Content Marketing Strategies Best Practices 2025

Answer engines, like Google’s AI Overview and Perplexity, have caused some anxiety in the content marketing world. It’s feared that they’ll divert traffic—why would people click on a link when they can get the answer on the page? It’s a fair concern, but still, industry experts say that they’re integrating AEO strategies with their SEO. 

Zero-click searches—answers that appear directly on the SERP without having to click—might diminish traffic to your site, but they provide value in other ways. The biggest benefit to optimizing for zero-click searches is earning trust and authority. While readers might not click on the link, they will take note (even unconsciously) of your brand. As your website appears in more zero-click searches, you’ll earn brand recognition and gain trust.

You can also strategize your content to entice a click, even if the answer is supplied on the SERP. For example, Google’s AI Overview provides links to the articles it references alongside its answer. If you create a title that promises more of a deep dive, you could still earn traffic from a zero-click response. 

There’s so much potential to earn traffic from answer engines. By investing in AEO strategies, you can tap into this new marketing opportunity.

Marketing in 2025 is all about cultivating an emotional connection between your company and its customers. People want to support organizations that align with their values, and they’re even willing to pay more if they feel the company is doing some good. Tap into that by going beyond selling products to share your company’s journey.

Storytelling drives sales by building trust, offering transparency, and creating a sense of fulfillment when your customers purchase your products. When you share your story effectively, your audience will feel as though they’re part of something great.

Because of the rise of social media marketing and short form video, audiences have become accustomed to intimacy; our phones provide a window into our lives and businesses, and to connect with younger audiences, it’s expected that you keep those windows open. In this way, storytelling is no longer a handy marketing trick; it’s an expectation. If you keep the window closed, it may garner suspicion. 

Storytelling doesn’t just require an ability to craft a tale. You must create a story that’s worth being told. The younger generations care deeply about social issues and the environment, and you need to ensure that your company aligns with these values before authentically sharing your journey.

Anyone who’s worked on SEO strategies knows E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust). Content that wants to rank well has to exhibit these qualities. While this still rings true, the advent of mass produced AI content has placed particular importance on the two Es.

The more sophisticated LLMs become, the better they are at producing passable generic content. It’s not going to blow your pants off, but it can answer basic queries.

In response to this, search engines are placing higher value on articles that can display experience and expertise—two things that LLMs can never have. Successful content in 2025 often uses first person pronouns, expresses opinion, and addresses knowledge gaps.

Interestingly, it’s opened up new content marketing avenues through Reddit and LinkedIn. Since the infamous March 2024 Google update, Reddit posts and LinkedIn articles have consistently earned top SERP ranking, offering proof of concept that the Es are the quality raters to shoot for.

Content teams should brainstorm deep topics that require expert opinion. They can then either conduct interviews or ghostwrite articles based on thought leaders’ expertise. As they prepare their content calendars, they should prioritize deep dive topics over titles like “What Are Carbon Emissions?” since the latter will be nearly impossible to rank for over the cacophony of AI generated posts.

Today’s successful strategies focus on publishing one or two high-high quality pieces per month rather than dozens of generic blog posts and articles. With LLMs allowing some websites to publish dozens of articles a week, the only way to compete is to do the opposite: spend lots of time researching and structuring one or two outstanding articles that address knowledge gaps and provide major value to readers.

Although this is more work, it offers an amazing opportunity to elevate your brand. Answer engines and AI marketing data give us a deeper understanding of our audiences and their pain points than we’ve ever had before. It allows us to hyper-personalize our content for a more targeted audience. When you’re speaking to a smaller group of potential clients, you want to make sure your messaging is spot on by slowing down your content production to make sure that each piece is incredibly well thought out.

This cannot be done with AI. Sure, you can use LLMs to help with the research and brainstorming process, but the actual content production must be done by professionals. This is where hiring a professional writer is not only a good idea, but essential for the success of your content strategy.