Why You Need a Content Strategy to Grow Your Education Business
When we consider that the global education market is valued at $4.4 trillion, the e-learning industry at $200bn, and the global private tutoring market at $102.8 Billion, it’s no surprise that the education industry is a noisy place.
If you want your marketing efforts to pay off long-term, you need to know who you’re marketing to, and how to do it effectively.
However, according to a recent survey conducted by Marketing Week, the education sector is where marketing is least understood. The survey of 3,435 marketing professionals found that 65.2% believe that marketing is misunderstood and undervalued in education. That’s where a documented content strategy can set you apart from the crowd.
Seventy two percent of marketers already have a content strategy in place. However, only thirty percent of strategies are actually documented.
Graphic source: SnapApp
A documented strategy holds you accountable for following it through. It enables anyone in your organisation to pick it up and understand what you’re trying to achieve from your content. Plus, the very process of creating a content strategy provides you with invaluable insights about your audience, your competitors, and the education industry.
Whether you run an EdTech company, or specialise in face-to-face teaching, one of the best marketing investments you can make is in content. After all, it’s the reason people use the internet. As an educator, you’re probably very good at teaching your audience, but how are your selling skills?
As we all know, education businesses need to be promoted. They need to attract the right type of customers and they need to make sales. In this guide, we’ll explain why a content strategy is the best way to grow your education business.
And when we talk about content, we don’t just mean blog posts…
You’ll Understand Your Audience and the Industry Better
Every content strategy begins with research. Typically, this includes creating customer personas, defining your company’s tone of voice, carrying out keyword analyses, and identifying opportunities for content promotion.
Carrying out the research for your strategy will help you understand who you’re marketing to – no company has a target audience of ‘everyone’.
From the outset, your current perception of the industry might be slightly skewed without you realising. With a little research, you might discover that your audience aren’t who you initially thought they were. You may realise that you have more competitors than you first thought, and you may even find gaps in the market that you didn’t know existed.
As they say, knowledge is power.
You’ll Have Opportunities to Engage with Potential Partners
A content strategy brings about opportunities to partner with other companies in your space. You may find companies that can recommend your products or services to their existing customers, and vice-versa.
Even your competitors can make great partners. Even though you may occupy the same niche, you’re probably trying to achieve the same thing. A content strategy could help you find ways to complement your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
You’ll Attract the Right Type of Customers, Increasing Your Conversions
As education copywriters, we’ve seen it happen many times. A promising education start-up takes a gung-ho approach to publishing content and burns out a few months later, with only small gains in website traffic and revenue.
A documented content strategy helps ensure that you’re targeting the right people. Because the right people mean more sales.
However, a website doesn’t need to have hundreds of thousands of visitors to make a good, sustainable income. At Brand New Copy, we’ve seen education companies with 5,000 website visits per month convert their traffic into frequent sales because they know exactly who they’re targeting.
Case Study: A 1005% Increase in Website Traffic in 9 Months for Success at School
In 2015, we helped student careers website Success at School increase their website traffic by 1005% in 9 months by drilling down on their target audience. We took their website traffic from 7,029 sessions per month to 77,698 using a documented content plan.
Educational Content is the Backbone of Inbound Marketing
If you want your customers to come to you, then you need to ensure that your website is targetted for the terms that people are searching for. A content strategy will provide you with insights into what you should be writing about on your blog, what you should be talking about in your videos, and what you should be sharing on social media.
Educational content gives your audience something for free. It answers their queries, it provides them with information, it gains their trust. If a potential customer finds your website through a valuable piece of content that you’ve written, they’ll be more engaged with your brand, and more likely to explore your products and services.
Case Study: a 55% Increase in Year-on-Year YouTube Traffic for Our Education Client
In 2017, we helped an education company achieve a 54.54% year-on-year increase in YouTube traffic, as well as improvements in YouTube rankings. After the first month of implementing our changes, our client’s video saw a 16% month-on-month increase in YouTube traffic and improvements in YouTube and Google search results.
It’s the Best Way to Market for Long-Term Growth
Unlike paid advertising, where visitors disappear the moment you stop paying for it, valuable, evergreen content ensures people keep coming back. And if that content has been properly optimised using on-page SEO best practices, it should continue to drive even more traffic through time.
As your business grows, you can adjust your content strategy to suit your new positioning in the marketplace. Perhaps you’ll introduce new products or services that will require targeting a different set of keyphrases. Or maybe you’ll discover that your customers are more engaged with one type of content more than others.
Without a documented content strategy, you won’t have a solid basis on which to make analyses and observations about your content marketing efforts.
Case Study: A 325% Year on Year Traffic Increase (+ 450% Increase in Revenue) for our Education Client
In 2016, we helped a niche education company increase their year-on-year organic traffic by 325% in 6 months, and increase their year-on-year revenue by 450%. We took their website from 474 organic visitors to 2016 using a well-researched content strategy.
Since 2011, Brand New Copy has been helping education companies grow their online presence, improve their website traffic, and increase their revenue. If you need help creating a content strategy for your education business, get in touch at hello@brandnewcopy.com.
Related posts:
11 Great Examples of Education Copywriting
Copywriting Vs Content Writing: What’s the Difference?
Header image: Pexels
