Think of content marketing as the bridge between the solutions you provide and what your customers need. You create informative, helpful and useful content that addresses their common questions, concerns, or pain points, then make sure your customers can find it. Simple, right?
But before your customers can find your content, you need to carefully plan the content you are going to create so you can best answer their questions and solve their problems.
“How do I do that?” we hear you ask. Well, read on to discover some actionable tips that will help you get started.
1. Check out Reddit and Quora for content ideas
Many businesses struggle to find genuine insights and feedback from their ideal customers. This is where community platforms like Reddit and Quora come in handy as a source of valuable intel.
A simple search on one of these platforms about your products or services, like ‘heat pumps’ or ‘refrigerant’ or ‘indoor air quality’ could serve up a whole host of conversations people are having around these topics.
You can then take the questions that inspired those conversations and turn them into your next piece of content. Afterall, an important part of your marketing efforts should go into serving up answers and providing solutions to the problems your customers have.
This is just one side of the coin for Reddit and Quora. On the other side you can actively participate in those conversations, providing answers and publishing your own content. But that’s a strategy we’ll save for another time.
2. Optimise your content for Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)
Once you have your content ideas from Reddit, you then need to create content. Many marketing experts would talk about making sure your content is SEO-ready (Search Engine Optimisation). But in 2025, you should also be aiming for GEO.
With more people using AI chat tools to ask questions, Google has introduced its own AI-search. We’re not saying ignore SEO. Far from it. Content optimised for search engines underpins your attempts to get featured in these AI search results.
What is GEO?
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation and is a marketing strategy that optimises content for AI-driven search engines. The goal of GEO is to increase a website’s visibility in AI-generated responses – the bit that appears before the first search result on Google or Bing.
As we said, you shouldn’t abandon the principles of SEO because you’ll still need to clearly answer your customers’ searches and many of the same principles apply to both tasks.
The best way to ensure your content is GEO optimised is by working to Google’s EEAT principles. By sharing your Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness you’ll have content that Google is more likely to show to your customers and that your customers are more likely to read and engage with.
This, therefore, gives you a better shot at being cited in the AI-generated search result. Think how powerful that could be for your brand.
3. Become a thought leader
Thought leadership articles are a staple of any good content marketing strategy. We write dozens of thought leadership pieces for our clients every month, securing coverage in key trade publications – just like this recent piece in the January 2025 issue of ACR News.
The first place to start would be identifying publications you want your brand to feature in. One of the best ways to do this is by identifying the titles your customers are reading. If you’re looking for customers in refrigeration, then you may want to explore titles such as RAC magazine. If you’re focused on air conditioning, then ACR News and ACR Journal could be perfect. If you’re looking for customers in heating, then HVR and HVP would be suitable. You may even consider CIBSE Journal or Installer if you’re looking for engineers and installers.
Once you’ve identified the publications, you can drill down into their features lists to find relevant topics that you or your chosen spokesperson can contribute to.
We’ve been building relationships with journalists in the HVAC industry for many years and can help you identify the right publications for your brand. So, if you would like some support with this, please get in touch.
While this tactic is a great way to demonstrate your expertise and build trust with your audience (there’s E and T from Google’s EEAT), it also gives your business a human face – and humans do business with humans.
If you’re able to provide real insights, personal stories and share genuine experiences, you will have ticked all of Google’s EEAT boxes and created an engaging article.
Pro tip: By including the author’s credentials such as qualifications and accreditations you’ll add more credibility and demonstrate serious expertise.
4. Showcase your value through case studies
Telling your customers how your products and services solve their problems is good, but having your customers tell other potential customers is even more powerful.
Case studies featuring your happy customers provide real-world examples of how your business solves problems.
If you’ve not written a case study for a while, then following a copywriting framework can help structure it. The framework we use most often is “Challenge, Solution, Result”.
This looks a little something like this:
Start by outlining the customer’s problem (the challenge). Then explain the process you went through to come up with a fix for the problem, as well as how you implemented it (the solution). Then reveal the results with evidence and data to back it up (the result). Including a quote or testimonial from your customer will add even more credibility.
5. Repurpose and amplify your content
You’ve now got all this great content, but how do you maximise it? Repurpose, reuse, repeat.
Here are some practical examples of how you might do this:
If your goal is to boost the number of enquiries you get through your website, then you could look to create a hybrid landing page. Think of this hybrid landing page as your sales page enriched with your helpful and engaging content.
This page will give the reader what they want to know, and then as they read on, they’ll learn more about the benefits of your product or service and want to take the next steps with you thanks to your too-good-to-miss call to action. Listicles, like “5 reasons why…” work well on hybrid pages.
But don’t stop at repurposing content for other pages on your website. Your helpful content can be turned into scripts for podcasts, videos, or webinars. This can be a great way to reach customers who prefer to engage with different types of content other than written words.
The same can also be done the other way around. If you already have a series of webinars or podcasts, then you can use tools like Descript to transcribe the content and then use it as the basis for your blog or thought leadership article.
And then you can repurpose content for social media. You could post the majority of a blog on your LinkedIn page – but bear in mind you only have a maximum of 3,000 characters. So, if you find your post is too long, publish it as a LinkedIn article or start a LinkedIn newsletter from your company page.
If you’re looking for something a little more engaging, you could create an educational carousel of images, save them as a pdf and upload it to LinkedIn as a document. This creates swipeable content for followers to view.
Taking this one step further, just a few months ago, LinkedIn introduced Reel-like videos onto the platform. So, if you’ve been busy creating videos from your blogs, you can clip those into shorter videos and share those too.
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