Education as a marketing strategy

Small businesses can build trust by teaching and educating their audiences about their brands, products and services using digital marketing and digital advertising.

Every small business has owners, founders and managers that are subject matter experts and authorities about their brands, products and services, therefore they can use this knowledge to educate their prospects and customers.

There are two challenges in educational marketing, one is the production of the content and the other is the distribution of the content. Content production and content distribution are the two challenges to overcome.

Professional content production will produce a high quality content.

Professional and strategic content distribution will produce high reach, engagement and conversion metrics.

By doing educational marketing, small businesses not only will position their brands, products and services as trustable ones, but also will position their owners, founders and managers as subject matter experts and authorities in their markets. The audiences will know, like and trust not only the brands, but also the humans behind the brands.

Content production.

The key to produce a high quality content is either to have a subject matter expert that writes well or to have a good writer that becomes a subject matter expert through studying, learning, reading, listening, interviewing, experiencing and much more about the brands, products and services.

The topics are all those themes related to the brands, products and services. The main topic categories are feature and benefits, problems to solve, needs to satisfy, pricing, best in class and competitors, case studies, testimonials, reviews, media features, research and findings, success stories, failure stories, partnerships.

The content should be produced originally in a text format, like an article, and later it can be produced in another audio visual format like podcasts, videos, graphics.

The original publishing should be done at the small business WordPress Blog within the business website. This publishing methodology will help the small business to conquer the first page of Google organic results.

Content distribution

The content should be distributed in two types or distribution campaigns, organic and paid campaigns. In the organic campaign, the content is distributed in all the small business owned digital media channels, like website blog where the content is originally published, and then in all the social media pages, directories, guest blogs and email marketing. In the paid campaign, the content is distributed to the right audience using the big database advertising platforms from Google, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

The organic campaigns have low reach, engagement and conversions, however they are needed to build the trust for readers and algorithms.

The paid campaigns have higher reach, engagement and conversions because the content is displayed to a larger audience.

Subject matter experts should also host or sponsor events at their networking business associations, where they can give their conferences, workshops, classes and talks to the right audience. Events can also be given to the right audience using the Google, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram event features.

Last but not least, subject matter experts can be interviewed in specialized media to deliver the story to the right audience using third party media.

A larger project for the subject matter expert is the writing and publishing of a book about their brands, products and services stories. The articles written will help to do this task.

All type of communication has an implicit legacy within, however, nowadays, in the era of search algorithms, big databases and the power of Google, the published text format can become an evergreen legacy, whereas the social networks “lives”, “posts”, “stories” and “events” do not have evergreen legacy in the search algorithms and big databases, but only in the minds of the low reach organic audiences.