Everything changes. Everything stays the same. 2024 saw some incredible changes in the world of content marketing. Artificial intelligence (AI) has obviously had a significant impact on the way people create and distribute content. But in reality, the basic rules of content marketing remained the same. Before we look at how content marketing will evolve in 2025, we need to look at what content marketing actually is and will always be.
What is Content Marketing?
Successful content marketing offers a blend of education, entertainment, strategy, and storytelling. Delivered over a series of channels, including blog posts, email marketing campaigns, social media activities, podcasts and online videos, successful content marketing will help your business:
- Establish Expertise: Position your business (or the people in your company) as the go-to expert(s) in your field by consistently sharing valuable, relevant, and actionable information with your audience.
- Build Relationships: By providing genuine value in your content, your business can create trust and loyalty with your audience.
- Create Bankable Assets: For example, a well-written blog post may generate traffic, leads, and authority long after it is published.
How Content Marketing Changed in 2024
The need for compelling, engaging, and useful content will never go away. However, how it is produced, discovered, and consumed has changed dramatically in recent years.
AI tools like ChatGPT have made it easier to plan and create content. However, this doesn’t mean that the role of the content creator is redundant. It could be argued that AI-produced content lacks the warmth of human-written content. It’s also prone to making mistakes. At the same time, this doesn’t mean professional content marketers should not consider using AI to aid their content production.
How AI Can Fuel Your Content Marketing Strategy
AI is great for planning and inspiring your content marketing activities. Consider the following strategies:
- Competitive Analysis: Want to know what your competitors are writing about? Use AI to emulate their strategies or (even better) identify gaps in their content marketing. Ask tools like ChatGPT to analyze patterns and suggest unique angles to stand out in your niche.
- Cure Writer’s Block: Struggling to get started? Use AI to craft the first sentence or paragraph. Once you overcome the initial hurdle, you’ll find that the rest of the content flows much more naturally.
- Transcribe Audio: Use AI-powered tools like Otter.ai to turn audio recordings from meetings, interviews, or Zoom calls into editable text in minutes. This approach saves hours of manual transcription and helps transform conversations into engaging blog posts, articles, or newsletters.
- Suggest Email Subject Lines: Craft compelling and diverse subject lines using AI. You can then test multiple variations to optimize your email campaigns with A/B testing.
- Write Show Notes for Video/Audio: AI can create a detailed first draft of show notes to accompany podcasts or YouTube videos. This saves time and ensures your content is optimized for SEO while being informative for your audience.
- Repurpose Old Content: Feed your evergreen content into AI to reformat it for different platforms. Turn a blog post into an infographic, a LinkedIn article, or a series of tweets to maximize its reach and utility.
- Content Calendar Creation: Use AI to help design a comprehensive content calendar. It can suggest topics, formats, and publishing schedules tailored to your business goals and audience preferences.
- Personalize Content: AI can help you tailor content for different audience segments. Personalization ensures better engagement, whether it’s localized messaging, tone adjustments, or customer-specific recommendations.
- SEO Optimization: Use AI tools to suggest keywords, phrases, and headings that improve your content’s search engine ranking.
- Write Scripts for Videos and Webinars: Create engaging and professional scripts for your webinars, explainer videos, or tutorials. AI can help maintain tone consistency while addressing key topics efficiently.
- Answer FAQs: Automate the creation of FAQ sections or customer service responses with AI. Analyze common questions from your audience and craft clear, concise, and friendly answers.
- Visual Content Ideas: Use AI to brainstorm ideas for infographics, charts, or illustrations that complement your written content. Pair text with visuals to improve retention and appeal.
- Headline Optimization: AI can evaluate and improve your headlines, making them more clickable and engaging while maintaining clarity and relevance.
- Create Multiple Social Media Posts: Because the average shelf life of a social post on a channel like X or BlueSky is a few minutes, it’s always a good idea to create multiple posts that can be deployed over a period of time to ensure the maximum number of people can see that content.
The list goes on…
AI is a Good First Draft
AI can be a powerful tool in your content marketing arsenal, but it’s crucial to understand its limitations. Anything AI produces should be seen as the starting point, not the finished product. While it can save time and spark ideas, it rarely delivers content that’s ready for publication.
AI can assist in the creative process, but it’s your unique human touch that transforms basic outputs into meaningful, impactful content that stands out in a crowded market.
At best, AI generatesa foundation upon which to build. To truly make the content your own, you need to bring your expertise, voice, and insights into the mix. This means carefully editing, re-working, and adding depth, personality, and nuance to ensure the final piece resonates with your audience and aligns with your brand.
How Will AI Change Content Marketing in 2025?
The content marketing industry was completely disrupted by AI in 2024. AI tools created an opportunity for brands that struggled to develop a content marketing strategy due to a lack of resources. The most successful brands will learn from this experience and enhance their strategies by including more of their own voice in their output.
What Else is New in Content Marketing?
While AI stole many of the headlines relating to content marketing, other trends also emerged or continued to evolve. These include:
- The Evolution of Influencer Marketing: Brands are increasingly allocating significant amounts of their marketing budgets to influencer partnerships. The focus moved towards long-term collaborations and video content, particularly on platforms such as YouTube Shorts and TikTok Shop.
- Short-form Video: Platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels are driving this trend, with consumers, especially Gen Z, increasingly using short videos for product research.
- Content as a Product: Marketers are increasingly treating content as a product, focusing on creating compelling material that builds a community of loyal customers rather than solely aiming for conversions. This “media first” approach is increasingly seen in podcasts where the producer’s product or service is often presented as an ad or brief mention in the show.
- Creator-led Campaigns and Authenticity: We’re seeing a notable shift towards creator-led campaigns, with brands leveraging the authenticity and relatability of creators to engage consumers effectively. This trend emphasizes the importance of genuine connections over polished content, aligning with consumer preferences for authenticity.
Do More
The content marketing landscape is constantly evolving, but one thing never changes. If you want your organization to stand out and gain visibility across traditional online and social media platforms, you need to show up and put in the effort.
Visibility isn’t something you stumble upon; it’s earned. Earning visibility means creating more relevant, engaging, and meaningful content that speaks to your audience’s needs. It’s not just about producing more—it’s about producing better, consistently, and with purpose.
Learn More
To learn more about how the content marketing experts at emfluence can help you harness the power of content to become more discoverable in 2025, contact us today at expert@emfluence.com.
