People usually don’t like being sold anything. A little extra push from marketers can cause some people to think the product is not as good as advertised. With educational marketing, there’s no such risk. It functions by providing valuable content to the target audience without focusing on selling.
Interestingly, there’s also something called education marketing that promotes educational organizations, but that’s different from educational marketing. The latter is a marketing strategy that can enhance your business in the long run. Keep reading to know how you can leverage educational marketing to build credibility with your audience.
Benefits of Educational Marketing
Helps Build Trust
Utilize knowledge of your industry to create useful content and showcase your expertise. When you provide content without actively pitching anything, prioritizing helping over profit, you can earn the trust of your customers and build credibility.
For example, as a paint company, you could upload informative videos such as “Basics of Painting Your Bedroom” and “Best Paints for a Minimalistic Home.” Such videos solve viewers’ problems and help them make better choices. Maintaining a steady flow of valuable content will help you gain your viewer’s trust.
Boosts Organic Traffic
Offer materials that your audience can learn from, such as how-to guides, reviews, interviews, etc. Such content on your website, blog, and social media sites attracts traffic because people are searching for these things. You can also expect a rise in subscribers and the number of your leads.
Saves Your Money
One of the finance-related benefits of educational marketing is that it doesn’t require you to post any ads. It’s cost-efficient as all you need to create informative content is a good team of writers. This makes it 62% cheaper than traditional, outbound marketing. Educational marketing also forms stronger connections with the target audience, so you get more ROI and 3x more leads.
Establishes You As a Thought Leader
By consistently delivering value to your audience with informative content, you gain their trust. Eventually, the audience will see you as a thought leader. They’ll perceive you as a credible resource for things related to your industry. Your explanations and opinions will hold weight and will be considered by your audience while taking certain actions.
Increases Conversion
When people see you as a reliable source of information, they become interested in your products and services. Establishing trust through helpful content makes it easier to promote offerings as customers already trust your brand. You’ve provided them with so much valuable content that they won’t mind when you try to sell them something. All of this works in harmony to boost your conversion rates.
Best Practices to Build an Effective Educational Marketing Strategy
Design Accurate Customer Personas
Educational marketing puts the target audience at its center. Its foundation is set by understanding the audience and succeeds by providing a great user experience and value. Marketers should create accurate customer personas to achieve this.
But, how do you form a customer persona? It can be done using multiple sources such as demographics, surveys, and buyer intent data. Use Google Keyword Planner to know the search queries of your target audience. You can supplement this data by studying customer complaints, feedback forms, suggestions, and reviews about your products and competing products.
Create Valuable Content
Use the understanding of your target audience and their pain points to provide solutions. Aim to find answers to questions like “What are the aspirations of your audience?” “What would they like to change about their life?” “Is there any way our brand can bring that change?” The answers should help you portray your offerings as more appealing to your target audience.
Let’s say that you are a door manufacturer and you have an environmentally conscious target audience. Using this data, you could create a blog like “Guide to an Environment-Friendly Home”. Write useful tips and mention that you could secure your house with doors that care about nature. Then tell them just a little bit about your sustainable doors.
Utilize the Right Platform
Depending on how your target audience spends their time online, decide what kind of content will garner the most reach. Then use those formats that align with your objectives and expertise.
Let’s assume you own a furniture company that wants to sell vintage-style furniture. Research might show your target audience prefers blog posts, online courses, and videos. You should then write blogs on the evolution of home furniture. Create online courses on restoring old furniture. Upload videos focusing on iconic furniture designs of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. In all of these, plug in your products subtly. Lead generation and conversion will happen eventually.
In Summary
As a salesperson or marketer, you should consider practicing educational marketing. It helps your target audience and creates the need for your products and services without advertising. Along with increasing conversions, it saves your money, enhances your brand’s image, and helps strengthen relationships with customers.
FAQs
What is an example of educational marketing?
Here’s an example of educational marketing – let’s assume there’s a brand named ABC in the moving and shipping industry. It wants more customers for its international shipping service. Using educational marketing, the brand will create multiple blogs and videos about why people should ship things internationally, what interesting things they can get from other countries, and more such engaging content. ABC will plug its service subtly into all of this content and wait for lead generation.
How does marketing help in business growth?
The main goal of marketing is to establish your company’s worth for your target consumer to buy your offerings. There are multiple kinds of marketing techniques that use different mediums of communication. They all have a few key things in common: they help businesses grow by positioning the brands well, boosting customer engagement, and bringing conversions.
External Links and References:
Want to learn more about educational marketing? Check out the links given below.
What is Educational Marketing & How to Use it to Grow with Examples | Learn Worlds
5 reasons why you need to start Educational Marketing now | LinkedIn
