How fast is everything changing in marketing? Classic models created in the 80s are being transformed and adapted to the realities of today, research data needs to be updated every year, and the Facebook Ads Manager gets new features every few months. The development of ideas and technology is happening faster and faster, and one of the main qualities for practitioners is the ability to be on-trend: to know the best views and to master the new tools of the industry.
This article will provide a comprehensive guide to using educational marketing to grow your business, with actionable tips and strategies.
Educational marketing definition
Educational marketing is based on sharing knowledge and experience from the company to the consumer. By receiving something useful instead of exclusively selling advertising messages designed to solve one of his or her problems, a person is imbued with trust and begins to respect the company. This is the first step to ensure that he or she will remember your company and not the competitors.
If the principle is followed, and consumers are not required to buy anything right away when they receive useful information, the brand gets a loyal audience that considers it an expert. This expert is contacted when a product or service in this category is needed, remembered, respected, considered cool and valuable, and forgiven for small weaknesses. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Especially if the market is highly saturated or if consumers have long ago developed immunity to traditional advertising.
There are various ways to convey experience or knowledge. But the main thing is that it should be convenient for the audience and effective in terms of the goals set. If you want to dive deep into educational marketing topics, consider Studocu a reliable knowledge source, as thousands of people share useful documents about educational marketing on this platform.
5 benefits of educational marketing
Here are some benefits of using educational marketing:
- Building brand trust. By providing helpful and relevant information, you can establish trust with your audience and position your brand as an authority in your industry.
- Establishing thought leadership. Educational marketing can differentiate your brand from competitors and make your business more attractive to potential customers.
- Increasing customer engagement. Educational marketing can keep your brand top-of-mind and encourage customers to engage with your business regularly.
- Improving SEO. Educational marketing can also help improve your search engine rankings by providing valuable content optimized for relevant keywords.
- Creating customer loyalty. Valuable information helps to increase customer retention and encourage repeat purchases.
Proper educational marketing can have a snowball effect in the long term (5-10 years) and may require sales automation software to enhance the sales process. Now let’s discuss how to use educational marketing effectively.
Identifying your target audience
The success of your educational marketing efforts depends on how well you know and understand your target audience. You need to:
- Define buyer personas. You should create a representation of your ideal customer, including their demographics, goals, challenges, and interests.
- Understand their pain points. Knowing your target audience’s pain points and challenges can help you create content that addresses their needs and interests.
After this stage, you can start creating educational content.
Creating educational content
There are three main ways to transfer knowledge: content marketing, event marketing, and experience management.
In the case of content marketing, you generate useful educational materials for social networks, websites, and other company resources, where you pass on knowledge and share ideas and thoughts. In this way, you also broadcast brand values. Regularly receiving such information, a person can share the liked content with friends. By the time of purchase, he or she will already know all the ins and outs of the product and will be loyal to the brand.
What about event marketing? By experiencing something, trying it out, and getting certain emotions and impressions, we form an experience that stays with us and through which we assess the world in the future. Conducting events, the brand puts its values into a person’s system of views, sharing the experience and living the event as if with him. What is the result? A sense of unity and loyalty. To maximize attendee engagement, you can use interactive event giveaways, which focus on creating a memorable experience for attendees rather than just providing a physical item.
The customer journey map works great on its own. Suppose you analyze the customer’s pains at each touch point and offer them something valuable and useful at that particular moment. In that case, it will have a significant impact on the brand. Experience management lays the right impressions of brand contact and prevents negative reactions.
Promoting your educational content
Creating great educational content is just the first step. To get the most out of your content marketing efforts, you need to promote your content through various channels, such as:
- Social media: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
- Email marketing
- Paid advertising: Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, etc.
You should understand that promoting educational content is no less important than creating it.
Measuring success
Finally, to determine the success of your educational marketing efforts, you need to track and measure relevant metrics, such as:
Deep analytics of your results will help you understand your strong and weak sides and show what you should adjust in your educational marketing.
Conclusion
It is up to the company to choose a specific way of communicating values, knowledge, and experience. However, educational marketing is a long game for perspective and reputation. The brand provides itself with a committed audience that trusts it. This audience considers it an expert, which becomes the main factor of survival among competitors in economic instability.
