January 13, 2025 - 2:05pm - by

It’s the start of another new year, and for us marketing professionals, that means planning season.

Now that you’ve slept off the holiday hangover (literally or figuratively, I won’t judge), it’s time to think about the year ahead, and what that means for your content marketing.

I’ve put together this content marketing checklist for 2025, filled with ideas and insights for how to make the most of your efforts this year. 

1. Develop content themes

Depending on your business or industry, this can be an easy and energizing place to start your planning, or the complete opposite – but either way, it is always one of the most important.

Do you have any big plans for the year? New products launching? A rebrand or major campaign? A key event or season that drives a lot of what you do? These are great top-level priorities for your content. Not only are they the things you’ll want to talk about most, but they can become inspiration for broader supporting themes to fill your year of content.

For instance, your new product launch can complement a broader theme of innovation or quality. Your end-of-season sale could be supported by a broader theme of providing value. Or you could pair the launch of a capital fundraising campaign with evergreen content themed around impact and community.

All of this is a lot more challenging, however, if your business or organization doesn’t have much new or exciting to talk about. Without big campaigns, sales or announcements, it can feel tough to keep things fresh and relevant.

But there’s good news – if you aren’t finding content inspiration by looking within your company, you can look outside. Even when we aren’t changing, the world around us certainly is. Look around your industry for changes and trends to respond to. Consider your customers and think about what is changing in their world. Get curious and try zooming in and out on different aspects of your business, industry, customer base, or even the broader economy and world.

2. Identify key topics and keywords

Once you have your themes outlined, it’s time to think about key topics and keywords to use in your content marketing.

Starting with the themes you’ve established, some of these can (and probably will) also be terms and phrases that are common and specific to your industry. Put on your SEO hat and think about how people might be searching for the kind of content you’re making, and use variations on those topics and keywords to try and capture that in a thorough way. 

To really go above and beyond with your keywords, you should also be doing some research. Get onto the various platforms where you are publishing your content, follow some accounts within your industry doing good work, and look for things like:

• What topics or keywords are getting good engagement on other accounts?
• Is there a new trend or topic in your industry that you’ve missed?
• Are there any emerging topics within your content themes that you should include? 

3. Research your audiences

A common mistake I see in marketing is people not researching their audiences often enough.

So you already defined your audience back in 2008? That don’t impress me much. (Sorry, Shania Twain…)

Like I said in our first point in this content marketing checklist – even if your organization hasn’t changed, your customers, donors or clients might have. 

This doesn’t need to be done every year, necessarily, but I do recommend keeping this on your checklist every year, and at least considering if your audience needs an update. Ask yourself (or your team, or client) the following:

• Is our audience aging?
• Do we have a new, younger cohort aging into our product/service/audience?
• If our audience has grown, who are the new people?
• If our audience has shrunk, are there people we want to win back?
• Where is our audience online, and has that changed?

That last one is probably the most important, and the one that could be changing most often. One of the best content marketing tips I can give you is to research your audience’s media diet – meaning where they are consuming content, what kind of content they’re consuming, when, and how much. 

There are many ways you can learn these things about your audience, from surveying your existing customer base, to social media analytics, to research done by other firms available online. 

Once you’ve answered these questions and done some research, you can better focus your content themes, and prioritize the channels and formats that best suit your content strategy.

Which leads us to…

4. Prioritize formats and channels

Hopefully you already have some idea of what platforms, content types and formats work well for you and connect with your audience. But once you’ve done the work in the checklist items above, you may find yourself wanting to shift some effort from one platform to another, or consider adding a new channel or type of content.

Remember, there are many types of media you can include in your content marketing. To name just a few:

• Blogs
• Video content
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• Case studies and white papers 

Something we’re thinking about this year is the value of the “Twitter alternative” platforms, Threads and Bluesky, but for you it may be something different. 

We're here to help

If you’ve read this far, you clearly see the value in being proactive and intentional about your content marketing for 2025. But maybe your team doesn’t have the time, capacity or skills to really make the most of your content marketing. 

We’re here to help. Book a discovery call today to see how our team of content marketing experts can help you make the most of your content and digital marketing this year!

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