What Does Effective B2C Content Marketing Look Like in 2025?

Why Content Marketing for B2C?
Content Marketing Strategies
Types of Content
Identifying Topics
Distribution & Optimization
Measuring Performance

B2C content marketing looks much different than it did just two years ago.

Traditional top-of-funnel content strategies that relied heavily on search traffic aren’t as effective as they once were. Since Google rolled out its AI Overviews feature last year, fewer people are clicking past the search results page. Other shoppers have stopped using Google entirely and now rely on AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT to research products.

In 2025, the best B2C content marketing teams acknowledge these realities and create content that serves strategic business goals, rather than traffic for the sake of traffic.

Let’s talk about what that kind of content marketing looks like in practice.

Why Is Content Marketing a Great Tool for B2C Brands?

Content marketing offers unique advantages for B2C brands, especially in comparison to other marketing channels that require ongoing investment to maintain visibility:

Builds long-term organic visibility: Unlike paid ads that stop delivering results the moment you stop paying, good content keeps bringing new customers months or years after publication.

Connects with potential customers during research: Content can get your products in front of a customer when they need it most.

Builds trust and authority: Educational content that genuinely helps people can establish credibility that influences purchasing decisions.

Supports other marketing channels: Content provides material for email newsletters, social media posts, and even paid ad campaigns, amplifying the value of your investment.

Serves multiple business objectives simultaneously: A single piece of content can work for your business in several ways at once, such as driving sales, capturing email subscribers for long-term nurturing, and earning backlinks to improve your website’s overall SEO performance.

Produces compounding results: Old content continues to generate results long after publication and supports your website’s credibility as people engage with it, allowing you to target more competitive (and valuable) keywords.

What Does a Strong B2C Content Marketing Strategy Look Like?

In 2025, a good B2C content marketing strategy balances multiple priorities:

Produces content that drives tangible business results
Builds long-term brand authority
Adapts to how consumers actually discover and evaluate products today

Focus on business outcomes over traffic

With supply costs continuing to rise, most marketing teams are operating on a tight budget. That means content marketing efforts have to contribute to meaningful business outcomes, whether it’s influencing purchase decisions, driving email sign-ups, or supporting other marketing channels.

Builds multi-channel visibility

An effective content marketing strategy creates content that reaches all of your customers wherever they research products. While traditional search traffic is down, high-quality content ensures AI search engines have authoritative information about your brand to reference.

Redefine content ROI

As approaches to content marketing change, so does the way we think about its impact. Instead of measuring the ROI of content strictly by organic traffic, we’re shifting our focus toward the revenue it helps to generate and the goals it helps our clients achieve.

What Types of Content Drive Results for B2C Businesses?

Different content formats work better for different types of businesses. That said, most B2C content marketing strategies include some combination of the following:

Sales-centric Content

Sales-centric content is designed to directly drive sales by helping people make buying decisions. This content targets high-intent audiences who are actively comparing options or ready to purchase.

Examples include competitor comparisons, buyer’s guides, or case studies. It can drive organic traffic by targeting popular keywords like “Harry’s Razors vs Dollar Shave Club” or “Goop alternatives”. However, sales-centric content is typically designed for a very small (but sales-qualified) readership.

Awareness Content

Awareness content introduces your brand to potential customers who may not yet recognize they need your products. This type of content often attracts customers to your website by ranking in search engines for pain-point-related search keywords.

For example, a wedding dress retailer might publish content about broad topics related to wedding planning. This allows them to build brand awareness with their target audience and is an opportunity to showcase some of their dresses.

We’ve changed our approach to awareness content significantly in recent years. We used to create awareness content primarily to drive top-of-funnel engagement (often we wouldn’t mention the product at all).

When we’re building awareness content these days, we look for topics that require searchers to click through to get the full value. From there, we create content that can’t be easily summarized in AI Overviews or quick answers.

For example, style galleries and other image-heavy content still work very well for ecommerce businesses. Google’s AI Overviews don’t include full-sized photos (yet), so we still see high clickthrough rates.

Thought Leadership Content

Thought leadership content establishes your brand as an authoritative voice in your industry. This content helps build credibility and trust that can influence purchasing decisions down the line, while also earning backlinks (valuable for SEO) and social media mentions.

In the B2C space, thought leadership content takes the form of expert roundups or survey reports. We often create thought leadership by sourcing quotes from our clients’ teams or other industry experts. Thought leadership content doesn’t typically drive immediate sales, but it builds a foundation of authority that makes your sales-centric content more effective when people encounter it later.

Note: I don’t mean to make it sound like every piece of content falls into one category or another. Some content drives awareness through search engines and takes a heavy-sell approach, for example. We refer to this as dual-purpose content.

B2C Content Creation: What Should Your Content Be About?

The biggest challenge for B2C content marketing isn’t creating content, but more so knowing what topics will actually help a business.

Here’s how we think about topic selection for our B2C clients:

Start with problems your customers actually have.

We always start by identifying specific pain points our clients’ customers are trying to solve.

What keeps them up at night? What issues do they complain about online?

Once we identify those problems, we research how people search for solutions. Someone dealing with jaw pain might search “why does my jaw hurt?” or “how to stop grinding teeth during sleep.”

This approach ensures we’re creating content around real customer needs rather than topics we think are related to the business. It also helps us collect target search terms that indicate an intent to solve a problem, which often translates to higher engagement and conversion rates.

Focus on topics that require click-through.

Successful B2C content focuses on topics that can’t be summarized in a search snippet.

Visual content works especially well for ecommerce businesses because buyers like to see the thing they’re buying. Step-by-step walkthroughs and comparison content tend to perform well, too, especially if they contain nuanced perspectives from experts.

Choose topics no more than one degree removed from your product.

The most effective B2C content addresses topics that naturally connect to your products without being overly promotional.

For instance, a company selling fitness equipment might publish articles like 7 Signs Your Home Gym Is Causing You Back Pain or How to Build a Workout Routine You Actually Stick To. With this type of content, you’re able to capture search traffic and demonstrate your knowledge, but there’s also an obvious opportunity to let the reader know about your products.

Research your competitors’ content.

Competitive SEO analysis is helpful for two reasons:

It shows you what content drives website traffic for competitors.
It reveals the gaps in your competitors’ content (i.e., what questions are your customers asking online that your competitors aren’t answering).

Ahrefs and SEMRush are both helpful SEO tools for keyword research and competitive analysis. But you can do this manually, too, just by typing a question into Google that you’re considering writing about and reading your competitors’ articles about that topic.

B2C Content Distribution & Optimization

The creation process is only part of the equation. How and where you distribute your content determines its ultimate impact on your business.

The most successful B2C content marketing campaigns optimize for multiple discovery channels while recognizing the unique requirements of each platform.

SEO

Search traffic may have declined for many B2C brands, but SEO remains one of the most valuable distribution channels for content. That said, successful SEO adapts to the ways search engines (and their users) have changed. This means:

Addressing any technical SEO issues that could prevent optimal performance.
Organizing the site architecture to improve UX and engagement.
Optimizing category pages (PLPs) and product pages (PDPs) to ensure they appear in search results.
Crafting strong meta titles for the site’s most important pages.
Creating content clusters around your target keywords to show that your site is a go-to source of information about those topics.
Finding ways to demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust (E-E-A-T) so that Google and other search engines want to rank your site.

Well-optimized content can ensure that your brand appears – and stays – at the top of Google in high-value searches.

AI Engine Optimization

While Google still dominates the search market, B2C companies are finding that traffic from AI search engines converts at a very high rate.

For instance, one of our ecommerce clients has seen a 7.25% purchase rate from AI traffic over the past 12 months.

Why so high?

Because AI users might ask several, sometimes dozens, of questions when researching a product. By the time they arrive at your site, they’ve often made up their mind that they want to buy your product.

The best way to appear in more AI conversations is to publish in-depth content that helps AI engines understand what problems your product solves. Detailed and well-organized case studies or product comparisons can put your brand on ChatGPT’s radar so they know exactly when to recommend your product to clients.

Tip: Try asking ChatGPT about your product category to see if it recommends your brand. If not, ask it why. We use this AI sentiment analysis process to help us improve our clients’ rankings in AI searches.

Email

SEO content and email marketing can have a symbiotic relationship. The content encourages your website readers to sign up for your mailing list, and you can promote website content within your newsletters.

Email provides the opportunity to build ongoing relationships with your subscribers over time, which is especially important for B2C brands with longer sales cycles.

Social Media

Social media is a channel where you can repurpose your best blog content, rather than creating entirely separate content. Expert quotes can turn into shareable infographics, how-to articles can become video demonstrations, and advice-based blog articles can serve as the inspiration for Reddit posts.

Paid Ads

While paid ads have a much lower clickthrough rate than organic SEO content, they can be a great way to drive traffic to a new website that’s struggling to rank in search engines.

They are also helpful for promoting sales-centric content in highly competitive searches.

How to Measure B2C Content Marketing Performance

The exact metrics you track will vary depending on your business goals, but here are some that we look at to measure content performance:

Direct conversions from content pages: How many purchases, sign-ups, and other conversions happened directly on content pages?
Content-assisted conversions: How many customers were influenced by a piece of content during their decision-making process?
Revenue from content pages: How much revenue came from content-assisted conversions?
Organic traffic value: How much money are your customers saving on paid ads? (We use Ahrefs’ OTV metric to track this).
Email subscriber acquisition: How many people sign up for the newsletter after reading a piece of content?
Brand mentions and social shares: Are people sharing this content on their own websites/social profiles or mentioning your brand elsewhere?
AI traffic: Are ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI search engines referring users to your site?
Branded search volume: Are more people searching for your brand over time?

Unlike B2B content marketing, which has to speak to multiple decision-makers and account for longer sales cycles, B2C content often drives immediate purchases from individual customers.

However, even some ecommerce purchase decisions take years (wedding dresses, for example), so it’s important to measure your content’s performance by its larger impact.

Conclusion

Here are the biggest takeaways for business-to-consumer brands regarding content marketing:

Stop chasing traffic. Effective B2C content serves real business goals, whether that’s lead generation, sales, or strategic brand building.
Create content that works across multiple channels. Your blog posts should fuel email campaigns, social media, and even paid ads.
Follow your audience to AI search engines. The future belongs to brands that optimize for every search engine, not just Google.

We work with B2C brands in ecommerce, insurance, and other markets to create content that drives real impact.

If you’re interested in learning more about our approach, we’d love to chat!