The short version: content marketing covers anything you create to attract, educate, or nurture an audience without directly pitching them, and that includes blog posts, email, video, podcasts, case studies, social posts, lead magnets, sponsored content, and even the FAQ page on your website. Most small business owners think it means “blogging and maybe Instagram.” It’s a much bigger bucket than that, and knowing what’s in it stops you wasting money on the wrong bits.
The full list: what falls under content marketing
I get asked this question at almost every workshop I run. Someone puts their hand up and says “so is content marketing just the blog?” No. It’s everything you publish that isn’t a straight advert. Here’s the real list, broken into the categories that matter.
Written content
This is the biggest and oldest category. It includes blog posts, articles, guest posts on other sites, white papers, ebooks, case studies, buyer’s guides, comparison pages, and yes, your FAQ page and product descriptions. A well-written FAQ page is content marketing doing quiet, unglamorous work every single day. A 1,200 to 1,500 word blog post, done well, takes me between four and six hours from research to published, and that’s after 15 years of doing this. If you’re budgeting 45 minutes for a blog post, you’re not doing content marketing, you’re doing a to-do list item.
Video and visual content
Explainer videos, behind-the-scenes clips, YouTube tutorials, infographics, slide decks on LinkedIn, before-and-after images. A 90-second video answering one customer question (“how does your pricing work”) often outperforms a 2,000 word page for the same query, because people would rather watch than read when they’re deciding, not researching. Video is content marketing even when it’s shot on a phone in your kitchen, which most of mine still are.
Audio content
Podcasts, audio versions of blog posts, voice notes shared on LinkedIn or Instagram Stories. A weekly podcast is a serious commitment (plan on two to three hours per episode including editing), but a five-minute voice memo answering a client question and posted as an audio clip costs you almost nothing and still counts.
Email content
Newsletters, nurture sequences, welcome emails, re-engagement campaigns. This is the category small business owners underrate most. Your email list is the one audience you own, not rented from an algorithm, and a weekly or fortnightly newsletter is one of the highest-return content formats there is. I’ve had clients get more enquiries from a 400-word Tuesday email than from a month of Instagram posts.
Social media content
Posts, carousels, Reels, LinkedIn articles, polls, comments you leave on other people’s posts. Yes, comments count. A useful comment on someone else’s LinkedIn post, seen by their audience, is content marketing on borrowed real estate.
Earned and paid-adjacent content
Guest posts, podcast guest appearances, PR mentions, and sponsored content all sit under the umbrella too, even though money or a favour is often involved. If you’ve ever wondered where the line is between an advert and content, sponsored content is a useful test case, because it’s paid but still has to read like editorial to work. I’ve written about what sponsored content costs and how blogs price it if you’re weighing that route.
Interactive and tool-based content
Calculators, quizzes, templates, checklists, downloadable spreadsheets. These are some of the highest-converting content formats because they ask for very little (an email address) in exchange for something immediately useful. A pricing calculator on a services site can outperform a blog post ten to one on lead capture, because it does the thinking for the visitor instead of asking them to read.
Case studies and customer stories
Often forgotten, always effective. A proper case study with real numbers (before and after, timeframe, cost) does more selling than almost anything else on your site, because it’s proof, not a claim.
Repurposed and AI-assisted content
Turning one podcast episode into six LinkedIn posts, three email snippets, and a short video counts as content marketing too, and it’s the category most small businesses waste the most time ignoring. If you’re using AI tools to speed this up, that’s fine, and it’s increasingly the norm, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. I’d start with how to start using AI in your marketing this month before you plug a chatbot into your entire content calendar, and if you’re worried about search penalties, it’s worth reading whether AI-generated content is safe to publish without a Google penalty before you hit publish on anything a machine wrote for you.
What doesn’t come under content marketing
This is where I think most guides on this topic go soft, so let me be blunt. A Facebook ad with a discount code is not content marketing, it’s an advert wearing a content costume. A press release announcing your own product launch, sent purely to get coverage, is PR, not content marketing, even though the two overlap. Your terms and conditions page is not content marketing no matter how nicely you word it. And a piece written entirely to rank for a keyword, with no actual answer inside it, isn’t content marketing either, it’s SEO filler, and Google is increasingly good at spotting the difference, which is exactly why the line between AI-assisted and AI-generated-with-no-human-input matters so much right now.
A real example from my own business
Ten years ago I had over 300,000 followers on Twitter and I believed that was my content marketing strategy. It wasn’t. It was distribution. The content marketing was the blog posts, the guides, the webinars I recorded that I then pushed out to that audience. When Twitter’s reach collapsed for everyone (not just me, this happened site-wide as the platform’s algorithm changed and organic reach cratered), the follower count became almost worthless overnight because I’d confused the audience with the asset. The actual asset was the archive of content and the email list built from it. I rebuilt my entire visibility strategy around owned channels after that, blog, email, LinkedIn, because platforms you don’t control can change the rules on you with no warning. That’s not a hypothetical warning I’m passing on secondhand. I lived it, and it cost me a chunk of my income for the best part of a year while I rebuilt.
The bit about time and cost that nobody wants to say out loud
Here’s the uncomfortable truth most content marketing guides skip past: content marketing is not the cheap option people think it is. It’s often billed as the budget-friendly alternative to advertising, and technically the cash outlay can be lower, but the time cost is enormous and almost nobody accounts for it. If you write your own blog post, film your own video, and send your own newsletter, and you value your own hour at even £40, a single week of “free” content marketing can easily represent £300 to £500 of your time. Multiply that across a year and you’ve spent the equivalent of a part-time salary on content, whether or not a single invoice reflects it. Small business owners routinely underprice their own effort here, then wonder why content marketing “isn’t working,” when really it’s working at the rate they’ve allowed themselves to be paid, which is often nothing.
The fix isn’t to abandon content marketing. It’s to pick fewer formats and do them, rather than spreading thin across six channels and doing all of them at a level that convinces nobody. One good newsletter beats five mediocre social channels.
A simple 5-step plan to choose what to do
- Step 1: Pick one owned channel first. Email or blog, not social. Social is rented land.
- Step 2: Audit where your last ten customers came from. Ask them. Don’t guess. This tells you which content format is already working, even by accident.
- Step 3: Commit to a frequency you can hold for 90 days. One email a fortnight is better than a weekly email that dies in week four.
- Step 4: Build one piece of interactive or tool-based content. A checklist, a calculator, a template. These convert better than almost anything else and take one afternoon to build.
- Step 5: Repurpose everything at least three ways. One blog post becomes an email, three social posts, and one short video script. This is where most small businesses leave the easiest gains on the table.
If you’re doing this with a small team and want to speed up the repurposing step specifically, it’s worth understanding what prompt engineering is and whether your team needs to learn it, because the gap between someone who can write a decent AI prompt and someone who can’t is now a real productivity gap, not a nice-to-have skill.
Why this breakdown matters more than the definition
Knowing the dictionary definition of content marketing doesn’t help you run a business. Knowing which of these fifteen or so formats you can realistically sustain for a year does. I’d rather a client commit to one newsletter and one case study a quarter, done well, than promise me blogging, podcasting, video, and daily social posts and quietly abandon three of them by March. Content marketing works on compounding, not bursts, and compounding needs consistency more than it needs volume.
Frequently asked questions
Does content marketing include paid social ads?
No. A paid ad promoting a product or discount is advertising, not content marketing, even if it appears in a social feed. The line is intent: content marketing informs or entertains first and sells second; an ad sells first. Boosted or paid distribution of a useful piece (a paid promotion of a free guide, for instance) sits in a grey area but is still built on a content marketing asset underneath.
Is SEO the same thing as content marketing?
No, but they overlap heavily. SEO is the discipline of making content findable in search; content marketing is the discipline of creating something worth finding. You can have great SEO on thin, unhelpful content, and you can have brilliant content that ranks nowhere because it’s badly structured. The two need each other but they’re not interchangeable.
How much should a small business spend on content marketing per month?
There’s no single right number, but a rough small business benchmark is 10 to 15 percent of your total marketing budget if you’re doing it mostly in-house, rising to 25 to 40 percent if you’re outsourcing writing, video, or strategy to freelancers or an agency. If your total marketing spend is £1,000 a month, expect to invest £250 to £400 of that in content if you want it to move the needle rather than tick a box.
Do case studies and testimonials count as content marketing?
Yes, and they’re among the most underused formats. A case study with specific numbers (timeframe, cost, outcome) does more to persuade a hesitant buyer than almost any blog post, because it’s evidence rather than opinion. If you have three or four happy clients, turning their stories into proper case studies is often the single highest-return content project a small business can do this quarter.
Further reading
This goes deeper into tools to create interactive content.
