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.
5 playbookspublished · more in progress
- 12
- Industries mapped
- 5
- Full playbooks published
- 8
- Channels recommended
- 10
- 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
12 industries mapped across 8 sectors, with 5 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 12 industries
Property and construction · Long cycle
The trade press and Instagram set the shortlist, not search
A field where publications and Instagram set the shortlist months before anybody searches, where the best asset you own is a drawing you have never published, and where posting a project too early costs you 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
Software and tech · Medium cycle
The founder is the channel until they are not
The founder's own account outperforms the company's for the first two years, and the handover from one to the other 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
Playbook in progress
Search playbookHealthcare
YMYLHealth and medical · Short cycle
The channel that works is one a patient can be seen reading
A patient will not follow, subscribe or comment where anyone can see them, which rules out the engagement every other industry measures.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 9 to 18 months
- Typical monthly
- $4,000 to $20,000
Playbook in progress
Search playbookHigher education
RegulatedBusiness services · Long cycle
Three audiences, one brand, one immovable annual deadline
Applicants, parents and faculty need different content from one brand, against a deadline that does not move and a cycle that restarts every year.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 12 to 24 months
- Typical monthly
- $5,000 to $30,000
Playbook in progress
Search playbookManufacturing
RegulatedIndustrial and manufacturing · Long cycle
Your best content is a file, not an article
An engineer downloads a CAD model and a tolerance table, then specifies you six months later. The article that led them there is the least valuable thing you published.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 9 to 18 months
- Typical monthly
- $2,500 to $12,000
Playbook in progress
Search playbookDTC ecommerce
RegulatedRetail and ecommerce · Short cycle
The channel that acquires is not the one that retains
The channel that acquires a customer and the channel that keeps one are different channels, and the second is worth more while getting a fraction of the budget.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 3 to 9 months
- Typical monthly
- $3,000 to $20,000
Playbook in progress
Search playbookConstruction
RegulatedProperty and construction · Long cycle
They check you exist, then ask somebody who knows
The buyer checks that you exist, then asks somebody who knows. Content is a reference check that happens before anybody contacts you.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 9 to 18 months
- Typical monthly
- $2,000 to $10,000
Playbook in progress
Search playbookNonprofits
RegulatedLifestyle and leisure · Medium cycle
Every story that raises money needs its subject's consent
The story that raises the most money belongs to somebody who did not ask to be its subject, and consent is a production step rather than a formality.
Channels to run
- Time to compound
- 6 to 12 months
- Typical monthly
- $800 to $5,000
Playbook in progress
Search playbookHow 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?
The cards without a playbook link are the ones already in scope, and each already has its channel constraint written, which is the part that decides whether the page can exist. The order they get written in follows which industries people actually ask about. If the sector filter is not finding you, try filtering by channel instead: two industries in unrelated sectors often share a playbook shape.
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.