Let Your Customers Lead: Exploring the Best Content Strategy for 2025

February 12, 2025 | by Jack Pittas

Is your content performance stagnant, fading, or not generating anything "sellable?"  

I see this a lot. It's why companies ultimately decide to eliminate blogs, whitepapers, social posts, etc., from their marketing strategy altogether.

They create, create, and create, yet can't seem to get eyes on their brand. In the best-case scenario, they might have a solid audience but can't convert that into revenue.   

So what's the problem?

Bad writing? Is there a technical SEO issue? Or are you just not publishing enough?

How about none of the above?

More often than not, the root cause of your issues is actually your content ideas and topics — more specifically, how you're generating them.

Content Needs to Be Led by the Market, Not the Marketing Team

When companies sit down to create their content calendar, it usually starts with a marketing analysis:

What are people searching or asking on Google? (SEO research)

What are our competitors creating and posting? (competitor analysis)

What are SMEs in the industry saying on LinkedIn? (Social monitoring)

Then, based on common trends, they have pillars and topics to create around. This is a "marketing-led" approach.

The problems?

If everyone in your industry generates the same content using the same method, how do you stand out?
SEO is getting funky with Google's changes and Gemini; it's getting tough to compete with larger, more authoritative domains on high-volume KWs.
Customer needs and knowledge gaps change fast; topics relevant can become obsolete within years or even months.

Put yourself in audience mode for a second. If you have a problem you're trying to solve, you'll seek out information that's useful, applicable, and easy to digest.

And creating "useful" content could be as easy as picking up the phone and calling your customers.

Customer-Led Content Strategies: What it Looks Like

With content, I'm a believer in the adages: "It is better to be different than better." and that "being first is better than being perfect."

Moving from a marketing-led to a customer-led content strategy solves both of these problems. 

It literally means sitting down (probably on a Zoom call) with customers (your audience) and learning all you can about them via interviews or surveys:

What stressors within their job are keeping them up at night?

What are their top organizational and personal goals for 2025?

Which pain points and roadblocks are getting in the way of those goals?

Are there alternative solutions they're looking at to overcome industry challenges and achieve their goals?

What does their buying and decision-making process look like?

What are some topics they'd like information about that could help with their role but can't find?

What are some of the biggest misconceptions about their industry or role?

Can they give an example of content they've consumed recently that was particularly helpful? Why was it impactful?

See what I did here? I didn't focus on a competitor's blog or rely on what was searched on Google last year. I went right to the buyer.

From there, spot the buzzwords. Look for common trends and concerns within these conversations to create around.

Examples of Customer-Led Content Ideas

Industries evolve, and interests change. And by asking the right questions, you might come up with topics you never thought were useful to your audience. I've seen this firsthand:

A business selling security software to GovCons learns that a particular component of CMMC 2.0 is stressing FSOs out the most.
A company providing IT modernization and pricing tools to the supply chain discovered that a CRO's biggest stress is not having a quick-fix idea for revenue growth at board meetings.
An MSP uncovers the top 5 technical issues keeping remote employees from staying productive.

And guess what? These led to some excellent content pillars because they were generated by your audience for your audience.

Go Customer-First, Everything Else Second, Then Watch Your Brand Stick Out

Choosing a customer-led content strategy for 2025 puts you on a path to success. Why?

You'll stand out with content no one else is doing (at least not initially) because competitors are unaware it's valuable to the audience.
You'll be "first to the punch" by publishing original information and ideas.

Once the pillars are set, you can focus on content format (eBooks, blog post, video, etc), structure, tone, and those other areas like distribution, SEO, the keywords someone might use to search for these answers, and potential syndication campaigns. 

Customer-first, everything else second.   