Content Marketing in the Education Industry
Every Business Needs Great Content
Connect instantly with highly-vetted writers across 50+ industries. Manage your entire content production in one easy-to-use platform. Never worry about content again for your SMB.
Get Started
A fully-supported, flexible content marketing solution for digital and creative marketing agencies. We will match you with highly-vetted writers to best support the content needs of each of your clients.
Learn More
Large enterprise businesses in need of a turn-key content marketing solution. Add a dedicated, expert writing team from Scripted to research, produce, and publish premium content.
Learn More
Producing consistent, quality content on your publishing or media site means managing a lot of moving parts including multiple deadlines, assignments, and payments for freelancers. Scripted can handle it all.
Learn More
With 77% of organizations saying they have a
content marketing strategy in place, the importance and impact of successful content marketing is obvious.
Of course, for those in the education industry — be they software providers, thought leaders, or even
nonprofits — content marketing often requires a unique approach.
After all, when it comes to the education industry, honesty, trust, and factuality are the hallmarks of the
niche. For that reason, content marketing requires not only a lot of forethought and planning to ensure it
strikes a chord with the audience, but the execution of the strategy itself must also be carefully
considered so as not to seem overly focused on sales or profit.
In this guide, we’ll explore content marketing step-by-step, looking at the concept not with a bird's-eye
view, but from the perspective of someone in the education industry who’s trying to create a strategy in a
streamlined, effective, and transparent manner.
What Makes a Content Strategy Effective?
Any form of organic marketing, even if supplemented by paid advertising, won't lead to an “overnight
sensation” like many founders dream. Rather, all forms of marketing take time — especially content
marketing for the education industry, as its measure of success is often rooted in building a strong
reputation for a given solution. Needless to say, gaining people’s trust
isn’t something that happens in a day.
For content marketing to be effective in the education industry, it requires time, first and foremost.
In addition, prepare to invest a great deal of effort into understanding your audience, defining your
brand, and then figuring out where to publish, what to publish, and when to publish. Only once these
components come together, will you have a real strategy on your hands.
The first component of a successful content strategy is a well-defined brand.
After all, content marketing is focused on helping you gain recognition for your brand, and that
requires a consistent, relatable brand image your audience will want to connect with. Of course,
even if you know who your brand is, that doesn’t mean you can check this off the list.
The fact is, a growing company likely works with a number of people, whether they’re in-house staff
or contract workers. In any case, marketers, sales teams, customer service reps, and professional
writers all need to know your brand inside and out. Fortunately, getting that information across to
them is simple if you assemble a brand book.
A brand book is a standalone resource
that will help you instantly inform a new partner or employee about who your brand is, who your
audience is, how your brand should speak to that audience, and so on.
Without proper resources to define your brand and its intentions in such a manner, writers and other
content creators you hire will undoubtedly take liberties that will lead to inconsistencies in how
your brand is portrayed and perceived. That makes your content marketing efforts less effective at
building trust and recognition in your industry.
Every company must define objectives for their content marketing strategy in order to measure its
efficacy. After all, what’s measured can be managed. You likely already track various KPIs, which
will align with your business’ big-picture needs. However, you must also track specific metrics that
pertain to your content strategy.
Across industries, web traffic is one of the two markers
most often used to track a content strategy’s success. However, for an education company, you should
define and track metrics that indicate growth in the following areas:
- Brand Awareness: A lot of content marketing revolves around building awareness, so measure indicators of how well-known, recognizable, and memorable your brand is.
- Consumer Perception: Content marketing shapes and builds upon how the public perceives your brand, so consumer perception must also be quantified and measured.
- Employee Perception: Finally, educational companies looking to expand must invest in employer content that shows off company culture, helping them attract top talent and partners.
As time goes by, your objectives are likely to change. For instance, a newer company is going to focus on customer acquisition and their content marketing plan will fit that goal accordingly. As you develop an audience, though, you will also have to split your focus to include customer retention, and current customers will require a whole other set of content — and metrics — to go along with it.
You can't create impactful content unless you understand the audience who will read it. For that reason,
defining audience personas is most certainly a necessity for any education organization looking to
produce sharable, engaging content that showcases thought leadership. For this, you can turn to
customer persona templates
that can be filled out according to the demographics of your average reader or client.
Education companies often have many different target personas. For instance, Khan Academy needs to
target individual adult learners who become users just as much as they target educational institutions
who become partners. By drawing out customer personas, you’ll gain insight into who you’re talking to
and what you should do to best connect with them.
A persona may include information like age, salary, and gender along with behavioral characteristics,
such as cultural influences and media preferences.
When you write a specific piece of content, you should know exactly which person you’re targeting with
that content and create a call-to-action (CTA) according to that persona’s
biggest needs and pain points.
The customer personas you identify will also help you create content around the customer journey (more on that later).
The final component that you must have sorted before creating a content plan is another critical one:
keywords. Every successful content strategy is built around in-depth keyword research,
which can be completed with the help of tools like Google Analytics. With the right tools, finding the
short-tail and long-tail keywords you need to target is relatively easy, it just takes time.
Laying out a keyword plan ultimately requires you to approach from multiple angles. A professional
keyword strategist can help, but planning your keywords is just half the battle. You also need to
invest in monitoring tools that will help you understand and track your performance overtime. This
involves a combination of on-page SEO strategies to
actually drive organic traffic to your website.
You'll be relying on your keyword strategy later in this guide to figure out what type of content your
education organization should be publishing.
Understanding an Education Customer's Journey
No prospect comes upon a company ready to make an immediate decision about a product they have no
knowledge of. Rather, customers in every industry go through what’s known as the
“customer journey,”
in which a handful of key phases are defined.
How long a customer spends in each phase will vary from person to person, but understanding these phases
is important in building out a content plan and keyword strategy that directly and appropriately addresses
the intent of a given reader. In other words, you can’t show a “buy now” CTA to someone in the awareness
phase and expect them to jump on it.
Understanding the customer journey your prospects take is the precursor to building a full-fledged
content plan that addresses every phase and moves people through the sales funnel. The phases are to
follow, with each featuring recommendations regarding the content you should create and serve to people
in each phase.
A prospect enters the first phase, “awareness,” when they first become aware of a pain point or
problem that needs solving. They may stay in the awareness phase for quite some time before ever
even trying to figure out their options. Some may never take the time to explore options, at least
not seriously, and that’s why identifying your ideal customer personas and offering targeted advertising
can be so effective.
By putting the right content in front of prospects who are aware of their pain point, but not yet
aware of all their options, you can gain the first-mover advantage and become their go-to solution.
Take the University of Arizona, for instance, who targets
prospects in the “awareness” phase with engaging videos explaining different majors. They’re piquing
the interest of people who know they want to pursue an education or a different career, but haven’t
begun seriously comparing schools or programs.
Content to show prospects in this phase includes:
- Targeted advertising addressing their pain points.
- Informational content that points out how your offerings address their needs.
- Promotional content that introduces and builds a reputation for your organization.
After becoming aware of what’s out there, prospects move into the consideration phase in which they
begin exploring your organization and your competitors. In this phase, it’s very important that you
showcase what makes your organization standout compared to other solutions.
Colleges, for example, will spend a lot of money retargeting prospects
to make sure that their own programs and campus stay at the front of prospects’ minds as prospective
students compare all the potential schools they may attend.
Content to show prospects in this phase includes:
- Information about your organization’s accolades, awards, and unique offerings.
- Testimonials and reviews about your products and services.
- Comparisons between your organization and competitors.
As they gain knowledge about you and your competitors, prospects will develop a preference. In other
words, this is the beginning of the decision-making phase. They’re narrowing down options and you
need to continue showing them promotional content that makes you a favorable choice. This is when
you should offer extra
value to encourage them to choose you in the next phase.
Content to show prospects in this phase includes:
- Informational and promotional content showcasing benefits, like setup time
- Offers for free coaching, trials, and other added value.
- Special pricing, like a discounted first year subscription.
This is the key phase where you finally get to see how many prospects actually turn into customers.
However, your work isn’t done just because you’ve gotten a customer all the way to the end of the
sales funnel. To actually convert them into a customer, you must provide the lead with a
frictionless purchasing experience.
During this phase, you need to give prospects answers to their final questions. Knowing the customer’s
persona and their specific purchasing hurdles will help you address those questions proactively. From
there, you need to be ready to follow-up immediately, especially in the case of “abandoned carts” where
a person was in the process of purchasing, subscribing, or registering, but ultimately backed out.
Content to show prospects in this phase includes:
- Targeted promotional content with strong CTAs directing them to register, subscribe, etc.
- Follow-up content, especially in the form of email marketing, to maintain their interest.
- Survey requests and exit questionnaires for those who abort the registration process.
For most education organizations, the “purchase” or “decision” phase is not the end. If you’re selling
textbooks or another product, you may very well jump right to the “retention” phase and get back to
focusing on acquiring more customers, but other organizations really need to prioritize onboarding.
In the education industry, onboarding can take on many forms. For instance, a college’s onboarding
experience focuses on making the admissions process and a student’s first weeks on campus enjoyable
and as minimally stressful as possible. Meanwhile, an online course provider will focus their
onboarding efforts on making sure that all students who register for a course are
highly engaged
and actually returning to utilize the course’s content.
No matter what “onboarding” looks like for your organization, your content strategy will play a major role in this phase as well.
Content to show prospects in this phase includes:
- Tutorials and “welcome” content to engage them and inform them about next steps.
- Manuals, documentation, and FAQs that address common questions.
- A highly interactive support team, ideally one that proactively reaches out to help.
The onboarding phase may last for a few days, a few weeks, or a few months depending on the product,
service, or platform you offer to your users. After users are setup and going, you then need to move
onto the retention phase.
This is truly an ongoing phase that your company should always invest money into.
With long-term engagement, colleges ensure students refer their friends, companies ensure subscribers
renew for another year, and product companies ensure that users have an experience that they’ll share
positive feedback about.
Content to show prospects in this phase includes:
- Surveys and questionnaires asking them about how you can improve.
- Updates on how you are implementing feedback and continuing to grow.
- Stories about your organization, its team, and your values.
Building an Engaging Content Calendar
With an understanding of your customer's journey, you already have an idea of what type of content you
should create in order to cater to prospects throughout the various phases. Now, it's time to sit down
and layout your actionable content strategy.
Your content strategy begins with a content calendar,
which is basically a schedule telling you what type of content will be published and when. How often
you publish content will depend on your capacity for creating content and also reliant on the size
and preferences of your target audience.
If you're undecided about when you should publish, look to industry metrics and competitors and study
what days of the week they share new content, and the response it gets. You can then make a tentative
schedule and adjust it as necessary, as you collect information about when your audience is most
likely to interact with your content and how often.
Your content calendar not only tells you when to publish, but it also needs to define what you're
publishing. For some organizations, a content strategy starts out with strictly content writing projects,
but even then you'll have multiple platforms and types of content to contend with. For instance, you
may write: listicles, comparison articles, walkthroughs/tutorials, case studies, and so on.
When thinking about what type of content you plan to create, categorize it into areas of focus like these:
- Brand Awareness: Content that informs the public about your organization, its values, and the people who make it work.
- Product Information: Content that describes what you offer, what makes it unique, and why a prospect should choose you.
- Onboarding Content: Content that explains who uses your product/service and how to use it.
- Loyalty-Building Content: Content that shares testimonials, case studies, and publicity for accolades and awards you've earned. You might consider this part of your brand awareness content category.
Your content calendar should define each type of content you plan to create and then plug these types of content into the publishing slots you've created. If you're also publishing videos, podcasts, and other forms of media, they need to be in your calendar, too.
The third step in creating your content calendar is to explore the exact topics you're going to cover
for "content slot" you've put into your schedule. It's a good idea to build up a bank of content ideas
so that you can stay ahead of your content schedule rather than constantly feeling like you're
scrambling to find topics to cover. Fortunately, if you've done your keyword research, a lot of the
work is already done.
Your keyword research will inform much of your content strategy. After all, those keywords reveal
what your audience is searching for and what they care about. Therefore, you need to
create content around those topics.
In doing so, you're also powering your SEO, helping to drive traffic to your website.
Understanding search volume and on-page SEO, along with other SEO strategies that can help you score
featured snippets, is very important to consistently increase organic traffic. However, these are
things you can focus on after planning your content strategy and laying out the topics themselves.
Exceptional Examples from Education Leaders
As you begin to see your content strategy come together, turning to leaders in the industry is a good
idea. Not only can it offer you inspiration, but it can also help you identify new topics and categories
that audiences are reacting to. Here are some exceptional examples from various niches within the
education industry.
For universities, building a strong community culture around their institution is fundamental to
new enrollments and student satisfaction. At Indiana University, one way they do that is through
the Pride of IU microsite. This microsite explores the
university's founding while showcasing its work in the areas of art and culture; research and
innovation; and more.
Prospective students are sure to visit this microsite when comparing schools to learn more about
IU and what it offers. Current students also frequent it, especially the "IU Spirit" section, where
fun facts about the campus, student features, and interactive content is often featured.
TED Talks have taken the world by storm, and one way they've become so synonymous with educational
presentations is through their ever-growing YouTube channel,
which now has over 18 million subscribers.
Elsewhere, TED also maintains a major digital presence with an engaging website
that features podcasts, blog posts, and "TED on screen," which are conferences people
can attend from home. TED touches on a number of topics, but excellent organization ultimately
keeps all of their talks and content in perfect order.
An Effective Content Strategy Starts with Great Content
As an organization within the education industry, you undoubtedly aim to be a thought leader. However,
proving your knowledge, reliability, and authority doesn't come easy. Creating a content strategy and
getting your ideas on paper is an essential first step, but you are not going to see results until you're
actually executing the plan and having content created for your brand.
Here at Scripted, we maintain a database of some of the best writers in the education industry
who are poised and ready to help your organization reach new heights by creating informative, thoughtful,
and relevant content to engage your audience. With the help of our professional education writers, your
organization can implement its content strategy and get results.
To learn more about Scripted's writers or
our fully managed Cruise Control service,
reach out to the team for information and answers to all of your questions.
