11 Content Marketing Trends
(No, It’s Not Just About AI)

Content has never been easier to create, making it HARD to stand out.

It’s still possible. But you need to change your approach to content marketing.

Mr Beast spends $2M+ per video. Gen Z creators pour hours into fine-tuning multiple daily TikToks. And it’s not unusual for our team to invest $3,000 on a single blog post.

On the other hand, Joe Rogan—recording largely unedited, multi-hour conversations—pulls in more listeners than most major news networks combined.

What’s going on here?

With AI content saturating the landscape, simply having “more” isn’t enough.

The timeless truth remains:

People connect with people. And the best story wins.

This is shaping the direction of Backlinko. Writing an article isn’t merely about meeting a word count and being informative.

We continually monitor the latest trends to ensure we’re creating content our users love. And this helps us get over 772,000 monthly sessions.

So, what are the content marketing trends to follow in 2025?

Let’s find out.

1. The Best Marketers Will Find Unique Ways to Use AI

AI isn’t going to replace your content production workflows—I think we learned that pretty quickly in the past few years.

The role of AI in content marketing is to scale and improve, not to come up with the original insight that hasn’t been shared before.

So our first content marketing trend for this year is NOT that “AI will affect how you do things” or “businesses will speed up their workflows with AI.” That’s nothing new, and it’s not specific enough to be all that useful.

(Although it’s clearly still working, as many marketers are seeing ranking gains this way.)

What IS going to change is how the very best marketers use AI tools within their content and workflows.

Brands will start moving away from just using AI to speed up their writing process (they’ll still do that), and move toward using AI to truly level up the content they produce.

For example:

By creating interactive content and tools with the help of AI, brands can offer readers and customers an enhanced experience.

I realize this still sounds a little generic, so let’s do a live example right here. Within this very post.

I don’t have a lot of coding experience, so I’ll head to Claude for some help.

The responses aren’t all that exciting (which isn’t a huge surprise). But it did get me thinking of my own idea, so I shared that with Claude:

I just came up with some values for each of the categories, and then mapped them in a spreadsheet. I then pasted it into Claude.

This was very rough, and I didn’t put a whole lot of time into fine-tuning the values associated with each trend.

I also didn’t edit the summaries it generated for the trends it displays. So this is very much a raw example to illustrate how quickly you can put an MVP together.

The very next message had the code:

And here’s what the finished product looks like:

Pretty cool, right?

Now don’t get me wrong: this is obviously not a revolutionary tool. It’s really just a showcase of how quickly and easily you can put something like this together with the help of AI.

There are definitely more useful cases for a tool like this. But hopefully, it gives you a bit of inspiration to create your own.

How to Use AI in a Way That Actually Helps Users

So, how can you apply this to your own content marketing strategies?

Here are a few ideas:

• Calculators: If you’re writing a post about the costs of something, you could embed a budget calculator for your readers. Like a calculator that estimates how much they should spend on various aspects of their marketing strategy.
• Recommendation engines: Similar to the example above, you could implement your own recommendation tool into your posts or pages. Like a tool that recommends which of your services is best based on user needs.
• Polls and quizzes: These are great ways to get users to interact with your content. They can also give you a lot of helpful data for future content.

Just to drive this point home, I used Claude to create a simple poll for this post. Check it out:

2. The Importance of “People Not Brands” Will Grow

People want to hear from people, not brands. This is becoming abundantly clear, especially on social media.

And we’re not talking about influencers promoting brands here (although that’s clearly a viable content marketing channel). We’re talking about people in your brand being better poised to grow engagement and brand awareness than your brand itself.

Just look at the engagement our very own Leigh McKenzie gets on his LinkedIn posts:

Versus a post on our brand page for the same piece of content:

Major caveat: clearly there is more at play here than just the profile it’s posted on. Leigh has put in A LOT of active work to grow his following on LinkedIn.

And the content is often slightly different too. But the general idea still stands.

Need more evidence?

Let’s switch to a different industry, and compare the engagement levels of skincare brand d’You (76K followers):

To the kind of engagement the brand’s founder, Shamika Haldipurkar, gets (with just 9.5K followers):

These kinds of posts let Shamika engage with her audience while also subtly (but effectively) promoting the brand’s products.

Why is this often so powerful?

It’s just the case that people tend to engage more with brand ambassadors on social media than the brands themselves. And you can capitalize on this for your own content marketing efforts.

Instead of just pumping out posts on your brand accounts, consider looking to your internal star players to grow your social media and wider online presence this year.

3. Website Owners Will Need to Focus on User Experience

User experience (UX) is directly linked to user signals, which you can no longer ignore as part of your SEO strategy.

Google’s algorithms consider site speed, how easy it is to navigate your site, and user interaction when ranking websites. We know they take into account user clicks thanks to the Google antitrust trial.

And if your site loads fast, answers users’ queries, and is easy to navigate, people are going to stay on your site and interact with it. They’re also more likely to visit other pages of your site.

This ultimately signals to Google’s algorithms that your website’s UX is great and that you provide value to people who visit it.

In return, the idea is that Google will reward you with better rankings (provided you tick a lot of other content quality boxes, of course).

In 2025, this is going to be more important than ever. You can’t just add some keywords to your headings, use alt text, and pick up a few backlinks.

Rather than simply thinking of it as creating content, you need to create great experiences—ones that your users love and want to keep coming back for.

How to Provide an Awesome User Experience

Optimizing your UX is about making your site as user-friendly as possible.

This includes:

• Improving site speed
• Being thoughtful about how you use pop-ups
• Designing an easy-to-navigate page layout
• Making your calls to action contextually relevant
• Linking only to genuinely helpful content
• Catering to the search intent early on in your content, not hiding important information at the bottom

With how easy it is to create AI-generated content, focusing on your user experience is an easy way to stand out from low-quality content on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Because pure and even just lightly edited AI content rarely provides an enjoyable user experience.

When evaluating your user experience, some of it will simply require you to manually assess it.

For example, to ensure you’re catering to the user’s needs, you’ll need to think like a user (or better yet, gather feedback directly from them).

But you can use tools to streamline some of the more technical aspects. For example, Semrush’s Site Audit will check your website for 140+ technical and on-page SEO issues.

You’ll get detailed reports, such as for your Core Web Vitals, that will tell you how you can improve your user experience.

Because your user experience correlates with both your organic rankings AND your conversion rate, it’s definitely worth investing some time into monitoring your site’s technical performance.

4. You’ll Need First-Hand Experience to Convert

People love to hear about other people’s experiences.

That’s why platforms like Reddit remain super popular.

To satisfy users and hinder the process of AI-generated content flooding the internet, Google updated its EEAT guidelines in December 2022, emphasizing expertise.

And the way to show expertise is to share content that’s based on first-hand experiences.

Leigh McKenzie, our SEO Strategy and Growth Leader, agrees:

Think about it:

Experts can provide a unique perspective from doing or experiencing something in the industry compared to someone without that expertise.

It makes your content more insightful and relatable for readers. This, in turn, signals to search engines like Google that your content is valuable, pushing its rankings higher.

This content marketing trend has persisted for several years now. But that doesn’t make it any less relevant in 2025. In fact, I’d argue it just continues to become more important every year.

How to Implement First-Hand Experience in Your Content

Documenting what you’re already doing is the best way to implement experience-based content.

So, think about:

• What challenges have you recently faced and overcome?
• How did you achieve something your audience might also be interested in achieving?
• What are some unique experiences you had along the way?

Then shape your content around those experiences.

For example, Brian Dean wrote an article sharing how to get more website traffic based on his own experience increasing Backlinko’s traffic.

Two sentences into the post, he shares a screenshot of Backlinko’s traffic for proof (similar to how this post started):

This idea doesn’t just apply to blog content, of course. You can also use it in your social media posts, like our very own Leigh McKenzie does:

And you can do it in your YouTube videos. Like Rob Walling of MicroConf does, drawing on his vast experience with startups to help other founders navigate the world of starting your own business:

All of these examples share the same methodology: they help readers by sharing specific real-life experiences of people who are ahead in their journey compared to the readers.

Now, you may not have expertise in all the areas you’re writing or talking about.

How can you still make use of this approach?

One way is to interview people that DO have that specific experience and base your article or video on their insights. (Or encourage guest posts to let them do all the talking).

So when you don’t have experience on the topic, it makes sense to reach out to experts in that niche and have them share their insights with your readers.

We do this a lot at Backlinko, often through guest posts from industry experts:

And also by adding expert insights throughout our regular posts:

5. We’ll See More of a Focus on Visual Content

It’s becoming increasingly more competitive and difficult to stand out as a content marketer. So putting effort into creating useful, shareable, and engaging visual content is a good way to get ahead of your rivals.

Brands of all shapes and sizes are already jumping on this trend, no matter the platforms they use.

Whether it’s adding engaging visuals to blog posts:

Or using eye-catching images on social media:

Custom explainer visuals, including videos and graphics like screenshots and custom diagrams, are great ways to explain complex concepts.

We put a BIG focus on this here at Backlinko, which is why you’ll see a lot of visuals in our technical or tool-focused guides:

How to Make Smart Use of Visual Content

To effectively use visuals in your content, focus on creating images, videos, and graphics that are informative, visually appealing, and engaging.

Here’s how:

Use Informative Graphics in Your Articles

Create graphics that visually represent data or explain the steps readers need to take to achieve something.

We do this a lot in our studies with original data. Like this SEO study:

Establish Your YouTube Presence

Given YouTube is one of the most popular social media platforms, in the world it’s a great place to distribute your content.

Plus, Google features YouTube videos on the first page of the SERP for a lot of search terms:

Add Short-Form Videos to the Mix

YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikTok are also great platforms to distribute your visual content.

For example, the owner of Brooki Bakehouse frequently shares videos explaining her processes and sharing her baking-related tips.

@brookibakehouse My best 10 baking tips from a bakery owner 🤫 The last one is a game changer! #bakingtips #bakeryowner #baking #fyp ♬ original sound – brooki

Considering the video got 2.8 million views, 300K+ likes, 6026 saves, and 850+ shares, sharing short-form videos is a great strategy for brand awareness.

6. “Be The Source” Content Will Become More Common

In 2025, backlinks are still one of the top ranking factors. And it’s going to continue being relevant for years to come.

If you want to get more links, traffic, and shares from your content marketing, then give “Be The Source” content a try this year.

But what is “Be The Source” content?

“The Source” posts are research-backed pieces of content that contain new, interesting data.

Data that bloggers and journalists can cite in their articles.

It’s the original information (studies and stats) that is so useful and unique that your industry and big publishers will want to link to you.

We have a lot of posts that we would call “Be The Source” content, and they have picked up plenty of backlinks over the years:

How to “Be the Source”

Below, we’ll draw on our experience creating lots of this kind of content to help you get more backlinks by being your own source.

Choose the Right Topic

There are two easy ways you can find winning topics for “Be The Source” posts.

First, you can build on a proven topic.

For example, take our large-scale organic CTR analysis.

Why did we decide to go with this topic?

Because that was a topic that people in the SEO space were already SUPER interested in.

Plus, this ancient visual (from AOL!) was still getting cited left and right.

So we knew that an updated version of that data would work well.

And it did:

You can also try to hop on a new, emerging topic.

In fact, that’s what we did with the Google Lens ranking factors study that we published in 2020.

This was the first in-depth look at Google Lens rankings.

The content stood out and brought in a ton of traffic in its first week.

Focus on Validity

When it comes to “Be The Source” content, there’s one big catch to keep in mind:

If you want people to take your research seriously, your data has to be 100% valid.

Publishing flawed results or misleading findings can hurt your reputation.

You can prove the validity of your study by sharing your methodology and citing reputable sources.

Visualize Your Findings

Visuals help your “Be The Source Content” for two main reasons:

First, they make your data easier to understand.

Take a stat like “The average Time to First Byte (TTFB) of a voice search result was .54 seconds (vs. the worldwide average of 2.1 seconds).”

It’s really hard to visualize something like that.

But a visual like this makes it easy:

Second, visuals give other bloggers something to embed into their posts. Which can lead to contextual backlinks, like this:

Promote It with a Press Release

This is more of an optional step.

But if your data uncovered something interesting or surprising, a press release can help get your post in front of journalists who cover that topic.

Here’s an example of a press release we published in 2020 to help get the word out about one of our “Be The Source” posts.

7. Brands Will Focus on Streamlining Content Operations

With the rise of generic AI content, the demand for high-quality content has increased.

So have the costs of production.

In fact, Superpath reports that the average content marketer earned 16.75% more in 2024 compared to 2023.

Content ops are the way to tame it all. In other words: the teams, processes, and technologies you put in place to get your content from idea to publication.

Streamlined content operations are structured and efficient. From the management of content creation to your content distribution processes.

And as content marketing has matured, content ops has emerged as a distinct discipline with dedicated publications and senior positions.

Today’s content production and optimization processes rely on standardized and efficient workflows and team structures.

This is especially important for large-scale content platforms, where the complexity of content creation is higher.

We’ve taken steps to improve our own content operations in this way. So that instead of looking like this:

It now looks like this:

Kudos to Brian Dean for managing all of that (although he did have a small team eventually).

But putting these processes in place has allowed us to scale to 50 high-quality posts per month across Backlinko and Traffic Think Tank.

And I’m confident a lot of other brands are going to put more and more emphasis on their content ops throughout 2025 to help them achieve similar production gains.

How to Streamline Your Content Ops

Let’s break down how you can implement efficient content operations for your own team:

First, set clear content objectives. What should your content achieve? Is it brand awareness? Product sales? Email subscriptions?

Next, build your team. Assign clear roles and responsibilities, encourage them to develop their skills, and invest in training.

Once you have your team in place, map your content creation process. It might look something like this:

A key step you can’t sleep on even in the beginning is to implement a robust way to manage all of this.

Even if your process is only a couple of steps with a few people involved, your life will be MUCH easier if you have a simple way to keep track of everything.

We started out with Notion and Google Sheets, but eventually graduated to platforms like Slack and Monday.com.

It’ll take some time to figure out what works best for your team, but don’t rely on email to streamline your content ops.

8. More Brands Will Leverage Content Repurposing

Repurposing content is a great way to scale up your content production without starting over every time you want to create a post for a new format.

This is why content repurposing is a hot content marketing trend right now.

But people’s standards for content have gone up A LOT over the last few years.

That said, simply copy-pasting a section from your blog post and publishing it on social media doesn’t cut it anymore.

You can’t just read an article into a microphone and call it a day, either.

That’s why you need to be thoughtful when repurposing content, and consider the nuances of the different platforms you plan to post on.

How to Repurpose Your Content

There are WAY more nuances than the table above shows. From the language you should use on each platform to the visual styles that resonate best.

To learn more about them, check out our full guide to content repurposing.

For now, let’s look at some quick tips to repurpose your content successfully.

Match the Content to Each Format

You need to adapt the ideas, concepts, and examples from the original content to the new format.

For example, when repurposing a blog post for a YouTube video, you’ll likely need to change some of your wording so that it sounds natural when you speak to the camera. And because it’s a visual format, you’ll want to do more showing rather than just telling.

Finally, while static graphics and screenshots might work well in an article, animations, and video footage will work best when repurposing it to YouTube.

For a different example, the online news publisher The Know frequently repurposes their positive news articles into digestible, engaging Instagram Reels:

They keep them short, use captions on the screen to make them more accessible, and use hashtags to boost their reach.

Podcasting giant Tim Ferriss does this in two ways. He takes the standard “clips” approach with YouTube Shorts:

But he also takes longer snippets of his conversations with guests and uploads them as 5-10 minute videos on his channel too:

This lets Tim get many more uses from just one piece of content, while also catering to various sections of his audience depending on the length of video they prefer.

Reuse Specific Steps and Tips

You don’t have to repurpose an entire piece of content. Instead, take the best sections from an existing piece of content and reuse them elsewhere.

This approach lets you highlight specific, valuable parts of your content in different formats or platforms. And in bite-sized chunks to make them more engaging.

We do this on LinkedIn with eye-catching carousels of the best bits of our new posts here on the blog.

We find it works well on LinkedIn because it’s a business-focused social media platform. And a lot of our readers are business owners themselves or aspiring entrepreneurs.

Try to match up your repurposing efforts with the platforms your users are most active on.

If you’re not sure which platforms your audience uses most, tools like Semrush’s One2Target can show you exactly where they hang out:

9. User-Generated Content Will Become More Prominent

User-generated content (UGC) is content your users or customers create and share about your brand or product. It may include reviews, images, videos, or social media posts, which you can then use in your marketing efforts.

Many people now turn to platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube instead of traditional search engines like Google to find information.

Especially when they’re looking for local restaurant recommendations or how-to guides.

And they often prioritize content that comes from other customers, such as unboxing videos, reviews, and lifestyle videos featuring products.

UGC has two main benefits:

• Since the users are creating content for you, you get to speed up the content generation process
• Since the creators have already used your product or service, you get authentic content that your audience can relate to and trust

Everyone likes to talk about the classic example of UGC in marketing: the “Share a Coke” campaign. Where people would share their bottle with their name on it on social media, essentially working like free advertising.

But Coke is already HUGE.

So what about a few examples of smaller brands that make use of UGC in different ways?

Take Passion Planner, for example. They create planners and journals, and they benefit from UGC through their “#pashfam” hashtag on Instagram.

Users share how they use their planners, including the hashtag and often a mention of the product too. Helping Passion Planner reach a wider audience.

An example of a brand that uses UGC in a different way, and much further down the marketing funnel, comes from Sacheu Beauty.

They embed UGC videos directly onto their product pages in a “See it in action” section:

Showcasing this content from REAL customers right below the buy button can help convince visitors to make a purchase, boosting your conversion rate.

How to Double Down on UGC

You may think that people will just create content around your product or service on their own, and then you can use that content in your marketing strategy.

While it can happen, that’s not always the case.

You need to be proactive. Here’s how:

Encourage and Showcase Customer Reviews

These are powerful forms of UGC that provide social proof and build trust.

People love to check reviews before buying a product. It’s natural to want to see what other people think before buying it yourself.

Amazon does this well, and letting users add images adds an extra layer of authenticity. Plus, it can help other users see more angles of the product or how big it is, for example.

Create Hashtag Campaigns on Social Media

Encourage your audience to be creative or share their experiences related to your brand using a specific hashtag (like Passion Planner did on Instagram).

Big brands do this too. For example, Apple encourages users to share iPhone photos with the hashtag #ShotoniPhone.

Then they feature the best shots on their own Instagram page and credit the author.

This specific UGC marketing strategy helps people see the potential of the iPhone camera by showing what real people can do with it.

Host Contests or Challenges

Engage your audience by hosting contests or challenges that prompt them to create content related to your brand.

Platforms like Instagram and TikTok are ideal for these, as you can create your own #challenge hashtags.

10. Brands Will Change How They Use Podcasts

Podcasts in themselves are a content marketing trend that’s going to continue to follow us throughout 2025 and beyond.

But more specifically, how people and brands use podcasts and the platforms they focus on will change in the coming months and years.

For example, more brands will shift towards using YouTube as their main podcasting platform.

Why?

Searchability and overall visibility.

Think about how you find your favorite podcasts right now. It’s likely through recommendations from friends, family, and other creators you follow.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t remember the last time I found a podcast because I searched for a keyword on Spotify. Or because Apple Podcasts recommended a new show to me.

I’ve found a few by literally searching Google for the best podcasts in X niche. And I know I’m not alone on that front, at least, because thousands of people search for variants of “best podcast” every month on Google:

So people are always looking for new podcasts, but the mainstream platforms themselves don’t seem to be doing the best job of serving them up.

Enter: YouTube.

People have uploaded podcasts to YouTube since they became a popular long-form content medium. But in 2025, more hosts will start doubling down on the platform thanks to the higher level of visibility and search ability YouTube can offer.

This is in large part thanks to YouTube’s vast experience and data in the recommendations department. YouTube is great at serving up new channels to people interested in that niche. And this applies to videos and channels devoted to podcasts.

This is complemented by YouTube’s growing premium subscriber base—from 30 million in 2020 to 100 million in 2024.

These subscribers can play videos offline and keep them running when their phones are locked. This is especially valuable for podcast listeners.

Plus: More and more searches for people tend to yield podcasts in the results.

The second big shift in the world of podcasts in 2025 is one we’ve actually been seeing play out for a while now: hosts will start creating podcast-only channels.

We’ve seen clips channels perform very well with the growth of short-form vertical videos. But long-form still has its place, and more and more creators are finding that place to be separate from their main YouTube channel.

Take Niche Pursuits for example. In early 2024, founder Spencer Hawes made the bold move to shift his podcast episodes over to a new, dedicated channel.

This wasn’t an easy decision, given he was taking the podcast from a subscriber base of 36K+ (at the time) and starting fresh.

But over time, his audience caught up and became more familiar with the new setup. And the podcast was soon back to doing great numbers:

In fact, when I searched for “niche pursuits” on YouTube, the channel that came up first was for the podcast:

This is just one example, of course. But it just goes to show that moving your podcast to a dedicated channel could boost your show’s visibility on YouTube in the long run.

How Can You Change the Way You Use Podcasts?

Whether you already use podcasting as part of your content marketing strategy or not, here are some ways to jump on this trend:

Consider Your Platforms

Think about which platforms are best to focus on when creating your podcast. If you include video footage, YouTube is usually the obvious choice.

But even if you don’t, it’s still worth considering the benefits in terms of searchability and overall visibility.

Create Two Channels

This might be easier to do psychologically if you haven’t started yet.

But if you already have an audience and are considering making a podcast-specific channel, make sure you tell your audience well in advance.

Tell them in your podcasts to go and subscribe there before you make the switch, and tell them on social media too. This can help you build a following on the second channel before posting your first episode to make for a smoother transition.

Integrate Podcasting with Your Wider Strategy

You can use podcasts to have deeper conversations that wouldn’t suit a simple video or article format.

You can then use insights you gain or quotes from the podcast to enhance your other content.

11. Email Will Continue to Drive More Sales

In 2025, email marketing is shifting further towards a relationship-building tactic, focusing on nurturing and maintaining connections with the audience.

This approach involves providing value through your emails, building trust, and encouraging interactions. Rather than just gathering leads and immediately sending them a sales pitch.

Some consider email marketing as an old-school approach. However, it’s still an important content marketing channel.

In fact, Litmus found that email marketing has a whopping 3,600% ROI (return on investment). That’s $36 for every $1 you spend on email marketing.

And you can invest that money on email marketing (or do it for free, and just invest time) in lots of different ways.

For example, Wandering Aimfully launched one of their coaching programs entirely through email, without promoting it on social media. And they generated $226,000 in sales in two weeks with an email list of 11,000 people.

The point here isn’t that you can generate six figures via email within two weeks.

But by putting in the time to build quality relationships with your audience through effective email marketing, you can put yourself in a position to grow your business.

Let’s find out how to do that.

How to Grow Your Email List and Increase Engagement

While the basics of email marketing have stayed the same as in previous years, there are a few trending strategies to consider this year:

• Personalization: Personalize your emails based on the subscriber’s purchase history, interests, and website behavior. A lot of email marketing tools will have integrations to help you do this.
• Segmentation: Divide your audience into groups based on shared characteristics and send them targeted emails that resonate with their needs. Whether it’s new customers, people who have interacted with a specific channel, or those who haven’t made a purchase in a while.
• Timing: Send emails at the right time. Use your existing data or A/B test to determine the optimal times for sending emails to your specific audience (don’t just rely on benchmark data for other brands).
• Interactive elements: Use polls, quizzes, GIFs, or product demos to keep your audience engaged and increase clicks. And be open to them replying to you as well.
• Gamification: Encourage engagement and loyalty by giving subscribers points, badges, or exclusive offers through a gamified email experience.

This is something Grammarly does well:

How to Keep Up with the Latest Content Marketing Trends

Ready to start improving your content marketing efforts this year?

It’s time to put a strategy together and work on creating content that will provide real value to your audience and significantly increase your website traffic.

Here are some resources to help you do that:

• SEO Trends: Check out our comprehensive guide to this year’s SEO trends, where we share our predictions and give you actionable tips to get ahead of the competition.
• Google Trends for SEO: This guide shows you how to use Google’s free trend tool to spot patterns in your industry and capitalize on them with SEO.
• Content Marketing Hub: Our content marketing guides will help you stay up to date with the latest trends and give you tips to improve your strategies.