How to put Education at the Heart of your Content Strategy

Why is it important to generously educate your audience?

When referring to education, we mean how you can teach your audience, and what your audience want to learn

We always recommend taking a very generous and accessible approach to sharing your knowledge and experience with your audience, which means that you can both achieve education.

It’s great to take your ideas and experiences and share them in a way which makes your audience feel welcome, that they’re in safe hands, and that you’re a generous person.

We often see individuals in consultancy roles making the mistake of not wanting to share their ‘secrets’, so that potential clients don’t attempt to achieve the same result, without paying.

However, the truth is that no amount of blog posts or videos is going to substitute for the five, 10, or 15 years’ worth of experience that you have. Remember that you are the expert!

So why not use all of that content you have created as an opportunity to sell the complexity of the work that you do?

We’re sure that your audience will appreciate you sharing your knowledge, but also understand that they may need help achieving their desired outcome. That is when they will come to you for further help, support, guidance, and consultancy.

So, how do we go about educating our audience with your content? Here are our top 5 tips:

 

1. Create audience personas

Audience personas are great for better understanding the demographic of who you’re selling to. 

This will help you to fully understand your target audiences’ wants, needs, challenges, and goals, so that you can tailor your offering and marketing towards them.

We find considering the following elements really useful:

• Demographics such as age, gender, location, job title
• The questions and challenges they have
• Their needs, goals and aspirations
• The content they are searching for and consuming
• The platforms and channels they engage with

 

You can even choose to add their hobbies, relationships, and avatars to make your persona more relatable!

 

2. Identify what your audience wants to know, and what you can teach them

Now you have a fuller understanding of who your audience are, you can dive further into what they want to know, and what you can educate them on.

As time goes on you will gain a better understanding of your audiences’ wants, and how you can address these. But in the meantime, we suggest trying this short exercise.

This simply involves writing down five ideas of what you can teach your audience, and what your audience wants to learn. You can then identify how these two link together, and focus your content creation in these areas.

The more you get to know your audience, the most you can build on these topics and ideas. Simple!

 

3. Get your content out there!

We know it’s easy to assume that once we publish content, people will engage with it.

We’ve all been there!

Unfortunately, that’s often not the case. And for many this results in frustration when weeks or months later no one is engaging with our content or purchasing our products and services. 

So as well as planning and producing content, promotion of content is really important.

But promotion doesn’t have to be difficult. It can be achieved through simple, actionable and management tasks.

Because unless we're paying a big agency or utilising multiple automation tools, promotion is something that we often do by hand. And it's something that we don't want to spend too much time on. We just want to give ourselves the very best chance of success. 

Which brings us neatly onto our next tip...

 

4. Choose the right channels

Now it’s time to get creative by considering the promotional channels you want to use to reach out and engage with your audience.

At this stage, you can always revisit your audience persona to understand the platforms and channels that they engage with the most. We often find this useful.

But don’t forget to acknowledge whether these platforms are suitable and perform well for the format of content you are promoting. 

For example, a blog may perform better on LinkedIn than it would on Instagram.

Or a video may perform better on Facebook than Twitter.

You may come across platforms which you are not so familiar with. But don’t let that deter you! Instead, why not see it as an opportunity to upskill (where possible) and familiarise yourself with the communities that your audience is most engaged with?

 

5. Keep it manageable

Last but not least. Whatever promotional strategy you choose, we recommend you keep it manageable!

If you're just one person or you're a very small team of people, then giving yourself a strategy that actually involves having too much to do, that's too ambitious, or has too many platforms and channels, won’t be manageable long term.

If you give yourself too much to do and you fail to do it, it can be incredibly demotivating and you end up in this endless cycle of trying to do something, failing to do it, and then having to pick yourself up and re-energize the whole process. 

We wouldn’t want that to happen!

 

So, whenever you approach a promotional strategy, try asking yourself the following:

Is this manageable?

Can I pull this off?

Do I have enough time in my week?

Do I have enough time in my month? 

We find it’s much more effective to give yourself a lot less to do and then build on it as you create capacity in your week. Than to give yourself too much to do but only chip away at your promotional activities.

 

Before you go…

At Content Club our goal is to help businesses make content their superpower.

Education is just one element of successful content. So if you’d like to learn more, or understand how you can embed content into your wider business, then get in touch for a friendly chat.