WORKWEEK

I’ve spent my first week back at work catching up with the team, and doing an audit––what is working for us now, and what are our competitors doing. It is 2025 planning season after all. 

I’ve audited 6 different competitors, looking at their content types, formats, and UX. One thing is incredibly clear: written content alone is not enough. There are 4 primary content types coming through across most of the larger brand content plays I’m seeing. Here is what those are:

1. Multimedia content: 

These are usually podcasts, videos, and newsletters. All of them heavily branded, heavily promoted, and appearing as extensions of the company itself. This is the “media company” vibes folks have been talking about all over LinkedIn. Really though, it’s a brand play to grow awareness for their out-of-market audience and earn their spot in the consideration set when that out-of-market audience moves in-market. 

This is typically top of funnel content. 

2. SEO content: 

SEO isn’t dead––but it is changing. Top of funnel SEO is harder to win these days (and has been for a while). Middle and lower funnel SEO is crucial for brands. Problem-aware prospects will search for answers to questions and they will continue to do so through the evaluation stage. You need to show up when they do that. This is blogs. This is tools. This is glossaries. This is also about UX and information architecture. 

This is typically middle of funnel content. 

3. Original content:

Original content is what brands are using in their campaigns. These are highly produced and branded assets that typically live behind a gate (but not always). Think online conferences, data reports, benchmarks, trends. This is where brands are turning the audiences they’re building in multimedia and SEO content into leads, and building their prospect list. From there, you can work on reducing time to close. 

This is usually bottom of funnel content (at least for lead gen, not necessarily conversion to customer). 

4. Product-focused content: 

Product-focused content isn’t always produced by content marketing or strategy teams. Your customer education team is often focused here, but this extends into marketing content, too. It includes case studies, product news, landing pages, education content, and help center content. This is a crucial content area for prospects in the evaluation and onboarding stage, and for long-term customer health, growth and retention. 

Wrapping it all up 

As you build your FY25 strategy, build each of these content types into your plan. And remember: these are not necessarily mutually exclusive. You can repurpose many of these types of content for another type. 

Whatever you do––be thoughtful about the funnel you build and where you allocate you and your team’s time. 

You need to prime your out-of-market audience if you want to end up in the consideration set from the get go. You also need to build a funnel for those folks who will research everything themselves, before they ever submit their email to your company (which is why you need to show up on Google). And finally, you need high-quality value exchange that builds your lists and gets you data to prove that content drives revenue, ideally faster than if a prospect didn’t consume it.