Top 3 content strategies for 2025
The content game doesn’t care about calendars, but humans do! We’re in the final stretch of 2024, so let’s talk about how to approach B2B content strategy in 2025.
A gentle reminder before we begin: The whole point of content is to help your business. Higher-quality leads, a fuller pipeline, increased conversion, more money, less churn. Content for its own sake is nice, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about.
When and where to use AI
The content generated by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Llama, and other LLMs is better than ever. That doesn’t mean it’s good content.
Good content engages its audience and stays top of mind. If it’s really good, the audience will share it with their friends, peers, etc. AI just doesn’t generate that kind of content. We’ve generated hundreds of articles for our clients at this point and let me tell you, everything we generate needs serious editing. Yes, we have high standards, but there’s a good reason Google was forced to take a stance on AI-generated content.
Thankfully, there are so many good uses for AI that will only get better in 2025:
Website copy: Given an AI enough context and it’s really good at generating bits of copy that can explain your product in the language your audience expects. Example prompt: “Based on this product documentation, please explain feature X in 2-3 sentences for DevOps engineers who visit our marketing website.”
Ideation: Whenever I need 10 title ideas for an article, AI is there. And when I need 10 more ideas, it doesn’t complain and tell me to go away. It just does its job. AI is great for options, angles, dissection, and going deeper with ideas. Example prompt: “Please give me 10 titles for this blog, all ≤60 characters and in sentence case. No more than 5 titles with colons in them.”
Transcript analysis: If you’ve ever transcribed a Zoom call or downloaded a YouTube video transcript, you can just dump that text right into an AI and ask for highlights, provocative moments, or a list of blog ideas that can come from it. Example prompt: “Take this interview transcript and give me five blog titles and summaries for the personas most likely to buy from my company.”
Low-risk blogging and first drafts: I love generative AI because it gives me something to start with. Sometimes that’s at least half the battle. Instead of spending 4 hours to write an article, it might only take me 2 if I start with an AI-generated draft. As I mentioned earlier, however, don’t use it for anything super-important. Example prompt: “Read these articles I wrote last year and help me put together a year-end wrap-up article that contains the main ideas of each of them.”
In 2025, AI is going to get a lot better at things like summarizing content, replicating content, and image and video generation. Based on the trajectory of the past year, I wouldn’t count on it getting significantly better at writing articles, case studies, white papers, or anything of real consequence.
Expert content is king
I love the quote from Vince Lombardi: “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” In that same spirit, I’ll adapt it to: “Content isn’t king. Authoritative and engaging content is king.”
When everyone has the ability to churn out content with AI, it’s easier than ever to lose your moat. Anyone can produce dozens of articles with generative AI tools. On the one hand, it sucks. On the other, it’s an opportunity to level up and make the kind of content that AI can’t produce.
Here are my “expert content” recommendations for 2025:
Go deep into video content: Some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with are so reluctant to get in front of a camera for the purposes of content production. And yet, they often produce some of the best content because they have opinions and and expert insights that are unique and crafted from experience.
Go on podcasts: Send your subject matter experts (SMEs) to podcasts to talk about what your company does and what makes your work/business unique. Or just help them promote their personal brand. People want to hear from people, not brands. If podcasts are deciding who wins the presidential election, then certainly podcasts are helping people decide what B2B SaaS to buy.
Produce white papers: Another great way to show off is with technical white papers. Demonstrate to your prospects and customers that you really, really know what you’re doing and you’re heavily invested in your domain. (White papers make great sales enablement documentation as well.)
Produce case studies: Interview your customers and show how they are being successful using your product. Make your customers the stars of your website and outbound marketing. When you prove you’re an enabler of success for others, people will want to buy that kind of success from you.
We need to move beyond SEO blogging and move into answering real “how do I…?” questions that are hitting Google. Answer the questions your prospects have and give them as much information as they could possibly need in the greatest depth you can.
SEO is dead—Long live SEO!
Another quote I love is from Frank Zappa: “Jazz isn’t dead, it just smells funny.” Well, the same can be said for search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine results pages (SERP) are now featuring AI content summaries right up top. We’re entering the age of LLMO, or Large Language Model Optimization. To do well with SEO, you can't just stuff keywords into your content and expect results because your SEO scoring tool gave you a 95/100 score.
Google SERPs now promote content that embodies “E-E-A-T: expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.” When Google crawls your website, it’s no longer just looking for metrics relevant to search terms. Now it’s scrutinizing the content it scrapes in search of the highest value.
Hate to break it to ya, but that kinda content ain’t comin’ from no AI.
If you want to succeed with content in 2025, you will have to go deeper. Demonstrate your expertise. Show off your subject matter experts. Be the authoritative leader in your space. The days of competing on search engine keywords aren’t over but the strategies of yesteryear are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Is SEO useless? No, it’s still the gateway to getting the highest possible ranking in search engine results. However, traditional “SEO blogs” are probably useless. And if they were AI-generated without any human expertise sprinkled in, they’re almost definitely useless.
My recommendation for 2025: Keep producing SEO-driven content, but limit your top-of-funnel (ToFU) content to your most likely topics. Prospects want to go deeper into the funnel. Make content that keeps them informed and coming back for more.
There’s more to content strategy for 2025
Listen, I’m happy to share more of my thoughts, but it’s late and my fingers hurt. But if you like the information in this article and you want to talk more about it, I’d be happy to talk to you instead of continue to type.
Edify Content (that’s us) is an expert producer of technical content. Whether you need how-to articles about setting up DNS on boutique Linux distros or how to migrate data from SQL into a modern data lake platform or how to set up high performance computing (HPC) cluster orchestration, we’re your team. We write for B2B SaaS companies all day, every day, for, like, 8-12 hours (usually including weekends, but not Sundays because we don’t “roll on shabbos”).
We’re not marketers who write technical content. We’re technicians who have reverse engineered all this marketing mumbo jumbo. Don’t get stuck with content marketers who are just pretending to understand your product. I would likely have been a buyer of your technical product in a previous role or an exec at a company like yours. I know the problems you face and I know what your prospects want to hear.
Let’s talk content strategy, already! Book a call with me by sending me an email.
