What is Content Marketing?
Who you are and what you offer the world as a brand or organization is expressed through your content: ads that capture interest, emails that relate your value to your customers’ needs, blog posts that show you get what your audience cares about, and so on. Content marketing is the art of deploying that content for optimum impact and response.
As education marketers, we have a healthy skepticism about the latest and greatest buzzwords that take the industry by storm. But content marketing isn’t a fad; it’s a philosophy that’s uniquely effective with educators who see a sale not just as a transaction, but as the outcome of your investment in building a relationship with them.
Relationships follow a pattern: from first contact, to shared interests and values, to meaningful interaction, to long term commitment. Relationship marketing targeted at educators applies this pattern to attracting and nurturing customers; just as conversation is how personal relationships move forward, content is a means to move a prospect along the continuum to loyal customer.
Content marketing helps brands and organizations:
- Become a valuable resource
- Establish thought leadership
- Empower customers with knowledge
- Tell important stories
- Create positive buzz
- Open two-way conversations
- Inspire sharing
- Move prospects closer to purchasing decisions
Why Content Marketing to Educators?
When it comes to purchasing decisions, the seven million educators in the United States do their homework; they want to know about your offering, your company, and your values. Content is how they get to know and trust you as an ally and a partner, and it is an especially powerful tool with evidence-loving educators. Educators love research, and brands can use content to give educators the information they need, when and where they need it. Relevant content delivered at the right moment can move an educator through the sales cycle, from awareness to action to advocacy.
Content can tell your brand story in a strategic, compelling, and sustained way that forges and nurtures relationships with educators—a connection they require to trust your brand.
Converting Educators with Content
As a strategy, content marketing has earned its place in the marketing mix. It not only helps to build brand affinity and trust, but has also been proven to dramatically increases likelihood to purchase.
According to research from SEO and content marketing company Conductor, consumers who read a brand’s educational content were 131% more likely to purchase from that brand*. What’s even more interesting, even one week after reading educational content, consumers were still 48% more likely to purchase from that brand compared to those who had not read a piece of educational content.
Now that you know why you need to include content marketing in your strategy, where do you start? We’ve put together a list of content marketing best practices into a handy checklist to use as a guide for your next content campaign. These best practices are our lessons learned from thousands of successful campaigns that generated the biggest responses from educator audiences.
You’ll get actionable tips for the dos and don’ts of content marketing to educators, including types of content educators are searching for, what language to stay away from, and when and where to promote your content.
