Content marketing, written per industry
Most advice assumes you already know which channels to run. That is the hard part, and the answer is genuinely different per industry. Each playbook here picks the two or three worth staffing, names the ones that look obvious and fail, and covers what you publish, who makes it and how you know it worked.
20 playbookspublished · every industry listed, written in full
- 20
- Full playbooks published
- 9
- Sectors covered
- 8
- Channels recommended
- 17
- Where a regulator limits what you publish
We publish two playbooks for most of these industries
They are not versions of each other. One assumes the channel and goes deep. The other decides the channel in the first place. Where both exist, each page links to the other.
This directory
Which channels, and what goes on them
- Which two or three channels are worth staffing, and which obvious one is not
- The raw material your industry already holds that nobody can copy
- Who in the business is allowed to make it, and what the sign-off path is
- What one idea becomes across every surface that is real in your field
- What you are permitted to publish, and in what order
- How to report when no single channel can be credited
The SEO directory
How you get found in search
- Which directories and publishers already own the results page
- The query clusters that carry an actual purchase behind them
- The technical defect endemic to your vertical’s software
- Which schema types describe the business itself
- Which regulator constrains the analytics stack
- The first ninety days, priced
Content marketing by industry
20 industries mapped across 9 sectors, with 20 full playbooks published so far. Filter by channel if you already suspect where your audience is, or by sector if you would rather start from what you are.
Showing 12 of 20 industries
Property and construction · Long cycle
The trade press and Instagram set the shortlist, not search
Publications and Instagram set the shortlist months before anybody searches, and the best asset you own is a drawing you have never published. Posting a project too early costs the placement that would have won the next one.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 9 to 18 months
- Typical monthly
- $1,500 to $7,000
Law firms
YMYLLegal and financial · Medium cycle
The referrer reads your content, the client never does
The person who reads your content is rarely the person who hires you. Referral sources, in-house counsel and other firms consume it; the client arrives already told where to go, having read nothing.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 6 to 12 months
- Typical monthly
- $3,000 to $15,000
Small businesses
RegulatedBusiness services · Short cycle
You have no audience, so you borrow someone else's
No list, no following and no domain history, so the only channels that pay are the ones where somebody else already gathered the audience you need.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 4 to 9 months
- Typical monthly
- $500 to $3,000
Business services · Long cycle
Buying happens in private channels you will never measure
The conversation that decides the deal happens in a peer Slack, a private community and a forwarded PDF, none of which appear in any report you will ever run.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 9 to 18 months
- Typical monthly
- $4,000 to $20,000
B2B SaaS
RegulatedSoftware and tech · Medium cycle
The buyer is not the user, and only one is reachable
The person who uses it and the person who signs for it want opposite content, and only one of them can be reached where they actually spend their day. Everything else follows from that.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 6 to 12 months
- Typical monthly
- $5,000 to $25,000
Startups
RegulatedSoftware and tech · Medium cycle
The founder is the channel until they are not
The audience subscribed to a person, not to a company, and the company cannot inherit them. The handover is where most startup content programmes quietly die.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 3 to 9 months
- Typical monthly
- $1,000 to $6,000
Healthcare
YMYLHealth and medical · Short cycle
No patient will be seen following, liking or commenting
A patient will not follow, like or comment where anyone can see them. That removes the engagement every other industry measures, and it decides which channels are worth staffing.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 9 to 18 months
- Typical monthly
- $4,000 to $20,000
Higher education
YMYLBusiness services · Long cycle
Your audience ages out before it can compound
The audience you spend a year building graduates out of the market. Nothing you own compounds on the recruitment side, which changes which channels are worth staffing and what an asset is for.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 12 to 24 months
- Typical monthly
- $5,000 to $30,000
Manufacturing
RegulatedIndustrial and manufacturing · Long cycle
Your content has a service life, not a publish date
A datasheet you publish this year gets specified into a design in two and is still being downloaded in fifteen. Content here is maintained like a product, not scheduled like a campaign.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 9 to 18 months
- Typical monthly
- $2,500 to $12,000
DTC ecommerce
RegulatedRetail and ecommerce · Short cycle
The channel that acquires is not the one that retains
You rent the channel that acquires a customer and own the one that keeps them. The second is worth more and gets a fraction of the budget, which is where the margin goes.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 3 to 9 months
- Typical monthly
- $3,000 to $20,000
Construction
RegulatedProperty and construction · Long cycle
Your entire market is a list you could write down
A regional contractor's whole market is a few hundred named organisations, and most of them will never procure. Reach is worth almost nothing here and penetration of a known list is everything.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 9 to 18 months
- Typical monthly
- $2,000 to $10,000
Nonprofits
RegulatedLifestyle and leisure · Medium cycle
Donors count what you spend reaching them as overhead
Every dollar spent reaching donors is a dollar a donor can see you not spending on the cause. It is the one industry here where buying reach carries a price of its own.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 6 to 12 months
- Typical monthly
- $800 to $5,000
Home services
RegulatedHome and trades · Short cycle
Nobody is in the market until something stops working
Nobody is in the market until something stops working, so there is no audience to build in advance. The content has to be waiting already, and the neighbour has to remember your name.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 4 to 10 months
- Typical monthly
- $1,200 to $7,000
Life sciences
YMYLHealth and medical · Long cycle
You publish for years before you may name the product
The product may not be promoted until it is approved, so the programme runs for years on the disease, the mechanism and the unmet need. Almost nobody staffs for that gap.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 18 to 36 months
- Typical monthly
- $8,000 to $40,000
Lifestyle and leisure · Short cycle
You have to market a place you do not own
Guests choose a place first and a property second, so most of your best content is about restaurants, trails and streets you have no control over at all.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 6 to 12 months
- Typical monthly
- $2,000 to $12,000
Legal and financial · Long cycle
Every employee who could build an audience is supervised
Everybody who could speak for you with any authority is licensed, supervised and personally liable, which removes the one distribution play that works in every other industry.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 12 to 24 months
- Typical monthly
- $6,000 to $30,000
Recruitment
RegulatedBusiness services · Medium cycle
Your best content makes candidates leave the clients paying you
The content that earns you a candidate audience is career advice, and it is read by the employers paying your invoices. You cannot pick a side, because you sell access to both.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 6 to 12 months
- Typical monthly
- $2,000 to $10,000
Real estate
RegulatedProperty and construction · Long cycle
Your reader moves once a decade and their friends ask them
The person reading you will not move for years, so nothing you publish should be built to convert them. It has to be built so they remember you when a friend asks.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 12 to 24 months
- Typical monthly
- $700 to $5,000
Software and tech · Long cycle
Your whole industry publishes the same vendor-supplied content
Your vendors hand you finished articles and so do the white-label shops, so several hundred providers publish the same piece under different logos. Being specific is the entire opportunity.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 9 to 18 months
- Typical monthly
- $1,500 to $8,000
Health and medical · Long cycle
Your only publishable story is your own, and telling it is clinical
You cannot publish a client outcome, so the only story available is your own, and telling it is a clinical decision before it is a marketing one.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 6 to 12 months
- Typical monthly
- $600 to $4,000
How these are researched, and what they are not
Writing content marketing by industry properly means finding out where an audience actually gathers, rather than recommending the channels everyone recommends. Every playbook starts from the channel question and states its sources wherever a claim depends on one.
8 distinct channels are recommended across the directory so far. If that number ever collapsed toward one or two, this would have quietly become a single-channel directory with a broader name, and it would deserve to be read that way.
Every channel gets a verdict, including the losers
All eight are judged on every playbook. The skip verdicts are the ones that save money, and a page that only named winners would be a service menu rather than a strategy.
Regulatory claims name a source and a date
This area moves. A rule quoted without its source and the date it was read is a liability, so every one carries both, and re-reading them is the first job on any revision.
Not every rule comes from a regulator
Image licences, press exclusivity and client consent are contract terms, and in several industries they cost more than the regulated rules do. They are marked as contract rather than law.
Budgets are estimates and say so
They come from what the work takes, not from a survey, and they are wide on purpose. No figure on this site is restated as a statistic when it is a judgement.
Attribution is reported honestly
An ecosystem has no single channel to credit. Every measurement section separates leading from business indicators and says plainly where the join between them is not clean.
No invented numbers, no affiliate links
The same rule that governs the other three directories on this site. Tool recommendations are editorial, outbound links carry nofollow, and nothing here is sponsored.
FAQ
Questions we get
How is this different from your SEO directory?
They answer different questions and are written to a field spec that keeps them apart. The SEO playbook for an industry answers how you get found in search: who already owns the results page, which technical defect is endemic, which schema describes the business. The content marketing playbook answers which two or three channels are worth staffing at all, what you publish on them, who in the business is allowed to make it, and how you report on it when no single channel can be credited. Search is one channel inside the second question, and where both pages exist each links to the other.Is this not just the same advice with the industry name swapped?
That is the failure mode the data model is built to prevent. Every playbook has to give a verdict on all eight channels, including the ones that lose, and name the raw material that industry holds and nobody else can copy. An industry whose channel constraint restates another industry's does not get a page, and a script fails the build on a duplicate rather than leaving it to review.Why do the playbooks recommend skipping channels?
Because a list of eight channels is a menu, not a strategy, and most industries can only staff two or three properly. The skip verdicts are usually the most useful part of a playbook: they are the channels that look obvious in that industry and reliably waste money there. Naming them is what makes the rest of the advice worth acting on.How are the budget figures worked out?
They are editorial estimates and every playbook says so where they appear. They come from what the work actually takes at each tier rather than from a survey, and they are deliberately wide because the real range in any market is enormous. Treat them as a sanity check on a proposal rather than a quote.Can I run one of these myself?
Yes, and every playbook has a section on doing exactly that with no budget. For most industries the free path is genuinely a large share of the available value, because the expensive parts are production capacity rather than access to a secret. What money buys is consistency after month three, which is where almost every self-run programme stops.My industry is not here yet. What now?
Every industry listed here now has a playbook behind it, so there is no waiting list to point you at. Before a new one is added, its channel constraint has to be written and checked against every existing playbook, and an industry whose constraint restates another does not get a page at all. If the sector filter is not finding you, try filtering by channel instead: two industries in unrelated sectors often share a playbook shape, and that is usually a better match than the sector label.
Or have someone own it
Every playbook here is written to be run without us, and plenty of teams do exactly that. Where it stalls is almost never the plan. It is that nobody owns it after the first month, and the person who holds the material has a day job. That is the job we do.