What is Content Marketing? Why It Matters

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a form of marketing that involves creating information (in any content format) and distributing the content (via any marketing channel), intended to shape a brand’s audience’s perception of the brand and influence the purchase of products and services.

The truth is that content marketing “tactics” and “principles” have been applied for centuries. One of the oldest examples of a content marketing campaign launched in November of 1867 was a magazine publication by Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, providing helpful technical information for operators and equipment owners to manage risks and solve operational problems.

In recent years, the term content marketing has been splashed on almost every single online marketing activity imaginable by marketers across various industry sectors. Speaking of “term abuse”, there have even been cases of unimaginably bold statements by digital marketing agencies that “content marketing is digital marketing”.

To avoid all confusion on the meaning of content marketing, it would be best to reference Content Marketing Institute’s comprehensive definition:

“Content marketing is a strategic 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.”

Let’s break it down.

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach. Content marketing is not a channel or a marketing tactic by itself. Rather, it is more of an approach or a discipline within the domain of marketing, holistically speaking.

Focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content – Content marketing is focused on the creation of content that provides immense value to the intended audience, the crafting of content that is relevant to both the business objectives and the target customers’ pain points and goals, and developing content that is delivered to the target audience in a timely and consistent manner.

To attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action – This is the marketing objective of content marketing, which not only seeks to acquire newly defined audiences but also retain them for future marketing campaigns which ultimately, aims to drive more profits to the business through valuable customer activities.

Why Content Marketing?

According to a global report by NewBase, more than half of APAC marketers and agency bosses ranked content marketing as their top priority. This doesn’t come as a surprise, as smartphone penetration rates and the amount of time consumers spend on digital devices continue to rise.

According to DataReportal’s 2025 Digital Singapore Report, the average internet user in Singapore spends around 8 hours and 12 minutes online daily, with smartphones accounting for over 75% of total online time. The most common activities include:

1. Scrolling social media (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram)
2. Online messaging (WhatsApp, Telegram)
3. Watching short-form video content
4. Reading news and educational content
5. E-commerce and mobile banking

People are consuming content on their digital devices at an unprecedented rate. The average display ad click-through rate (CTR) across industries as of 2025 remains low at around 0.3%, according to Wordstream benchmarks.

With growing ad fatigue and ad-blocker usage (used by 43% of internet users globally), brands are increasingly turning to non-disruptive formats like native ads and value-driven content to engage audiences.

There is an impending need for organisations to shift their focus to creating valuable and consumable content instead of dumping all their dollars into advertising.

Another study found that 81 percent of consumers conduct pre-research online before making a purchase.

What do these studies mean for businesses, and why is content marketing so essential?

Content Marketing Generates Positive ROI in the Long Term

A 2024 report by HubSpot and Content Marketing Institute found that content marketing generates 4–6x more leads per dollar than traditional outbound marketing. Businesses with documented content strategies reported 2x higher conversion rates and 30% lower customer acquisition costs than those without one.

Brands That Can Provide Great Value During the Consumer’s Buying Stages Gain Their Trust and Build a Loyal Following

People love consuming content and rely on content to aid their buying decisions. B2B companies that engage in blogging efforts received 67% more leads than their competitors, while small businesses that blog experienced 126% higher lead growth than their non-blogging counterparts, as stated on Social Media Today.

An audience that trusts what you say will choose your brand over your competitors. This is evident in Demand Gen’s Content Preference Report 2016, where 80% of B2B customers consume at least 3 pieces of content before talking to sales.

Content Marketing Complements the Efforts of Other Sales and Marketing Channels

Content marketing helps boost lead generation and sales campaigns. A 2017 Content Preferences Survey Report by Demand Gen found that B2B buyers are most likely to share their details in exchange for white papers, webinars, ebooks, and analyst reports.

Content marketing also provides more opportunities for link building, which helps boost organic search engine rankings. Creating and distributing valuable content, such as case studies, research papers, and long-form guides are great way to build backlinks.

Content Marketing is Trending

Over the past decade, content marketing has made a dramatic impact on the way brands and consumers interact, with customers expecting more authenticity and transparency from brands and more and more B2B and B2C brands committing more of their budgets to content marketing.

Content Marketing Examples

What are some marketing activities that constitute content marketing? First, it is important to differentiate pure advertising from content marketing. The focus of content marketing is not to push for the consumer to buy a product, at least not directly. Rather, it takes on a more indirect approach of providing valuable information to consumers throughout their buying journey.

Examples of Content Marketing Include:

• Planning out an editorial calendar of blog posts (e.g., sharing free tips, tutorials, guides) and implementing search engine optimisation to rank and drive traffic to them
• Doing an interview with the CEO of your company on sharing industry insights and distributing the content on social media channels (Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn)
• Creating a newsletter series (e.g., free course, article series, trends reports), setting up a lead capture form on your website to build your email list, and launching a drip campaign via email marketing
• Creating a contest to curate user-generated content (e.g., photo of the day for the fashion industry, completed projects of students for the education industry, PinkBike + GoPro Evolution Video Contest) and showcasing the user-generated content via the brand’s marketing channels (email, social, blog)
• Launching a video tutorial series of how-to guides and marketing it via social media, website, and SEO (e.g., Home Depot and Lowe’s). Check out our list of 120 content types you can use for your next marketing campaign.

Optimising Content for Search Engines

Creating valuable content is only part of the equation; ensuring it gets found is equally critical. Search engines like Google prioritise content that aligns with the E-E-A-T framework: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This means demonstrating first-hand knowledge, backing up claims with credible sources, and featuring real voices, such as authorship by named individuals with credentials.

Moreover, Google’s Helpful Content System update rewards human-first content that addresses users’ needs holistically, rather than keyword-stuffed or AI-spun articles. Brands that consistently publish insightful, original, and audience-aligned content see stronger organic rankings and click-through rates.

Incorporating structured data, topic clustering, and internal linking strategies also improves visibility and content discoverability over time.

Examples of Types of Content Used in Content Marketing

There are dozens of content types used in content marketing, ranging from digital to offline:

• Blog posts
• Infographics
• Webinars
• Ebooks
• White papers
• Conferences
• Preview seminars
• Direct mail
• User-generated content, such as forum posts and reviews on third-party sites

How do you determine the most appropriate type of content for your content marketing efforts? The type of content used can vary depending on factors such as what media your target audiences are using, what marketing goals you are trying to achieve, and how much budget is available.

For example, if your audience frequents YouTube, starting a YouTube channel and releasing a series of video content would be a great strategy to drive engagement and traffic back to your website. In 2025, short-form video (under 60 seconds) dominates consumer preferences, with platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts driving the highest engagement rates.

Meanwhile, AI-generated content tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, and Copy AI are streamlining content ideation and creation workflows for marketers, while platforms like DepositPhotos provide commercially safe visuals, helping teams produce more content in less time, with customisation, scalability, and legal peace of mind.

As a final step, some teams run their drafts through an AI content detector to spot sections that read as generic or templated, then rewrite those parts in their own voice

If your marketing goal is to generate leads, it would make sense to gate content such as white papers, ebooks, and webinars in exchange for your prospect’s contact details. If you are on a tight budget, sending EDMs via email may be a better cost-saving alternative than directly mailing printed product catalogues.

You should also look into repurposing your content into various other content formats. It takes much less effort to repurpose a piece of content into a different content format compared to creating a new piece from scratch. For example, a blog post series can be combined to form an ebook or a SlideShare presentation, while a survey report can be transformed into an infographic.

Here’s an insane example of the power of repurposing a blog post into a SlideShare presentation, which generated over 2 million views for Eugene Cheng’s SlideShare channel.

Examples of Media Channels to Distribute and Promote Content

Owned, Earned, Paid, Shared Channels for Content Distribution

Owned, Earned, Paid, Shared Channels for Content Distribution

Once you have created content, the next step would be to distribute and promote the content via owned, earned, paid, and shared media channels.

Owned – Assets You Own and Control Entirely

Owned media are assets that your business creates, owns, and controls the distribution of. Examples of owned media channels include:

• Sections within your website
  • Blog
  • Resource library
  • Press
  • News
  • Events
• Email subscriber list
• SMS subscriber list
• Online forum
• Meetup group

An example of content marketing via owned media would be to write an article and publish it as a blog post in the blog section of a website, then emailing the blog post to a list of email subscribers.

Earned – Publicity/Advocacy That’s Free

Earned media is content created or distributed by others that you’ve earned for free (not paid).

Examples of earned media include:

• Ranking your blog post on top of the organic search engine results pages (e.g., Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu)
• Getting invited to write a guest post to be published on a partner blog and receiving backlinks that will drive up your organic search engine rankings
• Getting recommended by a partner in their monthly newsletter
• Getting invited to interview with an established newspaper
• Customers independently write reviews on third-party forums, review websites, and social media profiles, recommending your brand
• Influencers independently writing positive reviews about your brand on their blogs and sharing them with their followers

Paid – Paying to Promote Content

Paid media is the promotion of content fueled by monetary incentives or transactions.

Examples of paid media include:

• Creating a white paper and promoting it via Facebook Sponsored posts and Display ads via Google Display Network
• Organising an industry conference, inviting keynote speakers, and delivering branded content in certain segments
• Paying a publication to write a sponsored post highlighting the features of your newly launched product

Shared – Co-created Content on Shared Platforms (Mainly Social Media)

Shared media is content produced on shared platforms where both the brand and the consumer influence the channel. Shared media is mainly fueled by both social media and content marketing efforts to produce the content.

Examples of shared media include:

• Posting videos on YouTube and replying to user comments on the video
• Publish status updates on Facebook and interact with fans who respond to them
• Creating a forum thread on Quora and responding to replies by users

How Do Great Brands Do Content Marketing?

Content marketing is such a broad marketing approach that it’s easy to get tangled in a web of projects that don’t lead back to the main objective. What sets great brands apart from good brands? For one, great brands have a content marketing strategy. They apply models such as the Hub and Spoke and Hero, Hygiene, and Hub models. They involve their customers in their content creation strategy.

Most importantly, great brands document their content marketing strategy. This allows them to create and deliver a complete content experience, maximise every piece of content, and focus on content marketing tactics that work.

Let’s look at how two of the biggest brands in both the B2B and B2C industries achieved god-like status through content marketing.

B2B Content Marketing Example – Hubspot

Hubspot.com

Achievements:

• AI Integration: In 2024, HubSpot introduced AI tools and acquired Frame AI to enhance its capabilities in sales, marketing, and customer service.
• Customer Base Expansion: The platform now serves over 247,000 customers across more than 135 countries.
• Revenue Growth: HubSpot’s revenue reached $2.63 billion in 2024, marking a 21% increase from the previous year.

How?:

• Content Strategy: HubSpot continues to offer a wealth of free resources, including downloadable guides, webinars, and blog posts, to attract and educate potential leads.
• Multi-Channel Lead Generation: The company leverages platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and organic search to drive high-quality leads.
• Optimised Content Funnels: Well-planned content funnels nurture marketing-qualified leads into sales-qualified leads, enhancing conversion rates.
• SEO and Content Marketing: Despite facing challenges in organic traffic, HubSpot remains committed to content marketing, focusing on quality and relevance to maintain its authority in the industry.

B2C Content Marketing Example – BMW

BMW Instagram

Achievements:

• BMW’s Instagram has 42 million followers to date
• #BMW hashtag had been used more than 47.5 million times in June 2025 (the most popular in the automotive industry)

How?:

• BMW shares photos taken by enthusiasts and hobby photographers with the community in appreciation of its loyal fans worldwide
• BMW uses its Instagram channel to share the BMW brand lifestyle with its followers through the latest news on upcoming models, glimpses of its history, and looking ahead to the future of mobility. – SGCARMART

How Should One Start Doing Content Marketing? – The Next Steps

We hope this article has helped you to gain a clearer understanding of what content marketing is and how brands of today are executing it. If you are feeling inspired by this article, do note that content marketing is just one of the many digital marketing disciplines you can use. To have a fuller understanding of digital marketing, at Equinet Academy, we offer a range of digital marketing courses taught in person in Singapore or online.

Also, if content marketing is one of the priorities of your business growth and expansion plan, you might need to have a content marketing strategy.

Start by:

• Learning how to develop a content marketing strategy for your business. Using a 6-step content marketing strategy process, our intensive 2-day Content Marketing Strategy course will equip you with the knowledge, skills, and tools needed to maximise your content marketing ROI.
• Documenting your content marketing strategy with Equinet Academy’s content marketing strategy plan template.