Your brand is your identity. You’ve probably worked hard to establish a solid brand – and you want people to know about it. But it’s not all about writing compelling content for your website; online marketing extends far beyond advertising your business on social media. Educational content is one of the best ways to strengthen your brand, not only online but also in the minds of potential customers who have never heard of it before. 

Besides having an eye-catching blog post title, educational content usually aims at providing value to the reader by answering their questions with helpful  information and solutions. People appreciate something new,  and educational content can be a great way to learn more about a certain niche.

What is Educational Content?

Contrary to popular belief, not all educational content is high in tone and low in entertainment value. Some of the most inspiring content is educational. 

• Educational content is material that expands the viewer’s understanding of a topic through a variety of media and visuals. It always focuses on the readers’ needs as opposed to the purposes of the site or brand, helping people to solve their problems, informing and inspiring them to take action, solve a puzzle, or do anything that will improve their skills and knowledge.

Educational content is an amazing way to deliver a brand strategy, build a community, and get your site seen without being overly promotional. It enables your brand to reach out to an audience that may not even know about it and deliver great tips and information that can also be tied back to important messages.

How Does Educational Content Affect Your Brand?

• Create a Brand Community

Brand communities are becoming the basis for establishing and nurturing stronger long-term relationships between consumers and brands. An effective brand community should be based on trust and acceptance, which can be more easily obtained with the help of educational content. This is largely due to educational content proving valuable in establishing trust within a certain target market. Through educational content marketing, we have an opportunity to share our expertise, answer questions, provide education, and dispel myths about our brand. This, in turn, can act as a powerful tool for creating trust and credibility. By these means, educational content can help to create a strong emotional bond with the audience and position the brand as a thought leader.

• Customer Loyalty

Educational content is a great way to appeal to potential customers. Someone who views your blog reads an article as part of a roundup, or takes a free webinar is more likely to come back and make a purchase than someone who has not been exposed to any additional revenue-generating content. Customers who feel you are providing value through educational content are more likely to return to your site in the future and recommend your products or services to other people they know.

Source: PeerBoard

• Increasing Online Sales 

Educational content is meant to help people understand a particular topic or solve a problem, but it can also be used for marketing purposes and eventually sell your online courses. When you publish educational content about your brand or products, you are giving people more details about what you sell. In other words, by educating your visitors and audience, you give them better insight into your business. When people know and understand more about what they’re buying, they tend to be more patient with sales pages and are more likely to buy from you.

• Generating Quality Leads 

Think of it this way, if you enjoyed reading something a certain business wrote, chances are, you would be more likely to interact with that business in some way. For example, if you enjoyed reading an article about how to become a better business leader, you may be interested in enrolling in a course that helps develop leadership skills. Or if you enjoyed reading about marketing strategies, you may want to purchase courses or services that help promote your businesses. 

The point: People who actively seek out educational content and benefit from said content are more likely to be great leads for your business because they take the initiative to seek it out.

• Create Opportunities for Referrals and Testimonials

Educational content plays an important role in brand building- it provides information about your brand, instills trust in your clients, and helps you to connect with your ideal customers. Moreover, it is effective in boosting customer satisfaction and promoting credibility amongst  prospects who can help you win positive testimonials, which are always a great thing, especially if you’re trying to seek out new opportunities through client referrals.

• Educate Your Clients

A prospect who is unfamiliar with your product or service is most likely confused about how to accomplish certain tasks with it. By creating educational content, you can educate your clients on how to use your brand’s products to achieve whatever they want.  An educational piece should aim at providing all the necessary information your prospects need to accomplish a task, keep them interested in your brand, and, thus, engage them so they can be converted into a lead, customer, or client.

Tips to Create Educational Content

1. Analyze Your Audience and Their Needs to Create Relevant Content

One of the most common misconceptions that business owners, marketers, and even content writers have is they think that there is one standard, formulaic way to educational content writing. For this reason, the internet offers plenty of free content, but a lot of it is boring, generic, and irrelevant. Your customers are seeking relevant content that addresses their specific needs — so why not give it to them? 

Your content must align with the needs of your target audience. Imagine: you’re trying to attract people who do not know a lot about what you offer. In this case, presenting an extensive manual for beginners is not a good idea. Instead, focus on creating tutorials for newbies who need very basic guides that will hold their hands as they use your product or service. If you are a SaaS business, you can create informative articles about how to use your product and introduce its unique features. This way, you not only educate your audience but also gain a chance to implement SaaS link building and earn quality links pointing to your site and content, leading to enhanced brand visibility.

Relevance is key. Carry out research using user research tools to help you define the customer persona you are targeting, and then put yourself in their shoes. What problems are they facing? What questions do they need to have answered? What helps them to make decisions or feel better about their lives? It also pays to know what your competitors are doing, whether it comes down to customer support or educational content marketing.

Quora, Twitter, or some other communities related to your business might be good places to start as you can use them to identify niche problems and product gaps. In addition, you can use testimonials from your support team to identify topics where educational materials could result in higher customer satisfaction. Are there any topics that you could describe in more detail? Are people struggling with your process? Do they have doubts about your product? Perhaps you can write a post on the most common problems your customers are experiencing. 

2. Pay Attention to Structure and Formatting

Keep in mind that website content structure is an SEO strategy that many search engines use to determine rankings and popularity. Paying attention to this will ensure you don’t lose out on good rankings and readers. If a page of content is properly structured, it will create better readability and improve comprehension by Google’s search algorithms. A content marketing tool can help you make your content competitive by considering your main rivals, as well as generating excellent title tags, and optimizing your content for search by assisting you at every stage of its creation.

Source: SE Ranking

Be sure to use a short, accurate title tag that contains the question you are answering. This is a primary element used in determining the relevance of search queries and the very first thing site visitors see when clicking on your website’s URL. In addition, it helps to make sure others can quickly identify what type of content you have on your page. Without proper title tags, readers will have a harder time understanding whether your page is relevant or not.

The first thing visitors notice when they land on your website is the headline. It’s what will start engaging them, so it’s important to make it catchy, readable, and consistent with the overall tone of your brand. Your headline should also be short, benefit-oriented, written in the active voice, and stand out from the crowd of other headlines on the web because it needs to get people interested in your content and drive more targeted traffic to your website right off the bat.

3. Make the Content Interactive and Engaging

Interactive content is becoming more and more important when studying, teaching, researching, or doing any other work. These days you need to entice your audience to pay attention to your content. Take a user-centric approach when optimizing content and consider the learner’s needs, capabilities, and cognitive skills throughout the whole process of web design. Students nowadays prefer infographics and visual learning in the form of video-based materials or images rather than plain text. The infographics developed around content increase the number of shares and interactions on different social networking platforms like Linkedin, Facebook, etc. 

In most cases, website owners are always on the lookout for new ideas that will help them enhance the user experience. They extensively test different designs and combinations of UI elements to make them look more attractive and workable.  Users have the option of participating in a website by simply clicking on interactive elements like icons, buttons, text links, and image links. By implementing these interactive features, you can provide your visitors with a better user experience.

4. Do it Live

There is a lot of discussion in the education industry about how to move from a more-traditional, distant, and disconnected learning model to a more social, connected, and direct one. There are constant discussions about how we can use technology to connect with our students, improve our pedagogy, and provide better outcomes for learners. 

A new and effective way to teach students is through ‘live’ or ‘synchronous’ learning. This involves bringing the lesson to life in real-time, with students actively participating in the event — for example, a teacher’s lecture is streamed live over the Internet, or recorded lectures are broadcast via YouTube and Facebook. This way, online teachers can address their students directly, answer questions immediately, and gauge the reaction of their audience. All this builds a social element that simply wasn’t there before.

5. Bring More Storytelling

Bringing a bit of storytelling into education doesn’t just enliven lessons: using stories improves student learning by emotionally engaging them with your content! Storytelling is a powerful tool for developing not just empathy but also understanding. Stories engage our empathy and help us create personal meaning,  driving collaborative, empathic learning. Therefore, with the use of AI tools like OpenAI and other ChatGPT alternatives, the more we incorporate storytelling into our education, the better we can teach complex skills like problem-solving, collaboration, and creativity.

People don’t want to read through facts and figures. They want to hear engaging stories from real people. Successful companies rely on storytelling in their efforts to create educational content. People want to know that they are not alone. When you tell people their problems aren’t unique, that their issues are common, and that others have faced and solved similar issues, you open the door for trust. If a customer feels like you understand their situation and that there’s some common ground,  it makes it easier for them to do business with you.

6. Reuse the Content and Make It Easy to Share

The reason you want to repurpose content is that it increases the number of audiences you’re able to share it with. Everyone has a format of preference, and content that doesn’t fit the format of one audience member can be shared with other audiences. Content can almost always be repurposed and shared in a variety of other formats, such as podcasts, webinars, videos, infographics, translated documents etc. If a blog post is written, consider how it might serve a dual purpose by being repurposed as an infographic or podcast — where appropriate.

Lastly, it is essential to note that online content can be shared. What we mean by this is that you can include social media, share links on your website pages and post educational content on your organization’s social media accounts. Additionally,  your organization’s stakeholders can use their own social media accounts to share your educational content easily and effectively to spread it across a bigger audience.

Conclusion

Whether you’re a small local business or a well-established corporation, you can use educational content as a way to establish yourself as an expert in your industry. These educational pieces can be a great addition to your marketing plan because they show the consumer that you’re knowledgeable in the niche and industry you serve. 

Top-notch educational content brings value to your audience by showcasing what makes your brand unique and sets it apart from the rest. Educational content can also help your online community grow in a number of ways. First, it helps nurture leads and inform them about your company and products. It also provides users with tips and tricks about your industry, making you their go-to resource for anything related to your niche. So if you are willing to write quality educational content to help teach people more about your industry, follow the above-mentioned tips and give it your best shot!