someone that final little nudge to complete a purchase.

One of the best displays of email marketing I’ve ever been fortunate enough to receive in my inbox is from Sheryl at The Creative Life.

To market herself as a coach for creatives, she designed a ten-day course that helps put any creative person’s goals into perspective. It’s absolutely unmissable, which is what we should always be aiming for as content marketers.

8. Ebooks and white papers

Ebooks and whitepapers are popular, long-form lead magnets in B2B online content marketing strategies.

Pack them with useful information, original data, and insightful graphics. Make sure you’re providing actual value, and it will be worth it for people to leave you their email addresses.

Once they’ve entered your CRM database, you get the chance to nurture them with other useful content as they move through your sales process.

Many experienced creatives out there use white papers as a way of generating leads and awareness for themselves, but enterprise-level businesses also benefit from the same practice. These formats can be a boon, no matter the size of your company.

For example, take this complete e-book from Planable on the future of content marketing teams. It’s hard to reframe a whole conversation within the space a social media post affords. Sometimes a blog post isn’t enough either. White papers and e-books help you make your case thoroughly.

9. Case studies and success stories

One thing is crucial for these formats: make sure you paint a vivid picture. The audience needs to be able to visualize themselves using your product/service, but also understand how it’s going to fit within the larger picture of their lives.

When you add success stories and case studies to your content marketing strategy, you address people’s skepticism upfront. This gives you the chance to eliminate the final barriers standing in front of a purchase.

Planable’s Customers page is full of video case studies that show how the tool works for different teams. Focus on benefits as much as you focus on features and your brand’s offering will be hard to refuse.

10. User-generated content

In addition to word of mouth, which is always a benefit, one of the main perks of user-generated content is that it provides social proof. Folks get to see your product/service out in the wild — not as part of a glossy company video, but as part of someone’s real life.

It’s great when users just post photos of your product or feature it in a video. But you get more focused user-generated content when you incentivize it on purpose.

Make sure there’s a small prize for the best entries, create a hashtag that can make them easily searchable, and visualize the content you want to share before putting out the call.

All sorts of businesses can benefit from this type of content. For example, travel brands are a perfect candidate to add UGC into their content marketing efforts. Incentivize people to post compelling visuals from a specific destination, then reshare the user-generated content to attract new customers.

How to get started with content marketing in 12 steps

Creating content that really strikes a chord with people is a skill worth calibrating. The better you understand the complexity of folks’ actual experiences, the more you’ll be able to welcome them to your brand universe in a way that builds long-term loyalty.

If you’re not sure how to get started, check out the 12 steps below for a thorough look at cooking up great content marketing strategies.

1. Know your target audience

The goal of content marketing is, in its simplest form, to create content tailored to your target audience.

That’s why this isn’t just the first step, it’s also the most important.

An in-depth understanding of your audience is the sturdiest foundation for a successful content marketing strategy. Invest in fully grasping their pain points, challenges, and desires. Draw up detailed psychographic profiles that connect the dots between preferred platforms and how folks use tech, all the way to interests and values.

There can often be a disconnect between how audience personas are shown in PowerPoint presentations and how actual people live their lives. The more you work to close this gap, the more powerful relationships your brand will be able to build.

This is also not a one-and-done task. Think of understanding your audience as a constant process rather than a single burst of research in the beginning.

As your strategy gets implemented and you begin to see results, use analytics tools to gain even more insights. Refine your understanding, then use that to feed content creation ideas within your content marketing strategy.

2. Understand why your brand or product matters

Next, it’s time to explore your brand and product/service from every possible angle.

Connect the best features to real pain points and challenges your audience is facing. Make sure you know why they should care, at every single point of the customer journey. Once these connections are clear, consider how your specific brand goes beyond what the competition is doing.

Use any insights you gain during this process to crystallize your brand’s messaging and value proposition.

When your brand positioning is well-aligned with the issues your target audience is facing, your content marketing efforts will have a much greater chance of success.

3. Set your strategic goals

Setting strategic goals crystallizes your approach to content marketing. It helps you know where you’re going, what formats you’re going to use, and who you need on your team. Most importantly, you’ll know what to measure.

No content strategy is created the same. That’s because each brand has its own target audience and the buyer’s journey differs from industry to industry, and even from product to product.

For example, a B2B tech company might focus on building long-term relationships with key decision-makers in specific companies. However, a soda drinks company is more likely to have an immediate focus, such as tempting consumers to try a newly launched flavor.

The contrast in focus would result in a completely different content marketing strategy within each of these companies. Their goals and approaches would be polar opposites.

Keep in mind how your target audience, your product or service, and its buying cycle should shape the goals you set for your own content marketing strategy.

Here are a few example goals to consider:

• Brand authority
• Brand awareness
• Demand generation
• Lead generation
• Organic traffic growth
• Improved search rankings
• Email subscriber list growth
• Increase conversion rates
• Customer loyalty
• Attracting talent

4. Determine which KPIs to track

Keeping track of key performance indicators tells you how close you are to the content marketing goals you’ve set. Depending on your chosen objectives, you’ll prioritize different metrics over others.

For example, the B2B tech company we were discussing above might look at SERP rankings and organic traffic as a measure of their content’s SEO performance, as well as longer-term sales metrics like how the average deal size increases over time. On the other hand, the soda drinks company might track the performance of specific social media campaigns and how they affect seasonal sales volumes.

Choose to track the content marketing KPIs that align with the strategic goals you set.

Here are some common KPIs to consider:

• Reach
• Engagement
• Clickthrough rate
• Traffic (organic vs paid)
• Conversion rate
• Leads

5. Decide what your content marketing budget is

It’s difficult to make content-related decisions without an idea of how much you have to spend. Take time to define your content marketing budget, whether it’s a set sum or a percentage of your quarterly marketing budget.

Research costs and try to form an idea of what you can realistically produce with what you have available. Remember, you don’t need to be doing everything. You just need to be doing a few things really well.

To start, you could even focus on a single output for a single channel. Master the content workflow, get buy-in to expand, and then introduce something new.

6. Choose which types of content you will produce

At the beginning of this list, we talked about how connecting the dots between your product’s best features and your audience’s main challenges will help you decide on content formats. This is the point where you narrow down the list.

Allow your content marketing goals to inform your choice of formats, and avoid the pitfall of trying to do everything at once. The energy you’d spend on struggling to produce six types of content is better spent when focusing on two or three of much higher quality.

Once your production and distribution have a good rhythm going, you can always expand to new formats.

And don’t forget to repurpose! So much info is well-suited for different mediums, so relying on a strong backlog can make breaking into new areas much more efficient.

7. Select your main distribution channels

It’s crucial for your content marketing strategy to map out where you plan to distribute your content.

You want to distribute in the places where your audience hangs out the most. And in a way that reflects their behaviors on these platforms.

It’s always a good idea to focus on building owned channels (your website, blog, email list, and social media profiles).

Once you feel you’ve got a good handle on producing high-quality content in these areas, you can take on earned and paid channels (guest posting, guest podcasting, influencer marketing, media outreach, etc.).

The point is not to cover as many channels as possible but to direct your energy to the places with the best chances of reaching your audience effectively.

Many a content marketer has chosen a mix of platforms, only to discover that users’ actual behavior requires a slightly different blend. This is part of the process. You measure and adjust.

The right marketing planning software can keep your team’s efforts focused on the platforms that deliver the most impact.

8. Figure out your content schedule

At this point, you’re ready to nail down a content marketing schedule. It helps everyone on the team keep track of deliverables, deadlines, and publishing dates.

Your content schedule should include an overview of all publishing-related tasks, which is always handy, especially when planning out full campaigns.

Your best bet for a schedule that keeps everything on track is to build a marketing calendar. Collaboration tools like Planable make it easy to plan, produce, and publish multiple types of content from a single calendar, whether we’re talking about blogs, ads, or social media posts.

9. Equip your team with the best content marketing tools

It’s no secret how long it takes to do everything manually. By streamlining your content-related processes, content marketing tools help you save time and make the best of all the available resources.

Keep an eye out for what can be automated. Consider what kind of software would boost your team’s efforts the most, depending on the types of content you’ve chosen to produce:

• CMS platforms host your content and help you manage it
• SEO tools help you find keywords and generate more traffic
• Content planning tools streamline the implementation of your strategy
• Design tools up your game on the visual side
• Writing and optimization tools maximize the impact of each piece

This is another element of your content marketing strategy that’s likely to change over time as you refine it. You may replace a tool with something better later on, or realize you have a bottleneck at a certain stage in your content marketing workflow.

You can always introduce or retire tools as you see fit, according to your team’s needs.

10. Document your content marketing strategy and processes

It’s important to have a knowledge database with detailed processes for every step of your content marketing production workflows.

It helps keep present team members focused and makes it way easier to onboard new ones. Most importantly, so much time is saved when people don’t have to second-guess things or struggle with the same pitfalls over and over.

Good documentation leads to well-produced, genuinely helpful content. And while it’s crucial to have everyone on the same page when it comes to implementation, remember that documentation is, in a way, a living, breathing thing. It should be tweaked over time depending on what you measure and learn.

Consider documenting the following as part of your content marketing strategy:

• Strategy development
• Content planning process
• Content creation process
• Review and approval process
• SEO optimization workflow
• Distribution methods
• Reporting and analytics

11. Start producing amazing content

You’re here! It’s clear what your goals are, who you’re talking to, and who’s in charge of every step of content development. Now you’re ready to start creating content.

But how can you ensure consistent high-quality levels?

Keep a handy checklist close by to make sure each individual piece of content is the best it can be. For example:

1. Does it deliver true value to the target audience?
2. Does it feature original data, expertise, or a fresh perspective?
3. Is it well-researched, well-written, and well-designed?
4. Is it optimized for SEO?

For best results, always use compassion as a lens. Consider if certain portions of a piece could be tweaked to be even more empathetic towards the reader, and you’re well on your way to nurturing trust.

Having content approval workflow can help make sure everything gets a friendly review, ensuring each piece connects with your audience in the best way possible.

12. Analyze results and measure progress toward your goals

It’s essential to track the performance of your content marketing efforts. It tells you if your chosen tactics, formats, and distribution channels are doing their jobs. It also clarifies how close you are to your goals, all with the help of the KPIs you decided on in the beginning.

Most importantly, analytics and reporting bring out the juicy insights that inform strategy optimization. The more you adjust your approach depending on relevant data, the more you can rest assured that your team’s energy is being used in the best possible way.

Refine and improve your content marketing efforts as you go. Adjust to new trends, capitalize on opportunities, and learn from past performance.

Time to start content marketing like a pro

A well-rounded content marketing strategy is a great foundation from which you can build towards wider business goals. Especially when paired with tactical campaigns, it establishes a constant flow of goodwill towards your brand.

Planable helps to bring out the best in your whole team through collaboration. Everyone benefits when content management is simple, stress-free, and downright inspiring. Try it out and schedule 50 social media posts for free when you sign up!