Are you thinking about growing your business with educational content, but are unsure how it works? Spreading educational content is a great way of offering customers upfront value, and they will return the favor by buying your products or subscribing to your services.
Educational content means customers are 131% more likely to buy. Therefore, investing in educational content is a smart idea to grow your business. It will lead to more customers, sales, and establish you as an authority in your industry.
Benefits of Growing Your Business With Educational Content
Before diving into the top tips for providing educational content. Let’s start by looking at the benefits of offering educational content to your audience. Perhaps this will help you decide if going down this route is a good choice for your business:
Increase marketing efforts: releasing blogs and videos increases the number of people that find their way to your website. For example, you can target highly searched keywords in your blog content. Hence, users will find your blogs via search engines, and the extra traffic will lead to buyers.
Alternatively, you can release videos on YouTube and include your website link in the description. This also increases website traffic and is a great way to drum up business.
Become an authority: you could become an authority in your niche by providing content that offers value. For example, you can create evergreen how-to guides that draw in allergy audiences looking for help.
Alternatively, you can provide the latest industry-related news, which updates your audience. Being a source of news helps add credibility and value, and it’s not hard. You can hire a few writers to complete the job at an affordable rate.
Generate sales: releasing content means more eyeballs on your brand, and that equates to more sales. Also, customers that digest your content and love what you have shared, are more likely to buy from you than the competition.
Relevant to Your Audience
It’s important for the content to be relevant to what your audience wants and is interested in. For example, if you’re selling plumbing services, consider article topics such as “How to unfreeze a pipe”, or “Top ways to clean your gutter without damage”.
People will find this content helpful, giving you a chance to provide value without asking for a fee. Of course, you could include multiple CTAs in your content to capture the email of readers, which can be used to market your services.
Now sure what the audience in your niche finds interesting? We recommend doing keyword research to find out the commonly searched phrases. This gives you an indication of what keywords should be included in your titles.
User-friendly Formatting
The average internet user does not like to read large blocks of text. Even if the content is valuable, the visitor has a higher chance of clicking the back button, rather than reading poorly formatted text. With that thought in mind, here are some tips for formatting your text:
- 3-4 lines per paragraph: make sure your text is broken up into 3-4 lines. This makes scanning content easier and finding your way around the page.
- Subheadings: using many subheadings in your content also helps users navigate a long page to find the information they are looking for. Make sure to format your subheadings with “‘H2, H3, H4” to ensure you get some SEO love from Google.
- Bolding: highlighting keywords by bolding makes them stand out. This enables users to draw their attention to the important parts of the page. However, don’t overdo it since it will be confusing rather than helpful.
- Visuals: it’s important to break up content by adding visuals such as images, videos, infographics and more. Visuals are a good alternative to reading and offer users a different way to digest the same information. Visuals are especially important if you’re showing how to do something step-by-step.
Repurpose Your Content
Consider repurposing your content to increase the amount of value you can extract from the content. This includes the reach and ROI of your educational content. Not sure where to repurpose your content?
Content can be repurposed between the following media forms:
- Blogs
- Video
- Social media posts
When repurposing content, it’s important that the original educational message is not lost in translation. However, you should also make sure to change the content so that it fits the platform where it will be published.
Therefore, you should research each platform separately to ensure you can get the most out of the content. Look at what your competitors are doing for inspiration and to understand what tone to strike.
Add Call To Action Messages
A CTA (Call to Action) is a message that nudges the user to perform a specific action. This could be signing up for a newsletter by sharing their email, buying products, or subscribing to a service.
It’s important to be clear in the CTA so that users know exactly what action they are expected to take. This increases the chances of the action being taken, which means you can generate more sales from your content.
We recommend that you include CTAs in every piece of educational content that you post. However, it shouldn’t be intrusive, repetitive or too overwhelming, since the volume of marketing material will put users off.
Finally, your CTAs must stand out on the page or wherever they are posted. As more of your audience takes notice, it increases the chance of a conversion. You should measure the engagement of CTAs and optimize them to improve their performance.
Final Thoughts
To conclude, growing your business with educational content is an approachable, practical, and affordable method that’s available to any business in any niche. Start with one platform and move on to another once you’ve mastered the basics.
Not sure what content to start with? Look at the commonly asked questions your customer support receives. Answering these questions and problems in the form of content provides many ideas to get started with.
