Content Marketing Experiments That Worked for Us in 2024

We’ve turned our content program into something of an R&D lab this year. With a full-time, dedicated marketing role at our agency, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to test new ideas before recommending them to clients.

As we wrap up 2024, I want to share what’s worked well for us this year, so you can use these insights to inform your 2025 content strategy. (And I get to do a “year in review” without calling it that. 😊)

Communities as a Sounding Board

We’ve relied on communities like LinkedIn and Superpath as sounding boards for testing and sourcing content ideas. Two tactics worked particularly well:

1. Run a poll to gather insights, then reach out to respondents personally to ask follow-up questions or schedule an interview.
2. Reach out to folks with hot content marketing takes and then invite them for a conversation or guest post.

“Blockbuster Blogs: How Breakthrough Ideas Are Born” is a great example. We tested potential headlines in a LinkedIn poll before writing the article. The feedback steered us away from using the term “blogbusters” in the final piece and connected us with readers who became sources.

Other pieces that benefited from this approach in 2024:

• “The Content Attribution Survival Guide”: A deep dive into content attribution, packed with insights from people who responded to a LinkedIn poll on that topic.
• “How Jess Cook Turns Content and PR into a Power Couple at Island”: A Q&A interview with Island’s Head of Content & Comms about content and PR, based on a LinkedIn post she shared on the subject.

Content Formats Unlocked by AI

AI allowed us to experiment with content formats that previously weren’t viable. Such pieces would have been too time-consuming relative to their expected longevity and traffic potential.

Two formats proved particularly valuable:

1. “Newsy” articles responding to industry updates and trends, like “Google’s March 2024 Search Update: The Battle Against AI-Generated Content.” We created this piece in just a few hours with the help of AI research tools.
2. Q&A interview articles, like “Why Megan Morreale Thinks Content Marketing As We Know It Is Dying (And What’s Next).” Previously, transcription and processing the interview would have taken hours, but AI now handles most of the workload, making this content type viable for our blog.

The results: our two items about Google’s updates attracted around 5,000 new visitors — much more than we expected. And the Q&A interviews got shared by most interviewees across their networks (which is what we hoped for but weren’t sure of).

💡 Speaking of AI unlocks: We’ve been using AI writing tool Lex’s integration with (Convert)Kit to create our newsletters. Lex takes the style, content, and metrics of your previous newsletters directly from Kit and uses those references to spin up your next email from input you provide (e.g., an article draft or an outline).

Unconventional Content Concepts

We launched several initiatives this year that were unconventional in their format or in their approach:

1. Content marketing budgeting transparency: We added an option in several blog articles allowing readers to request an emailed pricing breakdown (”What would it cost to produce something like this for your blog?”).
2. Revive: A free tool we built that analyzes decaying content in your library based on your GA4 data. Revive identifies which articles have lost the most organic traffic, helping you prioritize your content refresh efforts.

Each of these concepts has generated more than 500 new email addresses for our newsletter (and both launched in the second half of the year).

Multiple Thought Leadership Voices

We’ve always aimed to share forward-thinking, insightful, and sometimes contrarian perspectives on content marketing on the Animalz blog.

This year, articles like “Stay Strong: Never Let AI Fill Your Blank Page,” “Blockbuster Blogs: How Breakthrough Ideas Are Born,” and “Welcome to the Distribution-First Era, Where Strategy Starts With Channels and Ends With ROI” hit that mark.

But there was a twist in our 2024 approach: not all thought leadership came from us. We also featured insights and hot takes from people who aren’t on the Animalz team (anymore), such as Mark Rogers, Megan Morreale, and Jess Cook.

Some of our most impactful pieces this year:

• “Stay Strong: Never Let AI Fill Your Blank Page” really resonated with many content marketers. We still see people share and mention the article, and it’s an important reference internally for how we think about AI usage.
• “Distribute Ideas, Not Content“ (by Mark) was one of our most successful articles this year and still gets mentioned regularly in online conversations and on sales calls.
• The Q&A interviews we did with Megan Morreale and Jess Cook brought fresh perspectives that resonated with both their audiences and ours.

Strategic SEO Refreshes

We’ve traditionally paid less attention to SEO for our own blog, despite having strong domain authority and good SERP positions for many content marketing terms.

This year, we followed the playbook we often recommend to customers: investing effort into refreshing existing content instead of only producing new pieces.

We used Revive to find high-potential refresh candidates on our blog, then put on our white gloves to update some of these classic posts, mindful of preserving what made them special while sprinkling on some SEO magic.

We updated information, added new sections, and did subtle keyword optimization that the originals lacked. Examples:

• How to Create or Refine a Content Marketing Strategy
• Everybody Wants Thought Leadership Content. But How Do You Do It, Exactly?

While less exciting than creating new content, these refreshes saw substantial traffic gains after the updates.

🔔 Reminder for 2025: Don’t overlook unsexy tactics that work.

What Will Work in 2025?

There’s only one thing we’re really sure about for content marketing in 2025: experimentation will be a must. You’ll need an R&D mindset when everything keeps changing, so you quickly learn what works and what doesn’t.

We’ll make sure to keep trying new things while being even more disciplined about our content marketing experiments:

• Defining clear hypotheses
• Tracking progress and results systematically
• Documenting and sharing learnings more frequently and publicly
• Doubling down on what works

We’d love to hear what you think will work in 2025 — add your thoughts to our discussion on LinkedIn. 👇️