Why Educational Content Marketing is So Powerful

Content marketing is the art of using valuable information to promote your brand, and this information has to have relevance and be useful to a good percentage of your site users. There is one way you can provide useful details to your visitors so that they keep coming back for more and that is by providing educational content on your website.

Educational content marketing is where you not only focus on selling or promoting your brand but rather on educating your site visitors’ about important subjects within your niche.

With educational content, your purpose is concentrated more on educating your visitors rather than just promoting your brand on every post. The visitor wields the power to buy, and instead of forcing a sale on them, why not draw their attention to important issues about your niche and drive engaging discussions with them?

So, instead of selling, why not teach?

That is what educational content seeks to do; teaching your visitors so they can become better buyers. In teaching your online visitors about topics related to your niche, you tend to reach a wider audience, because many online visitors come to your site looking for vital information that will enable them to make informative decisions. 

So, in providing educational content, you are helping your visitors to solve some of their problems, provided you publish top-quality educational content to achieve that goal. 

What Are The Objectives Of Educational Content Marketing?

Publishing educational content on your site should seek to accomplish a plethora of goals. The most important objective of your content marketing strategy is to help you garner more visitors to your site, and doing so using educational content has myriad benefits. The following are some of the advantages derived from using educational content to amass more customers:

#1. Increased Customer Interaction

Posting educational content will help you engage your customers more closely, considering that it has the potential power to drive online discussions. It provides a good platform for you to engage with your visitors, and the more you interact with your customers, the better you will get to understand their needs.

Publishing educational content is a sure way of realizing improved customer interaction, and you will get to learn from the horse’s mouth (your customers) what their needs truly are. With educational content, you have the chance to shape your customers’ way of thinking and driving your business towards solving their problems, which ultimately leads you to achieve customer satisfaction.

#2. Lead Generation

If there is anything that can get you loyal customers to your site and help you with lead generation, it has to be educational content. Publishing educational material instead of focusing all your attention on forcing your visitors to make a purchase will enable you to pique the interests of your visitors, but only when you create informative content related to your niche.

Among the most effective ways of creating these leads include marketing on social media platforms and building an email list.

#3. Creating and Improving Brand Recognition

Content marketing, if done effectively, can help you improve not only your brand awareness but brand recognition as well. Publishing educational content has the potential to boost your brand recognition because it builds up trust between your potential customers and your brand. When you feed your visitors educational content on issues relevant to your niche, the customers will be able to trust your services/products more easily.

In fact, publishing quality educational content can help your brand gain authority within your niche, considering that customers will be consulting your blog anytime they need to make important buying decisions. What’s more, they will readily come to you if ever they need products in your niche.

So, indeed, educational content marketing goes a long way into creating and improving brand recognition. On the same note, 72% of marketers say branded content is more effective than advertising in a magazine.

#4. Increased Sales Opportunities

If you didn’t know, effective educational marketing has the power to improve traffic to your site. When you publish informative content, customers will understand where to go to when they need to be educated on relevant matters pertaining to your niche.

And if you have built an authoritative voice around your niche, guess who the customers will readily turn to for quality advice? Your website, of course! And the more visitors you get each month, the more selling opportunities you will have for that month.

In fact, when traffic to your site increases exponentially, chances are that some of the returning visitors will convert to actual paying customers for your services and products.

#5. Customer Loyalty

When customers keep coming back to your site because of your educational content, it means that educational content marketing is working for you. It means that you have created an informative image around your brand and have built an authoritative voice that can advise loyal customers on matters concerning your niche. 

What’s more, it means that the leads you are getting out of your content are solid and can convert to potential customers for long-term, and these loyal followers will ultimately be the returning customers every business will fight nail and tooth to maintain.

Publishing educational content not only helps you garner more customers for your business, it helps you maintain them as they will be coming back to check on your recent posts and derive any value from them. Therefore, you cannot underestimate the power of educational content marketing once you understand its objectives as highlighted in this post. 

So What Really Makes Educational Content Marketing Important?

Perhaps the question we should be asking is what makes educational content marketing tick? Well, if you understand how content marketing works, you will see the need to publish more educational content as a means of boosting your business’ online presence.

How do users make decisions on what products to buy and which vendors to buy from? They go online to find this valuable information. Customers do not want to be forced to purchase things; rather, they want to buy thing out of their own will. What they need from you is guidance whenever they are stuck, and that is why they come online to look for valuable information that will help them to make good buying decisions.

Considering that there are millions of sites that offer professional advice on various issues related to your niche, how do online users know which information resource to trust? Well, if you stick to publishing educational content that is not only professional but also adequately laden with valuable information that the online users need, they will trust your opinion and make you their trusted expert in that niche.

The information you give them, if it is useful and trustworthy to help them solve their problems, they will keep coming back to consult you for guidance on which products you recommend based on their needs. This is what makes educational content marketing tick. Educational content marketing has the potential to give you authoritarian voice on matters related to your business niche, which will give you control of the online market share, of course depending on how big your industry is.

Another significance of publishing educational content on your site is that it helps you shape the thinking of your visitors into understanding your thought process. You can nudge them to think like you, and this can help boost a solid relationship between you and your potential clients.

How? Allow us to explain in the simplest way possible: when you shape the thinking of your customers, you can drive them to look for more information, and these you will readily provide for them on your site. Once the customers consider you an expert in your niche, they will not think twice to consult you if they have problems in making decisions.

Once you get to this point, it implies that you have earned yourself loyal customers who hold you in high regard for educating them. This kind of customers would never flinch when it comes to buying your products or services. That is one of the major benefits of engaging educational content marketing on your site.

And while choosing to concentrate on a specific niche indeed attracts a smaller audience, it will still be beneficial for you because you will only get to deal with your targeted audience. Having a targeted audience provides a high chance of bagging solid leads that will ultimately bring in more sales. What’s more, with a targeted audience, you are assured of maintaining a continued relationship with the customer even after confirming a sale. The targeted audience brings in more returning customers, which is essentially the purpose of content marketing.

4 Effective Tips for Creating Quality Educational Content

Now that we have established the importance of using educational content to market your brand, we should look at some tips to help you along the way. It is not easy to develop quality educational content that will work magic for your online business. However, with our tips highlighted below, you will be publishing engaging, informative and valuable content that’s relevant for your niche. Here are some great tactics.

#1. Avoid Repetition

You may be tempted to frame content around the various ways a product/service can be beneficial to a targeted customer, but if you engage a lot of repetition, the value will quickly fizzle out and your content will become plain just like any hard sell.

#2. Hard sell; Ditch it!

As we had already mentioned, customers do not want products forced down their throats. They want to wield the buying power and exercise it at their own will. So, if your content is grounded on forcing a sell to the customers, you will not be adding any value to them, leave alone the fact that they can smell a hard sell from a mile away. Avoid hard selling on your educational content, because if you do it, your visitors will perceive that you are only after their money and will not trust you.

#3. Customers Want Quality Information

You can consider interviewing experts in your industry to chime in on some of the issues you want to engage your visitors to drive discussions on your site. With expert opinion, your educational posts will have legitimacy and be valid for anyone who reads it.

Additionally, you can enhance the credibility of the information if you cite credible sources. Educational content with sources that are credible and verified are more trustworthy than those without relevant citations. So, you have to ensure that the content you give to your audience is not only verifiable but has credible sources.

#4. Don’t Be Boring With Your Information Dissemination

Remember your school days, and how a certain lesson would be interesting because of how the teacher taught? While some classes were totally boring because the subject teacher was boring, others were extremely interesting to attend because the teacher kept is lively. The same principles apply here with educational content. You do not have to publish boring content because even those can be framed and structured in an interesting way to get your visitors craving for more.

There are many ways to get your educational content giving back substantial returns in the form of solid leads; hence, increased sales in the long run, but that will only be possible if the content you publish is engaging and informative.

If you follow the above tips to craft legit and interesting educational content, you will soon realize an increased number of engaging customers on your site, and that is how you carve out your authority within your niche. Never underestimate the power of educational content marketing. It can work wonders for your business!

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Charles Ebert

Charles is a career mentor, essay writer, motivational speaker & human resources consultant with over 10 years of experience in HR sector. Apart from career mentoring, he loves photography and football.

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• Why Educational Content Marketing is So Powerful - May 9, 2018