Ultimate Guide to Developing a Content Strategy (2025)

Content strategy development has become more crucial than ever in today’s dynamic marketing landscape.

Content marketing is dead. Or so people thought in 2024. 

Thankfully, as of 2024, more than 90% of all organizations are using content to market their products and services. 

It’s a funny old game, content marketing: it has died and been reborn many times. 

And there’s a very good reason why: it costs much less than advertising or influencer marketing and delivers more clicks, leads, traffic, and sales. 

But it’s also true that AI and video content have disrupted the trend of traditional content marketing. 88% of marketers say they have started using AI, while 61% say they’ll produce more video content in 2025.

So, what does it take to build the ultimate content strategy in 2025?

We’re here to tell you just that in this ultimate guide to content strategy development…let’s dive in and find out! 

The Importance of Content Marketing in 2025

In 2024, we witnessed a vital shift in the world of content marketing. 

It all started with Google introducing AI Overviews on the SERP (formerly Search Generative Experience), and many websites suffered a drop in their traffic and click-through rates. 

Plus, SEO research suggested that even top-ranking websites may not get into Google’s AI overview section.

While this led to some initial concerns and claims of the death of content marketing, these rumors were short-lived. Content marketing is still alive and well; in fact, more than 90% of websites use content as the primary means of marketing their products and services.

There are solid and practical reasons behind this:

1. Content Is Permanent

The primary reason why most organizations use content marketing is that content is permanent. 

Let’s compare it to the traditional form of marketing: advertisement.

An advertising campaign is both expensive and time-bound. Your best shot is to display targeted ads to your prospects wherever they hang out. This could be LinkedIn ads, banner ads or even TV ads. 

But your prospects may miss the ads, or worse; your ads get lost among several others in the same space! The return on investment isn’t guaranteed…

Unlike ads, your content never disappears: it will always be up on your website, and you can refresh it whenever you want. 
Plus, your prospects can access your content whenever they want. It’s available at their convenience. While your prospects may not be able to see an ad whenever they want, your content will be at their fingertips exactly when they search for it!

2. Brand Awareness

Good content builds brand awareness and projects your enterprise as a leading voice in your industry. Of course, this is also the case with ads, affiliates or one-to-one marketing. 

However, content costs much less compared to other methods of marketing and promises a higher average ROI. 

Content thus helps you generate awareness in a cost effective way and at a large scale.

3. Authority and Trust

A content strategy also has two more crucial benefits: it helps you educate your audience and, therefore, positions your company as an authority in your segment.

Even if prospects don’t end up doing business with you, they’ll still trust your brand to answer their burning questions. They’ll turn to your brand before making any buying decisions.

This has positive knock-on effects in the form of a higher domain authority, more traffic, and therefore more conversions. 

So, how can you create a winning content strategy that turns heads, educates prospects and draws in traffic? Let’s find out…

Prerequisites to a Killer Content Strategy

In our experience, every good content strategy is built on a solid foundation of thorough market research. Without this prerequisite, your content strategy may not deliver the results you want.

In one word, this prerequisite is market research. However, we’ve noticed that breaking it down into three parts makes it more manageable and practical:

1. Determine Where Your Target Audience Hangs Out

Content is only useful if it reaches your audience. Otherwise, it just lies there, gathering digital dust and blocking data space.

So, the first step to content market research is to understand where your audience gathers. 

Ask and answer these two questions to understand your audience:

• What Platform(s) Do Your Prospects Use? 

If you’re trying to reach a B2B audience, the answer might be LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), or even Reddit. Plus, you don’t want to miss out on industry conferences and offline events. And don’t forget review platforms like G2 and Capterra if you’re pitching a SaaS product!
If your target market is a younger demographic, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube could be your go-to platforms. After all, the younger generation consumes content differently…

The point is: where your audience hangs out will determine the nature of your content.

• How Much Average Time They Spend There?

The other question is about how much time you have to speak with and convince your target audience. 

For instance, the average person spends 143 minutes on social media. On the other hand, the average B2B buyer visits up to 12 websites before making a purchase. 

This will give you a target to aim at when you’re creating content: you must make 90-second videos or build a website that ranks within the top 9 results on the SERP. 

2. Analyze the Competition

Once you know where your target audience hangs out, it’s time to find out what the competition is up to. Here’s how you can analyze your competition’s moves: 

• How Frequently Do They Publish Content?

If you want your content to be better than the competition’s, you must first match their frequency of posting. 

If they’re posting 5 blogs a week, you must post 5 or more. If they’re releasing a reel a day, you’ve gotta do better. If they’re making 20 posts a week, that’s the number to beat. 

The idea is not to compete for the sake of competing; it’s to establish a web of information as expansive as your competition’s. 

• What Keywords Do They Cover?

Keywords are bridges to your customers’ thoughts: it’s how they express their pain points and search for solutions.

If your competitor is targeting a specific keyword, it means they’ve spotted a trend in the customer’s behavior. To stay relevant and overtake them, you must write a blog that outranks for the same keyword.

• What Channels Do They Use?

You know the old adage: keep your friends closer, enemies closer. Well, the same is true for content marketing. If your competition is out there posting on LinkedIn or creating Instagram posts, you must either match them or concede that ground permanently. 

We suggest that you keep a detailed profile of your competition’s content map. It will help you develop your own! 

• Understand Your Product

The last step in the market research process is to understand your product or service. 

If it’s a SaaS offering, you know that customers will visit review websites, look for product demos and want a guide on how your product works. They might also want to understand how it compares to competitors. The goal is to create content that matches these requirements. 

If you’re operating in the F&B segment, celebrity endorsements and influencer content can go a long way in boosting your brand image. 

Consider these questions:

• How Can You Best Educate Customers? 
• What Channels Are Most Suited to Your Product/Service? 

While these points align closely with our discussion on understanding the target audience, your product can also tell you what marketing approach will work. 

For instance, if you’re pitching a SaaS product but your target audience isn’t watching videos, you might think that video content is a bad investment. But this could be a fatal mistake: research suggests that video content is helping B2B customers make better decisions! 

Sometimes, you must play the long game: disrupt the marketing scenario and get ahead of the game! 

But how can you get ahead of the game and build your own content strategy in 2025? Let’s find out! 

7 Steps For A Successful Content Strategy

With the prerequisites out of the way, you’re ready to build your winning content strategy. Here’s how you can do it in seven simple steps:

Step One – Establish Your Aims

Every strategy needs a goal. Your goal isn’t just an abstract aim; it will also tell you whether your strategy is working. 

Ask yourself: what is it that you want to achieve with your content: 

• Do you want to drive conversions? 
• Do you want to increase traffic by 50% every three months?

Your goals can also be closely related to your sales strategy. For instance, if your sales team has noticed that your prospects always download a white paper or a free ebook before buying your product, your goal might be to boost content downloads! 

On the other hand, let’s say the sales and marketing data suggests that people who visit your website at least twice in one week book a meeting. In this scenario, your goal should be to strategically position CTAs to drive more leads!

In short, the first step in developing a content strategy is to establish its primary goals. 

Step Two – Audit Existing Content

Once you’ve decided on the motivating factor of your content strategy, you should understand its historical trajectory. 

Let’s say your goal is to drive more white paper downloads. Ask yourself: 

• How well is your existing content structured so as to invite more downloads? 
• Do you have a clear meta title empathizing with a pain point and the corresponding web page positioning a white paper as the answer?

Through this analysis, you’ll be able to clearly see if there’s a connection between your future goals and past content.

Here are some other general questions we recommend you include in your content and website audit:

• What’s the frequency of your blog posts and/or social media posts?
• What has been the click-through rate (CTR) of your website and specific blogs? 
• Is there a historical correlation between content and traffic? 
• Which were your best-performing and worst-performing blogs or social media posts?
• What is the State of the SEO of your website?

A comprehensive content audit will help you understand exactly how your content strategy has worked in the past. 

It’ll help you avoid the same mistakes and refine what has worked! 

Step Three – Build a Content Repository

The next step in our process is to build a content repository.

A content repository is a list of topics around which you want to create content. Ideally, it’s an Excel sheet with several details, including: 

• Topic and keywords.
• Content type: blog post, image, video, podcast, etc.
• Pain points that the blog is addressing.
• Length of the blog, video or podcast.
• Internal linking details.
• Date by which it should be live.
• The cluster under which you’re considering a specific post/blog/video. 

To build such a comprehensive content repository, we recommend that you establish a way of performing keyword research and ranking keywords according to priority.

We also suggest you differentiate between long-tail and short-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are more useful for B2B or SaaS companies, whereas short-tail keywords are better for retail or D2C enterprises.

Step Four – Create and Publish a Content Calendar

After your content repository is full, it’s time to create a content calendar.

A content calendar is critical to the success of your content strategy. It eliminates chaos, promotes collaboration and informs your content creators of their responsibilities. 

Making a content calendar can also seem like an overwhelming task. Here’s how we recommend that you do it: 

• Make a calendar for every month with weekly schedules.
• Establish a series of steps the creators must follow before creating and publishing content.
• Ensure that your content is routed to all the channels for which it is made (website, LinkedIn, affiliate websites, X threads, and more.)

These three steps can make the process of creating and publishing content relatively simple. 

Step Five – Develop a Content Refreshment Plan

As we’ve discussed, one of content marketing’s strengths is that what you produce never goes away. But that doesn’t mean that your content will also remain equally popular. 

The same blog that was ranking first a month ago may now appear on the second page of the SERP. This could happen for many reasons, such as changes in Google’s algorithm or the blog becoming outdated due to new developments. 

However, lucky for us, content can be refreshed without losing a lot of its original meaning. So, we recommend that you develop a plan to refresh your content periodically to maintain and advance your position on the SERP.

In fact, 53% of content marketers said that updating content led to an increase in engagement!

 Here are some tactics we recommend: 

• Optimize existing content to reflect the latest information.
• Try to include images and videos in previous versions of your blogs.
• Change the format of your content to make it more user-friendly. 
• Revisit old blogs and include FAQs in them.

With these simple moves, you can exponentially increase the effectiveness of your old content without a massive investment.

Step Six – Set up KPIs for the Content Strategy

The ultimate aim of content marketing is to drive traffic, boost conversions and increase revenue. All of these are measurable criteria, and the ideal way of measuring them is to use Key Performance Indicators.

We suggest that you divide your KPIs into three parts:

• Consumption Metrics

Consumption metrics tell you how many people read, viewed, or engaged with your content.

Higher consumption metrics will directly correlate with an increase in website traffic, downloads and views. 

There are three important consumption metrics you should always measure: 

• Page Views: how many people are clicking on and opening your blogs, website or social media page. 
• Bounce Rates: how many people are leaving your website within a few seconds of clicking.
• Engagement Time: how long people spend on your website or social profile. 

• Conversation Metrics

Conversation metrics focus on measuring your social footprint. It refers to the number of shares, mentions and reactions your posts receive.

In our experience, these conversation metrics can be deceptive: a post with a lot of engagement can gather a lot of engagement but not lead to conversions.

If you’re facing this issue, it means that your content is good, but you most likely lack the CTAs to accompany it. We recommend sharpening your focus on CTAs and positioning them more strategically. 

• Conversion Metrics

Perhaps the most important, conversion metrics refer to how well your content is leading a prospect down a sales funnel. 

These metrics include white paper downloads, form fill-ups, and meeting bookings. They could also be ebook downloads, subscription signups or even orders. 

We recommend that you use a tool like Google Analytics to record and analyze these KPIs. 

Step Seven – Gather Feedback

The last step to building a winning content strategy is listening to your customers. Feedback can take the form of simple comments on posts, shares on social media or even reviews on websites like G2 or Capterra. 

We suggest that you actively engage with your audience and build a community of followers on social platforms. Communities will help you build trust with your customers and increase your footprint with prospects. 

However, when you’re considering changing your strategy based on feedback from customers, keep a few things in mind: 

• Don’t make huge long-term changes within a small timeframe: give your strategy some time to prove itself. 
• Bigger changes should be made to the method of creating content rather than individual pieces of content. This will yield better results. 
• Trust the strategy you’ve made for a given timeframe unless KPIs dictate otherwise.

With these seven steps, you’re ready to build your own content strategy and start your journey to the summit of your industry…but this guide would not be complete if we didn’t share with you some insider tips for successful content marketing. 

Let’s check them out! 

Six Secrets to Success – Best Practices

After over a decade in the growth marketing industry, we’ve perfected the art of separating the signal from the noise to build a winning content marketing strategy. Here’s what we’ve found that works: 

1. Learn how to involve AI

Whether it’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, AI is here to stay. In fact, over 85% of marketers have said that Generative AI will change the way they do business.

So, what should you do to adapt to this changing world order? We suggest you learn how to strategically involve AI in content creation. Rather than using it to write content or create videos wholesale, use it in more targeted ways, such as: 

• Keyword Research
• Editing and Modifying Existing Content
• Preparing Outlines
• Generating Content Suggestions

We also recommend that you help your content creators explore and adapt to the latest AI tools. This will help them reduce their efforts and focus on more strategic tasks that require human intervention. 

2. Focus on Mobile Optimization

Today, more than half of organic traffic is generated through mobile devices. In industries like Food & Beverage, nearly 75% of all searches are from mobile devices. 

So, if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website or a dedicated mobile application, you might be missing out on more than half of online traffic. 

But this could also be an opportunity for you: you could leverage the now-mature mobile technology to launch a sophisticated mobile website to capture your target audience’s attention.

3. Diversify TOFU, MOFU, BOFU Content

Every sales cycle involves three different stages: the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. In sales terms, these are called the TOFU, MOFU and BOFU stages. These stages reflect consumer behavior: people move from discovery to interest to purchase. 

The best content strategy reflects this trend: it apportions equal focus on content that educates, increases interests and drives a buying decision. 

We recommend that you take this approach when you’re building your content repository and schedule. For every TOFU blog or post, make sure you have one MOFU and BOFU blog or post ready to go with it.

4. Prepare for AI Overviews

As of December 2024, nearly 50% of all Google Searches showed an AI Overview. In the future, this is set to expand as AI gains increasing prominence and trust. 

We recommend that you start optimizing your content to rank within the AI Overview. But how can you guess what the AI Overview will consider rank-worthy? 

Here are a few tips and tricks to help you optimize your content: 

• Include author bios with every blog to establish trust and authority.
• Write FAQs for every blog.
• Use bullet points to make the content scannable.
• Keep sentences short for maximum readability.
• Use meta tags to tell Google’s AI what your image and content are about. 

With these simple guidelines, you can get ahead of the curve in the age of AI. 

5. Use Influencers to Boost Content

The state of marketing suggests that influencers are on the rise. But not just any influencers; small, niche influencers with dedicated followings. 

This is a great piece of news to B2B businesses. It means that thought leaders can be more than just affiliates: they can be influencers that drive product awareness, interest and sales. 

We highly suggest that you vet the best influencers and experts in your markets and establish long-term working relationships with them. They could boost your products/services as well as content…it’s a win-win for marketing and sales!

6. Hire a Reliable Growth Marketing Agency

Often, content marketing is a part of a larger marketing strategy. Other tactics include targeted ads, affiliate programs, sponsored content, offline events, and more. 

To combine these efforts and get the most out of them, we recommend that you hire a veteran growth marketing agency. With its expertise and experience, you can take your content marketing to the next level and aim for true, accelerated growth. 

Good marketing agencies also bring all the tools necessary to help you ideate, build and execute a content marketing strategy. From blogs to vlogs and videos to infographics, they can be your one-stop shop for all things content marketing. 

Develop a Tailored Content Strategy Today

Far from dying, content marketing is witnessing a rebirth in 2025. 

We suggest you become early adapters and think a couple of steps ahead of your competitors. Trust us: in this game, it pays to be proactive rather than reactive. How do we know? 

Over the past decade, we at Lean Summits have helped our clients develop results-based marketing strategies that have driven exponential growth. 

We’re here to do the same for you: connect with us to find out how we can help you build a winning content strategy for 2025 or discover how our growth marketing strategies can help you conquer the peak of your industry!