Content marketing is the work of regularly creating and distributing useful content for a specific audience, to lead it towards an action that matters to the business: a quote request, a purchase, a renewal. The reference definition comes from the Content Marketing Institute, which talks about "valuable, relevant, and consistent content" to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Everyone knows the theory by now.
On 10 October 2026 we read Google UK's first page, on mobile, for "what is content marketing". Several snippets repeat the Content Marketing Institute's definition almost word for word, and the pages are old: of the seven that show a date, the oldest is from January 2016 and the newest from July 2025. Only one of the nine organic results, b4b Marketing, is on a .co.uk domain.
The mistakes we find most often on the sites we analyse are always the same:
- calling the news section content marketing, the one with last year's trade show;
- counting articles published instead of enquiries received;
- writing about what interests the company, not about what the customer is searching for.
We see it from the inside, on the projects we manage. Macropix, an Italian maker of LED walls, has received 2,906 contact requests from Google Ads since 2018 and today has 79 of its 135 tracked keywords on page one of Google Italy, with pages built around products and installations, not the company name.
Sunscape, which develops solar farms in Italy and looks for land to build them on, went from 329 to 5,809 organic impressions a month in six months with pages written for a single reader: the owner of a field.
And what does that have to do with the definition?
Quite a lot, because in both cases the content was written for a person who has a decision to make, and it was measured in enquiries. Below you'll find:
- a three-question test to see whether what you publish is content marketing;
- how the path from search to enquiry works, with timings measured on two clients;
- a table that separates content marketing, advertising and SEO;
- a test on seven UK searches showing who gets cited in AI Overviews (and who doesn't);
- five steps to get started from what you already have in Search Console.
Let's start.
What content marketing is (and a three-question test to recognise it)
Content marketing is a strategy, not a format: articles, videos, newsletters and guides are the tools, while the audience and the business goal are the substance. Three conditions follow from the Content Marketing Institute's definition, and you can check them on any piece of content.
- Is there a defined audience? Not "businesses", but "the purchasing manager of a company that needs to buy an LED wall for a meeting room".
- Is it consistent? A one-off piece is a campaign. Content marketing is an archive that grows and gets updated.
- Is there a measurable action? An enquiry, a sign-up, a quote request. If nobody can say what should happen after someone reads it, the content has no job.
Three yeses: it's content marketing. Even a single no: it's communication, which has its value but is judged by other criteria.
| Content | Defined audience | Consistency | Measurable action | Is it content marketing? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| News post "We were at the trade show at the NEC" | No | No | No | No |
| Social post with Christmas greetings | No | Yes | No | No |
| Guide "how many acres do you need for a solar farm" for landowners | Yes | Yes, if it's part of a series | Yes, valuation request | Yes |
| Page with a B2B manufacturer's installation case studies | Yes | Yes, it grows with every project | Yes, quote request | Yes |
| Monthly newsletter with product news | It depends | Yes | Depends on tracking | Only if measured |
And don't social media posts count?
They count if they pass the test. In a Censuswide survey for Markel Direct of 501 UK tradespeople and small business owners who use social media to market their business, published in July 2026, 84% say they win some work through social media, but only 33% say their main goal is generating leads. Using social media isn't the same as doing content marketing. The ones doing it know who is reading and what they want the reader to do next.
Where it comes from (and why a tractor explains it better than Spotify)
Content marketing predates the internet: it starts when a company decides to publish information that helps its customers do their job, instead of talking about its product. The two most quoted examples are also the most instructive.
John Deere has published The Furrow since 1895. It's a magazine for farmers, with advice on growing crops, not a tractor catalogue. According to the history published by John Deere itself, it had a circulation of 1.4 million in 1912, and today it reaches farmers in more than 100 countries in over 20 languages.
The Michelin Guide was given away for two decades. The Michelin brothers, who had founded the company in 1889, handed it out to motorists to get them travelling more (and wearing out more tyres). Only in 1920 did the new guide go on sale, at seven francs, as the guide's official website recounts.
On Google UK, the AI Overview for "content marketing examples" opens with Spotify Wrapped, then lists Red Bull, Coca-Cola's "Share a Coke", Blendtec, Canva and HubSpot (10 October 2026). Spotify Wrapped is the modern favourite.
So why prefer the tractor?
Because an ordinary company can copy The Furrow. You don't need a multinational's budget to tell your customers how to work better: you need to know what their job asks of them. It's what a small manufacturer does when it publishes a guide to the tolerances of a machining process.
How it works: from search to enquiry (with timings measured on two clients)
Content marketing works by taking a person from a generic question to choosing a supplier, with different content for each stage. There are three stages: discovering the problem, comparing solutions, deciding.
- Discovery: the person searches for the problem, not the supplier. They need guides and clear answers.
- Comparison: they search for categories and alternatives. They need comparisons, indicative prices, selection criteria.
- Decision: they look for proof. They need case studies, installations, other customers' numbers.
It looks like the diagram in any textbook.
The difference lies in the words customers actually use. Of the nine keywords that bring Macropix the most qualified enquiries, none contains the company name: the biggest is "ledwall" (LED wall), with 4,400 searches a month on Google Italy, and the others are "schermo pubblicitario" (advertising screen), "totem led" (LED totem) and "ledwall outdoor" (outdoor LED wall). The method is set out in our guide to SEO for manufacturers.
And how long does it take?
Longer than a quote suggests. On Sunscape, starting from zero in March 2026, keywords on page one went from 1 to 38 out of 143 in six months, and monthly organic clicks from 46 to 195. On Macropix, "monitor pubblicitario" (advertising monitor) climbed from position 88 to position 2 in five years. The five phases and their timings are in the article on how long SEO takes to work.
Content marketing, advertising and SEO: what changes (line by line)
Advertising buys attention, content marketing earns it, and SEO helps people who are searching find your pages. They're three different jobs that often end up in the same budget.
| Item | Content marketing | Advertising (e.g. Google Ads) | SEO |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you pay for | Hours of work and expertise | Clicks or impressions | Hours of work on the site and content |
| When the first enquiries arrive | Months | Days | Months |
| What happens if you stop paying | The content stays and keeps working | Enquiries stop | Rankings drop slowly |
| Channels | Website, newsletter, LinkedIn, video, sales materials | Search network, Shopping, paid social | Google, Bing, AI answers |
| Example from our projects | Macropix installation case study pages | Contesini: 299 enquiries at €7.20 each | Sunscape: from 1 to 38 keywords on page one |
The Contesini Consulenze case, an Italian consultancy, shows the strength of advertising: 299 contact requests at €7.20 each, starting from zero. Its weakness is row three of the table. Switch the ads off and the flow stops.
With SEO the relationship is closer: the two disciplines meet on the page, and we've set out the differences in method in our comparison of SEO and content marketing.
How much content actually works (almost none, and the data shows it)
Most published content brings no results at all. Of around 14 billion pages analysed by Ahrefs, 96.55% get no traffic from Google, according to the study published in 2023 (which is why the old line content is king needs reading to the end).
We checked our own site too, and it didn't fare better. Between 1 May and 20 August 2026, 71 of the 96 pages on the Visilay website with impressions didn't get a single click (Search Console data, mostly Italian-language pages; the method for running the same count is in our content marketing plan built on the numbers).
It isn't just us. The Content Marketing Institute's 2026 report on 1,015 B2B marketers, mostly North American, finds that:
- only 12% rate their marketing as very effective, meaning above target;
- the most cited difficulty, named by 40%, is creating content that prompts action;
- 33% can't measure its effectiveness;
- 95% work at a company that uses artificial intelligence applications.
Read the last two lines together.
Almost everyone produces more thanks to AI, and a third can't say what it returns. More content without measurement means more pages in the 96.55%. And every article has a cost: in the UK a company blog post runs from about £35 to £750, as we worked out from hours of work in the article on how much content marketing costs.
How many pages on your site don't bring in a single click?
On ours it was 71 out of 96. We start from your Search Console: we count the pages that bring nothing, find the customer questions that no page answers, and decide what to write, what to update and what to remove.
Book a strategy consultationWhat AI Overviews have changed (our test on seven UK searches)
Searches for "what is content marketing" now find the answer before the results: in a summary written by Google with artificial intelligence, the AI Overview. To see who gets cited inside it, we ran a test.
Method: 10 October 2026, Google UK, smartphone, seven searches on the topic, collected with DataForSEO. For the six searches where the summary loaded in full, we compared the sources it cited with the first eight organic results on the same page.
| Search | AI Overview | Sources cited | Of which YouTube videos | Cited websites found in the first 8 organic results |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| content marketing | Yes | not captured | not captured | not captured |
| what is content marketing | Yes | 10 | 2 | 0 of 8 |
| content marketing definition | Yes | 10 | 2 | 0 of 8 |
| content marketing meaning | Yes | 10 | 2 | 7 of 8 |
| content marketing examples | Yes | 6 | 1 | 2 of 4 |
| content marketing strategy | Yes | 11 | 2 | 4 of 9 |
| b2b content marketing | Yes | 6 | 2 | 0 of 4 |
Three things stand out.
The summary appears on all seven searches. Anyone looking for the definition reads it before they see a link.
On the three definition searches, Google cites the same ten sources, whatever ranks below. They are the Content Marketing Institute, Vanguard UK, Mailchimp, Oracle, the American Marketing Association, Wikipedia, Adobe, Study.com and two YouTube videos. On "content marketing meaning" seven of those eight websites are also on page one. On "what is content marketing" and "content marketing definition", none of them is in the top eight, where StoryChief, Neil Patel and Smart Insights sit instead. Ranking first and being cited, on these searches, are two separate leaderboards.
Video is there, but it's a minority. On the six summaries we captured, YouTube accounts for 11 of 53 citations, from one to two per search.
And how much does it cost in clicks?
Quite a lot, although the available figures are from the US. The Pew Research Center tracked 900 US adults in March 2025: with an AI summary on the page, people clicked a result on 8% of visits, against 15% without one. A 2026 Ahrefs study of 300,000 keywords, desktop data, measured a 58% lower click-through rate for the first result where an AI Overview appears. We've collected the wider effects in the article on zero-click searches.
The practical consequence: the definition no longer brings traffic to anyone, once Google writes it. What brings traffic and citations is what the summary can't summarise: your data, your cases, your measurements. It's also why we work on visibility in AI answers starting from proprietary content.
Which content to use (one per stage, not all at once)
Content marketing has plenty of formats, but each stage of the journey only needs a few. The choice depends on what the reader is trying to understand.
| Stage | What the reader is looking for | Formats that answer |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery | Understanding the problem | Guides, answer articles, short videos |
| Comparison | Understanding the alternatives | Comparisons, price tables, selection criteria, webinars |
| Decision | Trusting a supplier | Case studies with numbers, installation pages, demos |
| After purchase | Using the product well | Newsletters, manuals, tutorials |
B2B has an extra constraint: several people decide, and each one looks for something different. We cover this in our guide to B2B content marketing. The full list of formats, including the ones AI tools cite most, is in the article on types of content.
Who it doesn't work for (and what to do instead)
Content marketing doesn't work when you need enquiries within a month, or when nobody searches for what you sell. In both cases there's a better tool.
If you need enquiries now, you need ads. For Valore Solare, an Italian solar company, the first full month, October 2025, brought 9 enquiries at €212 each; the Google Ads channel went on to reach 223 enquiries a month. No editorial plan would have delivered those numbers in that time.
If nobody searches for the product, the content has to create the demand, and then the channels are LinkedIn, newsletters and events, not Google. In the Content Marketing Institute report, 76% of B2B marketers rate LinkedIn as the most effective channel for thought leadership.
And if the blog already exists but brings nothing? Before adding articles, ask whether it still makes sense to keep it; the answer is in the article on the company blog.
How to start in five steps (from Search Console)
The first step in content marketing isn't writing: it's counting what you already have. These are the five steps we follow when a company asks us to get started.
- Export your pages from Search Console, sort them by clicks and count how many have had zero in the last three months. That's your real starting point.
- Collect questions from your sales team. The ten questions they hear most often on the phone are worth more than any tool.
- Pick a goal you can count in enquiries, with a date: twenty qualified enquiries a month within twelve months, not "more visibility".
- Start with one format only and do it well: for a B2B company, it's almost always case studies with numbers.
- Measure enquiries, not visits. The metrics to watch are in our guide to SEO KPIs.
If you'd like someone to do it with you, that's the work we do in our SEO and content service: we start from the site's data, not from the editorial calendar.
Content marketing FAQs
No. The blog is one possible channel. A newsletter, a video tutorial, a case study with numbers or the pages describing a manufacturer's installations are content marketing too, if they're designed for a specific audience and measured in enquiries.
Yes. The Furrow, the magazine John Deere has published since 1895, shows it: you need to understand your customer's work, not a multinational's budget. For a small business, the starting point is the questions customers ask the sales team.
It depends: on Google it takes months, and on a solar project that started from zero we saw keywords on page one go from 1 to 38 in six months. A newsletter or LinkedIn can bring a response within days, but only if there's already an audience.
It depends on who you ask, but generally inbound marketing is the overall method of getting customers to find you instead of chasing them, and content marketing is the part of it that produces the content. Inbound also covers forms, automation and lead management.
Yes, but what's worth publishing changes. On seven UK searches on the topic, the AI Overview appeared every time and answered the definition on its own. What stays useful is what the summary can't summarise: your own data, cases with numbers, original tests.
In short
A specific audience.
Consistent content, one per stage.
An action you can count in enquiries.
Data nobody else has.
There's one thing the industry rarely says: on these searches Google has already taken the definition of content marketing, and it summarises it by citing the same ten sources whatever ranks underneath. What it can't take is the archive of numbers only your company owns: real lead times, average prices, the questions that reach your sales team, your customers' results. A company that publishes that archive is doing content marketing. One that rewrites the Wikipedia definition is adding to the 96.55%.
Until next time!
