Want to be a leader in your industry? One way to do that is by sharing educational content on topics that matter to your followers. This simple strategy can build trust in your brand, attract customers, and boost your reputation, establishing you as an authority.
How can you ensure that your content raises your brand profile? Design content for your audience and choose your medium wisely.
Creating Educational Content For Your Audience
Your existing audience is your first consideration, particularly if you have primary and secondary targets. Instead of presenting a topic to a technical audience in a complex manner, share that in a white paper rather than your blog. Savvy readers will appreciate a lighter format that does not drive away more casual readers.
Select educational topics that fit well for your target in your industry. Work with your team to brainstorm subjects, keeping in mind that the goal is not necessarily to sell but instead to inform and build trust through education. Brainwriting, mind mapping, and other techniques can allow your teams to create the best content subjects. These subjects must highlight your brand’s interests and expertise apart from services and products.
As you review topics, keep both current and future audiences in mind. Which of these topics are they likely to search for and click? What subjects address current concerns, issues, and interests in your market? Is there enough data available on this topic to support an educational content strategy?
Writing: Tone And Voice
Once subjects are selected, it’s time to think about creating content. You must provide information from trustworthy sources in a way that isn’t boring, dictatorial, or too technical.
Writing online educational content needs to be especially focused on engaging readers. You want to explain a complex idea based on what your audience already knows, without getting lost in too much detail. Offline media like PDFs and presentations can be used to provide more depth for interested parties.
No matter the topic, you should keep it in line with the current voice and tone of your existing online presence.
Add Eye-Opening Data
A good way to make data interesting is to find shocking statistics, for example, skyrocketing rates of illness. Look for stats that are far higher than you’d expect.
Provide data such as statistics from reliable sources. These include stats from national organizations, research from peer-reviewed journals, and data from industry think tanks.
If you’re tackling a difficult subject, find ways to break it down into simpler terms, but be sure your verbiage is still accurate. Any data relating to medicine, for example, can be complex and easy to mischaracterize. Take great care to illustrate it carefully but do not oversimplify it to the point where it’s incorrect.
Let the Experts Speak
A good way to gain authority is to work with subject matter experts on your blog. Be sure to select interesting and provocative quotes from these authorities rather than just outlining their advice. If they say something unexpected that goes against the status quo, this is an excellent way to add an element of controversy to an educational blog post without engaging in conspiracy theories.
Choosing Your Medium
Educational content serves a different purpose than traditional marketing content and thus, is available to a much wider range of mediums. Each demands a slightly different tactic to accomplish your goal of brand authority.
Written Content: Blogs, Guides, and More
Written educational content will probably be the lynchpin of your strategy. Your blog will likely be your most important tool, coupled with newsletter teasers. Remember that educational content can drive new traffic to your site as well.
For blogs, all the standard rules of content layout remain but are even more critical. Simple images that illustrate more difficult points are recommended. Bullets, headings, and chunked data are key no matter your medium.
However, to cover a specific topic exhaustively, you may want to go beyond a simple blog series. Instead, you can create an ebook, some of which can double as a lead magnet or it can be a product offering in its entirety. For a more technical audience, you can create a white paper or presentation.
Using Social Media To Inform
Social media is an excellent way to share educational content as well. Since this medium is image-driven, craft compelling images combining them with startling statistics. Boil down your information into bullet points and illustrate with emojis when appropriate.
Image Source: Hubspot
For Instagram, use well-researched hashtags. On Facebook, you can start a group based on this content and implement the guides feature to teach members. Be sure to use Facebook live as a way to attract visitors to educational content in general.
Creating Educational Content for Video
Crafting an educational video is an excellent way to make data interesting and engaging. Take a professional approach and treat your video as if you were making a film. Outline your content and storyboard the narrative to include images, actions, graphs, illustrations…whatever makes the content fly off the screen!
Be sure to use professional lighting, appropriate backgrounds, and camera angles that are properly aligned to the content. And use a talented speaker or narrator. Finally, edit the video using titles, music, and transitions to make it seamless. When videos are short yet skillfully made, they have a better chance of going viral.
Going Outside the Box With Webinars and Summits
With enough content, you can create a webinar or virtual summit. If you have a group of like-minded brands with a common interest, partner with them to host an event. These events will drive a very targeted audience so choose your partners and topics wisely.
Carefully consider your time and financial investment before going this route. The key to successful webinars and summits is ensuring that they are well-publicized to attract an audience. However, when successful, they not only drive a loyal audience, they also can help you build partnerships that can improve brand authority.
Providing educational content builds credibility. Create content that engages your existing audience while attracting others in the proper medium. These tips will help establish your brand as an authority in your industry.
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