It’s often said that you’ll know who the smartest person in the room is because when faced with a puzzling question, the most powerful person in the room always turns to them for advice.
That is an interesting idea to think about but what it actually really presents us is an insight into human nature. It’s only logical, that when we are dealing with a conundrum and are in need of answers, we turn to those whose intellect we have respect for and trust completely.
This human nature is also apparent with how consumers of this generation tend to have higher regard for brands that can offer them educational content that help them deal with the problems they face in their day to day lives. This inclination has long been useful for a lot of marketers and the businesses they promote.
When it comes to marketing, it’s been an established fact for quite some time now that a great way to attract new leads is by posting helpful, informative content on various platforms. These include your websites and social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, among others.
Posting original content on your website or sharing helpful, informative content on your social media channels in the form of infographics or videos elevates you into the position of a “guru” in the eyes of your prospects. This makes them trust you more, and when the time comes that they are ready to make a purchase, you have become such a trusted brand that they will come to you.
This is why attracting your target audience with educational content has long become a strategy that is utilized by a lot of businesses, big or small, to blaze new paths for growth.
Let’s discuss exactly how publishing educational content helps your business and let us find out why attracting your target audience with educational content is a great strategy for small business growth.
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First, let us define what “educational content” is.
Educational content is commonly described as those pieces of content that provide value to the audience. They can be in the form of videos, eBooks, articles, infographics, or sometimes shared social media content in the forms we have just mentioned. Educational content teaches the audience and provides information that fills a gap in their knowledge. Often, these pieces of educational content are answers to common challenges that the audience face in their daily lives.
As we have mentioned earlier in this blog post, attracting your target audience with educational content has become a marketing strategy employed by most small business owners and marketing managers because it appeals more to the current generation’s consumers.
Among the reasons that can appease the persistent question in your head that asks: why generate and publish educational content?
Here are the top reasons why!
When you make it a point to publish and share quality content (and you’ll know they are of awesome quality when they really do provide solutions to particular pain-points in your target audience’s lives), people will remember you. They will know your brand, they will trust you, and look to you for answers whenever they face a similar predicament that your products can solve for them.
They will set you apart from other websites that only aim to sell, and do so in the most obvious manner. Before you know it, they are ready to make a purchase, and since you have become a brand they trust, they will come to you and make that purchase.
At the same time, when people trust you and keep coming back to devour the content you offer, their page visits increase your web traffic, which also ranks your website higher on web searches. This can only be a good thing as people are busy. When they search something on the internet, they rarely make it to the bottom or next page of search results.
They consume and listen to the ones they find on top. Quality, valuable content driving up your web traffic is just another good reason to ask the question– why generate and publish educational content?
Think about this, when you generate your own original content, it is not uncommon to quote or link to other websites that talk about or promote other brands (as long as they’re not competition, of course!). When you use backlinks to mention other businesses, you encourage them to mention you on theirs, too.
This mutual show of kindness can be beneficial to both brands. You both drive up each other’s web traffic, and at the same time forge a certain level of kinship that can open the door for more collaborations in the future.
The first time they discover your product, chances are, they are probably not yet ready to make a purchase. As discussions on Buyer’s Journey suggest, the time it takes for them to arrive at the decision to buy can range from hours, to days, to weeks or months, or even years.
However, consistent posting of educational content allows you to nurture leads, who were previously just strangers that conducted a web search researching their pain-points and stumbled upon your page.
Other marketers might be against the idea of handing the audience (who may or may not buy from them) free, quality content. But remember, those pieces of educational content are not the products you sell. They are merely instruments for you to provide value to your target audience, and sell your product/service in ways so discreet they can never really tell you’re selling.
So there you have it. That is why you generate and publish educational content.
It is a way for you to draw people to your product and a way for you to market your product in an educational way.
Attracting your target audience with educational content is a marketing strategy that’s been proven to drive up sales. It is a marketing strategy that’s simply worth trying.