What is Content? A Definition and Meaning According to 40+ Marketers

By Lee Odden

There was a time when the information superhighway of the internet was full of links and pages but there was a pressing question for marketers navigating what kinds of information to create: what is content?

That was a question I posed when preparing for a presentation on the future of content for an audience of interactive marketers in Minneapolis. I wanted a baseline for describing the future of content by understanding how an audience of marketers in my network defined content in the first place.

The result was a poll shared across my social networks resulting in 40+ answers from a wide range of marketing experts. There were a variety of responses from the literal to the creative and ultimately it was an interesting exercise.

What is content?

A basic definition of content is that it is a collection of ideas transformed into a format consumable by others such as text, image, audio, video or interactive.

However, when reviewing the answers from the poll I ran, I noticed that several patterns emerged, clustering the content definitions into 3 groups:

Practical and informational
Experiential and use-based
Too ambiguous to define

It has been said that we now produce more content on daily basis than any individual could consume in a lifetime. And today, the advent of AI-generated content and the incentives to create and repurpose content by marketers along with the democratization of content creation which includes UGC (user generated content), EGC (employee generated content), IGC (influencer generated content) / CGC (creator generated content) is simply overwhelming.

When I originally ran this poll to simply define content I don’t think I (or anyone answering the poll) could have imagined the range of ways that content could be understood. Thinking about this understanding of content brought me to the idea of all the ways modern content can be categorized.

What are the categories of content for marketing?

Here are 8 examples of how content could be categorized for use in B2B marketing.

1. Content by Purpose

Primary goal or the core job it is meant to do for the business.

Thought Leadership (e.g., opinion pieces, trend forecasts, industry predictions)
Educational (e.g., how-to guides, tutorials, best practice explainers)
Promotional (e.g., product launch announcements, feature updates, sales collateral)
News & Announcements (e.g., press releases, company milestones, hiring updates)
Case Studies / Success Stories (e.g., customer testimonials, proof of ROI)
Research & Reports (e.g., original industry surveys, data analysis, white papers)
Community-Building (e.g., user-generated content showcases, expert Q&As)
Entertaining (e.g., humorous posts, behind-the-scenes looks, company culture spotlights)

2. Content by Format

Medium or structure used to deliver the content.

Written
- Blog posts & Articles
- eBooks & White papers
- Newsletters & One-pagers
- Website copy
Visual
- Infographics
- Charts & Diagrams
- Slide decks / Presentations
- Memes & GIFs
Video
- Webinars (live or recorded)
- Product demos & Explainers
- Interviews & Panel discussions
- Short-form video (Reels, Shorts, etc.)
Audio
- Podcasts
- Audiograms (static images with audio overlays for social media)
Interactive
- Quizzes & Assessments
- Calculators (e.g., ROI calculators)
- Interactive reports & Polls