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Education Content Marketing Best Practices

“You’re either a Purple Cow or you’re not. You’re either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice.”
– Seth Godin, The Purple Cow.

On the Internet, you’re either remarkable or invisible. Does your school or tutoring organization have a remarkable story to tell? How will you stand out from the ever-growing crowd online? Do you want to get your organization found in the search engines? Do you want to engage and connect with potential students, clients or donors in a VERY real way? Are you curious about how social media can provide a ROI for your school or tutoring company? Enter content marketing. The basic premise: people don’t want to be sold to.

Content marketing is simply the art of creating rich, engaging, shareable, digital ‘stuff’ that connects with your prospects, educates them, entertains them and engages them, and then getting that content found in the right place, at the right time, with the right message. They use Google to find the stuff that they want, when they want it and how they want. If you want to win in 2016, you need to be creating amazing digital stuff that connects.

Some Education Content Marketing Best Practices:

Know / Define Your Audience.
One of the biggest mistakes I see schools and tutoring organizations make is this: they write / create content as if it were for them, NOT their target prospects. Granted, you know your business better than anyone, BUT, your prospects may not have a clue OR a care about how you make the ‘sausage’. They are looking for information that’s geared and catered to them. Once you define your audience, you can generate content that is geared for THEM, such as parents of potential students, or maybe your audience mostly consists of parents of current students.

Create an Editorial Calendar.
An editorial calendar is simply a plan of attack for a period of time (a month, a quarter, a year), that helps you to stay organized, focused on current trends, and mindful of your audience’s needs. Which content are you going to create / have created when? You know your quarterly cycle, so it’s wise to create a corresponding calendar of content that helps to reinforce your quarterly cycle. Think about what your prospects need / want during which fiscal quarter, and craft your content creation and delivery around their needs.

Create Content In Multiple Formats.
Blogs are great and are amazing fuel for search engines, but images, graphics, infographics and videos can be easily shared across social media channels. Be sure to create a comprehensive content plan that involves multiple species of content, and constantly seek ways to grab the attention of your audience while staying on brand. For example, infographics provide an excellent way to educate your prospects about your process in an easily shareable format, and remember that while a picture can speak a thousand words, imagine what a video can say. Be creative and make certain that your graphics and videos are professional and crisp.

Hire A Professional.
Not everyone can write. Not everyone is an artist. Not everyone can create an animated video. Content marketing, if done poorly, can actually push people away from your brand rather than attract them to it. The best way to lose clout with your audience is for your content to be weak. Be certain that you have resources available to you to create rich, professional and STRATEGIC content. With content marketing, it doesn’t pay to be cheap.

Share and Share Alike.
Creating amazing, remarkable content is just the beginning. Once it’s been created, it needs to get found in the right place, at the right time, and by the right people. Sharing your content across multiple, relevant and appropriate social media channels can help to get your content seen quickly AND get Google and other search engines to pay attention to it. The name of the game: get your content seen by as many influencers as you can. If people love what you are creating, they will share it. They will comment on it. They will begin to trust your expertise as a brand, and potentially, become a student, donor or client. Be sure that your employees are sharing the content as well. They have a whole different audience, and you just never know who might see that content and a lead will be generated.

Don’t SELL.
Content that is full of sales speak will fail. People do not want to be sold to online. Create your content with the purpose of educating, entertaining, enlightening, improving customer service, spreading good cheer, etc., and you’ll win.

Rinse & Repeat.
The Internet never sleeps. Each minute, millions of new articles, graphics, videos, and websites are being created, so don’t give up. If you build a solid, consistent education content marketing machine, you’ll go far, but it’s important to not give up when you don’t get instant gratification.

For more education content marketing tips to help grow your online presence, browse our website.

Best,

Tom