Why The ‘How-To’ Boom In Content Marketing Is Still Growing
Trends in content marketing often come and go, especially as rising volumes of competition flood the market with similar types of content and oversaturate their shared readership with variations on the same idea. Sensationalized titles have gone in cycles, with different headline tactics rising and fading in popularity, and different content mediums have similarly risen and faded in popular use.
One common content tactic, the “how-to” article—sometimes in image or video form—has been around for years, and its popularity shows no sign of losing momentum. More content creators are using how-to articles as a foundation for their strategy than ever before, and the market shows no signs of oversaturation. So what makes the “how-to” boom so enduringly popular?
How-Tos Are Universally Practical
The entire purpose of content marketing is to generate material that’s informative—or more specifically, useful—for your given audience. There are many types of articles and content pieces that can be considered useful, but how-to articles are guaranteed some level of practicality. In contrast, a news article may be interesting or informative, but it’s not always an actionable piece. Even if you’re working with niche how-to topics, you can rest assured that your article has some grounding in practical use, and that automatically makes your article more valuable for your readership. This fact has not changed over time.
There Are Always More Processes to Describe
It’s a vast world out there, and the potential topics for how-to articles are infinite. There will always be new areas to explore within individual industries, and new ground to cover in previously explored areas, but perhaps more importantly, there will always be new trends and new technologies that demand new how-to instructional articles. Because the potential number of new how-to articles is literally infinite, oversaturation becomes less of a problem. Some publishers may choose to produce simple reiterations of previously explored topics, but there’s nothing to prevent the production of new how-to topics, other than perhaps laziness.
How-Tos are Evergreen—More or Less
How-tos have also managed to retain their popularity because they are, for the most part, evergreen. That is to say, how-to articles aren’t useful solely during a specific time period. Learning how to milk a cow today is the same as learning how to milk a cow in 1960, or in 2025. Because of this, they’re popular fodder for content marketers. Whereas news items and trend analysis articles might only pay off for a few weeks or months, how-to articles could potentially pay off over a lifetime. The only exceptions are how-to articles that focus on seasonal or temporary practices, and how-to articles that need updated—but the fact that some how-tos need constant updates can actually be a strength.
