By: Chris Piehler
For education marketers, writing and sharing content such as articles, blog posts, and infographics is an absolute must. But you can’t just sing the praises of your product and trust that the education leaders you are trying to reach will 1) find what you’ve written; 2) love it; and 3) write an enormous purchase order.
Creating content for educators is a multi-step process. First you have to determine what a good story is for your brand. Then you have to decide what form that story will take. Should it be a blog post? An e-book? A whitepaper? And maybe most importantly, you have to decide who you are creating all this enticing content for. Now, you may be saying, “Duh. It’s for the people who I want to buy my products.” Yes, but here’s the thing: Most of the people who will end up buying your products don’t even know that they want or need to buy anything yet.
This is because they are on what we call the buyer’s journey. To understand the buyer’s journey, imagine what you would do if your significant other, who loves cake but happens to be on a gluten-free diet, had a birthday coming up.
Step 1: Realize that you have a problem. Namely, gluten-free birthday cakes don’t grow on trees. In the buyer’s journey, this is called the awareness stage.
Step 2: Investigate various solutions. This means Googling search terms that fit with your situation or potentially turning to social media to find answers. If you’re short on time, you might search for “where can I buy a gluten free cake near me.” If you have plenty of time and a love of baking, you might choose “how to make a gluten-free birthday cake.” This is the consideration stage—and notice, please, that brand names are not a part of it. The focus is on finding the best way to create a happy birthday for your cake-loving love interest. Like your potential buyers, you start the process knowing what you want, not who you want it from.
Step 3: Pick a solution. Not surprisingly, this is what’s called the decision stage, and it’s when actual brand names may come into play. If that search for gluten-free bakeries yielded a list of three local options, a further Yelp search of each bakery’s name or a brief investigation on each website would help you complete your comparison shopping and choose the perfect cake.
So that’s the buyer’s journey, and to give yourself the best chance to reach your audience, you need to create content that will attract and connect with your future buyers at every stage along the way. How do you do that? To extend our example, let’s flip the script and imagine that you are the gluten-free bakery.
To pique the interest of someone in the awareness stage, you might write and promote an article called “How the Heck Do I Throw a Gluten-Free Birthday Party?” For the consideration stage, you could move to an infographic called “To Bake or not to Bake,” which compares the financial and time investment of baking versus buying a gluten-free cake. Finally, in decision-stage content, you should feel free to toot your own horn. You might, for example, write a blog post about how custom-baked cakes are fresher and more personal, complete with a clear call to action showing where to order your custom-basked cakes.
By creating and promoting content for all stages of the buyer’s journey, you are casting the widest possible net, which is key to success in today’s crowded ed tech marketplace. Because here’s the truth: No matter how great your product may be, most of your future customers aren’t just Googling your brand name. They are looking for solutions to their specific, urgent problems. If you can help them, you have a much better chance of eventually getting that enormous purchase order.
Already have awesome content but not sure you are collecting the right intel on the people downloading it from your website? Check out this blog post: Use Your Website Forms to Get More than Just Contact Information.
Chris Piehler is the editorial director of PR with Panache!. He loves cake in all its many forms.
Thank you for sharing!