There exist nominal amounts of proper research into content marketing – or, as defined by the Content Marketing Institute, the “strategic marketing approach focused on creating content” and distributing it to a “clearly defined audience.” The current literature regarding content marketing provides only cursory discussions of the “strategic marketing approach” and largely ignores, whether purposefully or not, the process of systematically locating the “clearly defined audience.” Therefore, the purpose of this paper, is to start filling that gap in content marketing literature. In order to do so, it will use the well-documented increase in competition for high school students between institutions in the higher education admissions process as the framework to make the argument that content marketing is an effective tool for increasing awareness and conversions into the institution’s TOFU (top of the funnel) recruitment process. Moreover, this paper showcases, using data obtained from the SaaS AHREFS, how proper content marketing requires the dismissal of conventional target market audiences and the adoption of a numbers-based strategy regarding search volume, domain ratings, URL ratings, backlinks, and referring domains to coincide with the search intent habits of today’s digital natives.