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What is the best way for a business to reach its target audience in 2025?
Simply having great content on your website is no longer enough. We live in a zero-click world where social media, search engines, and AI encourage users to stay on their platforms and even penalize content linked to an external website.
This is a reality that content marketers are acutely aware of: those we spoke to in our 2025 Content Marketing + Demand Gen Predictions Survey cited platform changes such as updates to algorithms and search methods as the external roadblocks that they were most concerned about in 2025 (55%). They feared these more than budget cuts (21%), talent shortages (18%), and even the growing distrust of marketing (29%).
Well, if you can’t beat them, join them. To overcome these challenges and connect with B2B audiences, content marketers must meet their target audience on the channels they trust and engage with regularly. Read on as I highlight three essential channels for reaching your target B2B audience, plus two key tactics to grow and nurture those connections into loyal, brand-aligned communities.
Finding Audiences
1. Social Media
Social media is where most people spend the majority of their time on the internet. A study by Datos and SparkToro found that just over a fifth of all US internet visits were to social media sites (20.75%). The only category that came close to social media was productivity sites such as Microsoft Office (20.05%), with news sites (12.86%) and e-commerce (11.36%) taking third and fourth.
Saying social media is important in 2025 is hardly groundbreaking. Marketers know this and know it well.
50% of respondents predict organic social to be their most successful distribution channel this year.
— 2025 Content Marketing + Demand Gen Predictions Survey
But it is important to recognize that social strategies today are very different from those of the past. With algorithms favoring zero-click content and punishing links out to external sites, the focus should be on content that is native to the platform.
Related Reading: The Fate of SEO in 2025: 5 AI-Driven Shifts to Watch
How Marketers Should Respond
To succeed on social media in 2025, marketers must design content specifically for the platform and their audience. Start by identifying the social media platforms where your audience is the most active, then tailor your content to fit those platforms.
Identify how each piece of content can be effectively delivered in posts that keep users on the platform rather than sending them elsewhere. For example, promote a research report with a series of stat-driven carousels for LinkedIn, a short-form video series on YouTube Shorts, and a conversation thread on X.
This is not to say you should never post a link on social media, but with algorithms increasingly rewarding native, zero-click content, brands that include a healthy blend of linked and unlinked posts will win social media in 2025.
2. B2B Media Publications
I began my career as a journalist 21 years ago on the magazine Materials Recycling Week (now MRW – Materials Recycling World), reporting on scrap metal prices in the UK. Many years later, it gives me great pleasure that B2B audiences continue to seek out niche publications.
Some B2B publications have managed to adapt and thrive in this new digital landscape. And above all, these publications understand the value of serving high-quality editorial and successfully finding new ways of monetizing their audience reach.
For many, this means embracing sponsored content published alongside original journalism, allowing brands to show up in the same trusted environments their audiences already rely on for news and insights. This is exactly what we do at studioID, providing opportunities to amplify content via Industry Dive‘s distribution network across 34 industries.
In our 2025 survey, content marketing and thought leadership (47%) ranked as the most effective demand generation tactic, ahead of both events (38%) and paid social (38%). That underscores the importance of showing up where your audience already is, especially when it comes with the added benefit of third-party credibility.
How Marketers Should Respond
Identify the industry vertical publications most relevant to your target audience. These don’t always have to be the biggest names often niche media has the most engaged and valuable audience. Once identified, explore how you could engage those audiences with content.
Ultimately, B2B publications are more than a distribution channel. They drive credibility for your brand as you contribute to conversations and topics the audience already trusts.
Interested in reaching 16M+ industry leaders across 34 industries? Get in touch with studioID.
3. Podcasts
When it comes to content, if people aren’t scrolling, reading, or watching, they’re listening.
Around a third of US adults (34%) and one fifth of adults in the UK are weekly podcast listeners, while globally, podcast listeners have been growing at a rate of 7.85% year-on-year.
The sheer volume and variety of successful podcasts demonstrate the potential for tapping into niche interests and connecting with target audiences.
In our 2025 survey, 38% of marketers identified podcasts as a top-performing content format for 2025. Not to mention, studioID’s Top 50 Content Marketing Brands of 2024 features multiple companies successfully incorporating podcasts into their campaigns, including DHL, Goldman Sachs, and HubSpot.
However, there are some caveats to consider when thinking about including podcasts in your B2B content marketing strategy:
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Success requires sustained investment over the long term – it takes time to build a podcast audience
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Podcast listeners skew towards younger adults – for example, in the UK audiences are predominantly under 55, and 15-25 year-olds listen for the longest.
How Marketers Should Respond
Before jumping into podcast production, consider if your target audience is likely to engage with the medium. Are they already listening to industry podcasts? What topics are similar industry podcasts not covering already? These insights will help shape the content of your show.
When starting out, be realistic about the budget commitment required for success: if you only have the budget for one or two episodes, this money will likely be better spent on other content formats with faster returns on investment.
Alternatively, consider starting a limited-run podcast around a specific theme or event rather than launching a full-scale series. This allows you to test your concept and build consistency without overcommitting resources.
Growing Audiences
Once you’ve found your audience, how can you deepen those relationships?
Look to turn occasional engagements into regular ones through subscriptions to additional content offerings. By doing this, you can begin to build a community around your brand, which, as Harvard Business Review points out, isn’t just a marketing tool. It’s a vital business strategy. And again, it’s recognized as vitally important by those marketers we surveyed, with 32% identifying growing audiences as a top priority for 2025.
4. Editorial Content Hubs
Some users might be happy to scroll through your socials, watch your webinar on a B2B media channel, or subscribe to your podcast. But once leads get further down the funnel, they will be looking for more depth and context from your brand.Having a dedicated hub of all content is a great way to centralize all content and use it to build trust with your audience.
As MIT points out:
Trust doesn’t develop instantaneously; it’s a product of long-term relationships and repeated interactions.
The more you can follow up those initial interactions with supporting material on your content hub, the more your brand will become a trusted authority on certain topics.
Every visit to your hub is an opportunity to reinforce credibility. Over time, these interactions can compound, positioning your brand as a trusted authority. A well-executed content hub signals that your brand is here for the long haul and that you’re committed to helping your audience succeed beyond the transaction.
How Marketers Should Respond
Make sure the primary focus of your content hub is to nurture and engage audiences. Use metrics like time on page and referral clicks from newsletters to gauge success.
Your content hub should also provide a great user experience – check out this post for tips on managing your content hub effectively. Build bridges between channels with crosslinks to internal blog posts, webinars, ebooks, and more. This will connect users to other resources within the hub, reinforcing it as a true content ecosystem.
5. Newsletters
I purposely use the phrase “newsletters” here rather than email to distinguish it from direct marketing efforts. Your newsletter should be content-focused to continue to build trust with your audience, pointing back to your central content hub.
The good news about a newsletter reader is that they have already chosen to share their email address, meaning newsletter recipients are already more engaged with you as a brand than the casual “like” on Linkedin. It is through regular, meaningful interactions with subscribers that you will elevate your brand to become that far more powerful thing – a community.
People are more interested in the social links that come from brand affiliations than in the brands themselves.
Your brand can become the destination for your target audience to meet and engage with each other. It is at this point that you will start to see the cross benefits of building such a community, which according to the HBR include: increased customer loyalty, lower marketing costs, and an influx of ideas to grow the business.
How Marketers Should Respond
Ensure that it is as easy as possible to subscribe to your newsletter. Within your content hub, feature opportunities for readers to subscribe throughout. Plus, offer clear value upfront. Why should someone subscribe? Be specific—whether it’s weekly insights, curated industry news, or exclusive content.
As for the content, curate, don’t just promote. Serve your newsletter readers with content that educates and entertains. The moment you start spamming your audience with direct marketing messages, you have lost them.
