In a highly competitive industry like Edtech, content marketing is the essential building block that nurtures audiences to choose your solutions.
HubSpot claims that an effective content marketing strategy in B2B is one of the most important methods of “growing your audience engagement, developing your brand presence, and driving sales.”
The content marketing institute (CMI) identified that 64% of all successful B2B marketers document their content marketing strategy. The research also discovered that audience-focused content marketing not only helps with conversion rate optimization but also enhances customer knowledge and loyalty among target audiences.
Our article looks closely at the importance of content marketing for Edtech businesses and how education tech businesses grow using it.
Why Do Edtech Businesses Need a Content Marketing Strategy?
Edtech content marketing is a powerful tool for generating leads and boosting engagement. By creating compelling, informative pieces that are tailored to customer needs, you can promote loyalty while gaining traction in your market space.
Higher education marketing usually involves a carefully mapped customer journey that nurtures leads to make an informed decision through strategic content campaigns. After all — as the saying goes – “content truly reigns supreme” when it comes to successful outreach strategies like SEO, SMM, SMO, or PPC!
Both HubSpot and CMI agree that content marketing is now a core business strategy. Professionals discuss that consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts buyer behavior, unlike any other method.
There are several competitive advantages that Edtech businesses can reap from a defined content marketing strategy, including an increase in online traffic, brand recognition, and improved search rankings.
Let’s look at some of the reasons why the Edtech business needs a solid content marketing strategy:
Increase Website Traffic
A dedicated blog offers Edtech websites additional landing pages to rank on search engines. According to popular research, unique content enables brands to get almost 8 times more online exposure with a 6 times higher chance of converting visitors.
One of the most inspiring examples of increasing website traffic and revenue comes from UK Edtech provider Edval. Using a low-cost and high-impact content strategy, the brand increased its UK web traffic by 237%.
This was achieved by investing in high-quality lead magnets like ebooks, case studies, and videos and focusing on a multi-channel social media strategy. Edval experienced a growth of 600% in its contact database while reducing the website’s overall bounce rate by 13%.
Generate Industry Authority
Having a branded blog that provides valuable information and leads to a knowledgeable authority will establish your business as a market innovator. A blog with value-driven and helpful content can allow audiences to recognize a business as a thought leader. Being an authority in the industry attracts valuable partnerships and business decision-makers to your brand.
One of the most interesting and deserving examples of industry authority building comes from the amateur website FreeTechForTeachers. Developed by Richard Byrne, a computer science teacher from Maine, the website builds its immense name on sharing resources for teachers and students.
Richard Byrne has built great authority as an Edtech industry thought leader with his Google Teacher credentials and speaking tours across 5 continents. In addition, he offers development workshops for teachers and contributes articles in other Edtech journals.
With a global audience of over 500,000 visitors, which includes more than 60,000 educators, the blog has a page authority of 60 on Ahrefs with 250,000+ backlinks. The website has also received numerous Edublogs Awards, including those for Best Resource Sharing Blog, Best Ed Tech Support, and Best Individual Blog.
Raised Brand Awareness
Content marketing builds brand identity and awareness in unique ways mentions HubSpot. Ranking multiple content pieces on search engines give your Edtech business visibility to a vast potential audience searching for your solutions.
By doing something unique, Edtech business can increase its brand awareness. A great example of this comes from Chegg – an online learning platform for high school and college students. The ability to rent both digital and physical textbooks is one of Chegg’s most famous features. Since textbooks are quite expensive in the USA, Chegg strives to make them more affordable by letting students rent them at a lower price and allowing them to purchase digital textbooks rather than physical ones. By doing so, Chegg offers something unique, increasing its brand awareness.
Higher SERP Rankings
A distinguished and populated blog will always have higher search rankings, more traffic, and convert more leads. Prominent social media influencer Neal Schaffer mentions that content marketing gains 94% more backlinks to your website, costs 64% less to generate leads than traditional methods, and offers up to 126% lead growth when done right.
Edtech marketing teams are turning to organic methods as paid marketing costs rise. Building authority and focusing on enterprise customers, in particular, can be accomplished through blogging, social channels like Quora, guest posting, and promoting truthful third-party reviews on Edtech review sites. A great example of this comes from Thinkific. This third-party review of Thinkific generates solid referral traffic for Thinkific and helps them rank high on SERPs.
How Edtech Companies Grow Business With a Content Marketing Strategy?
We will now discuss 10 strategies Edtech companies can use to grow their business with a content marketing strategy. So read on if you’re serious about boosting visibility & success!
1. Add value for the audience
Providing unique value through your content is the core aim of the content marketing strategy. Understand the relevant pain points of your audiences, and create value through problem resolution.
The popular concept of delivering unique value other than that gained from your solutions applies here. The modern audience demands value before they become your customers. Hence selling to them immediately can have possible consequences.
Some of the most popular ways Edtech businesses deliver value through content marketing is by crafting helpful tutorials & guides, case studies, success stories, and historical insights on topics.
A great example comes from language learning solution provider, Duolingo. The brand focuses on several buyer personas in its interesting blog, including travelers, teachers, and professionals aiming to learn a second language.
The Duolingo blog provides specialized guides that teach people basic communication, reports on language learning, learning specific languages for travel, language mistakes to avoid, and much more.
2. Create Content Goals Around Your Business Goals
Former CEO and co-founder of Moz, Rand Fishkin, discuss that content centered around your business’s messaging and goals is the one that performs best. For instance, an Edtech business may aim to increase the conversion rate. On the other hand, content creators may presume that the target is to increase traffic.
Content marketing strategies must be centered around the goals of your Edtech business goals. You can aim to sell more of the premium subscriptions, convert more freemium users, or add more users to the freemium version. Your content team must always sync with the business team to work together for the same end goals.
The ideal example to learn to build your Edtech content goals around your business goals comes from none other than HubSpot. This company dedicates itself to offering an ecosystem of inbound marketing tools, content, and community to grow business.
If you notice on their blog, a considerable number of content pieces are directed at providing valuable insights and solutions for daily audience pain points. By creating valuable content beginning from the basics of marketing to more complex business decisions, HubSpot engages a massive audience who will love its products.
The brand consistently focuses on providing customers with valuable content through its famous blog and a professional community to engage with, fulfilling its business goals through its self-sufficient content marketing machine.
3. Capture The Audience With Audio Content
Audio content, including podcasts and interviews, is an excellent way for Edtech providers to attract a vast audience between 12-34 years old. According to Infinite Dial’s 2022 report, 50% of American podcast listeners are within that age range.
The interesting characteristic of podcast listeners, Edison Research identifies, is that almost 54% of them are more likely to consider brands advertised in a podcast. Edtech providers can indulge in interesting ideas like guest speaker podcasts, workshops, etc., to create a unique learning-based podcast experience.
The Edtech Podcast is probably the most prominent and famous example of a successful podcast marketing campaign. Apart from discussing the latest developments in the industry, the podcast invites successful influencers and professionals to offer their unique ideas to keep their audiences engaged.
4. Video Content Marketing
Video is used by more than 85% of businesses in their marketing efforts, according to a Wyzowl study, while a Statista survey showed that videos offered a 92% audience reach. For Edtech, video content marketing can be an invaluable source to share knowledge, insights, trends, and professional experiences.
Instead of sharing research and white papers pages, a short video can offer deeper meaning through visual aids. Cisco identified that 82% of global internet traffic will come from videos or video downloads in 2022. How-to’s and explainer videos were identified as the most popular for B2B companies by Statista in 2021-2022.
The most deserving example of great Edtech video content marketing comes from SaaS business solutions provider HubSpot. Their YouTube channel is geared towards consistently learning and retaining customers while attracting new ones with excellent digital marketing tutorials, guides, and how-tos.
5. Create Targeted Landing Pages
A landing page is a dedicated web page that routes visitors when they click a CTA like a learn more button. Targeted landing pages are designed for visitors to learn exactly what they were looking for and are generally used to collect customer contact information by Edtech businesses.
An optimized landing page is designed with concise content and convincing copy for visitors to decide. HubSpot reported that landing pages improve SEO and organic ranking by almost 61%, allowing businesses to rank on multiple keyword searches.
Landing pages are designed to offer fewer navigational features while featuring elements like course outlines, similar courses, and orientation videos to keep users engaged with the offer. Landing pages with videos have reported an 86% improvement in conversion rates.
A landing page offer to be able to convert must always be unique to the visitor. For instance, sign up for the course now and save $200 or secure a scholarship. Edtech providers can also use forms to collect lead information for future correspondence.
Udemy presents an excellent example of a landing page designed to deliver the core marketing message, present, offer, and identify the choice of learning to visitors in the same fold. The offer also includes urgency with a timer, allowing the user to decide while offering minimal navigation.
6. Create Visual Content
Visual content is the backbone of Edtech services and their marketing campaigns. Ziflow identified in a survey that 95% of B2B customers evaluate companies based on visual design. In 2021, the video was the most popular format used to deliver content HubSpot identified, while infographics took third place.
Edtech providers generally develop different visual content like PPT presentations, PDF white papers, videos, etc., as these get the most social shares, according to multiple pieces of research. Website planet identified in their survey that blogs with visuals have 650% more engagement than those without.
Colors and pictures make educational content more memorable and allow audiences to recall brand names based on visuals. We look once more at the most deserving example of excellent visual content from the leader, HubSpot. The brand emphasizes real-time branded visuals with excellent videos, gifs, and infographics featured on diverse topics.
7. Quality Content
High-quality content geared towards audience pain points is the building block of a successful Edtech brand. Instead of being similar to the competition, Edtech content should be researched thoroughly and offer unique value to readers.
Quality content ranks longer and receives more shares from audiences. The quality of content not only represents your brand but also the values of this brand. Edtech content must have insight and learning, making it a reference for other publications.
Coursera is an excellent example of quality content available in its free courses section that keeps students engaged while exploring new areas of expertise. Head over to the brand’s Youtube channel, and you’ll find some high-quality learning courses, conferences, and guides to keep you hooked to the service.
8. Add Relevant Keywords in Content
Keywords are an essential element of great content marketing and should be no different for Edtech marketing. The top 5 results in a Google search secure almost 68% of all clicks, Backlinko revealed in 2021. The research also identified that using long-tail keywords with 3 and more words is a popular way marketers rank their content for better reach.
BrightEdge Research reported in 2019 that SEO drives 1000% more traffic than social media. Adding relevant keywords in blogs, presentations, image tags, meta, and profile descriptions is a popular way Edtech providers improve their organic rankings.
We tested three highly competitive keywords on Google search to demonstrate the importance of including relevant keywords in the content. When searching for “Edtech courses,” “Edtech online courses,” and “Edtech courses free,” we noticed that while some results varied, Coursera comes up in all three searches within the top 3 organic ranks.
Coursera marketing emphasizes integrating even the most difficult keywords within their high-quality metas, descriptions, presentations, landing page copy, and blogs.
9. Establish Credibility
Becoming an authority and establishing credibility through high-quality content should be the goal of every Edtech provider. Being a resourceful content publisher attracts new audiences while building trust with existing customers. In addition, other Edtech providers will consider your brand as a lucrative partner based on the expertise that you offer, backed by your authority.
An individual with a reputation in the education sector and typically with a particular specialization can be an education-focused social media influencer. Micro-influencers are also known as niche influencers because they are experts in a single topic.
Pasi Sahlberg, for instance, teaches education policy at UNSW. Pasi discusses play and learning. Sahlberg authored this essay on other nations’ education methods after moving to Australia from Finland, referencing his own children’s experiences. Doing so, he is now considered among the top 40 Edtech leaders transforming education and learning experiences.
10. Teacher-focused Content
As we mentioned above, Edtech businesses are leveraging the expertise and brand equity of professional academics who are now swaying to a more remote teaching model. Edtech providers, including Coursera, Udemy, and others, feature teacher-focused content to attract students while regularly adding new content for their paid subscribers.
“Great Minds,” the Edtech giant, is an excellent example of teacher-focused content. Apart from working to enhance online learning experiences and innovate Edtech solutions, Great Minds offers children an interactive solution to learn from basic English & Math to more advanced science, all hosted by professional teachers.
7 Content Marketing Channels for Edtech Business
1. Social Media
Social media offers a quick, cost-effective, and mass marketing channel for Edtech businesses. Edtech’s social media profiles should be targeted more toward educating audiences and building conversations rather than sales. LinkedIn marketing is ideal for corporate Edtech solution providers to engage new customers and build partnerships to enhance their industry authority.
2. Podcast
As mentioned above, podcasts are one of the most effective low-cost marketing channels offering a global audience of up to 350 million listeners. With a 50% audience aged between 12 and 34 years old in the US alone, Edtech businesses can engage a wider audience through promotional content and educational podcasts.
3. Webinar
Since 2020, webinars have increased by almost 400% while they were the fourth most used content medium in 2021. Edtech providers can leverage the power of educational webinars to deliver courses and discussions to attract potential customers and partners.
Widespread research has also identified that 73% of marketers claim webinars generate high-quality leads.
4. Ebooks & Books
Ebooks and books are excellent marketing tools for Edtech companies to attract a target niche of customers at a meager cost. Gated content is viral in digital marketing and allows organizations to collect audience contact information for later in the marketing funnel.
Edtech providers can invest in ebook ideas like educational, product-based, industry-based, and trending topics. Goodreader identified that 191 million US audiences bought an ebook in 2020.
5. Newsletters
Newsletters are one of the most popular and successful marketing channels for Edtech marketers. 40% of marketers claimed that newsletters are the most important aspect of their content marketing strategy, as per a 2017 CMI report.
6. Video and Audio
Video and audio are two of the most important elements of Edtech content. Utilizing important channels, including YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and others, to deliver audio & video content should be a core Edtech marketing strategy.
As we mentioned above, video has become the top consumed content while it is also one of the top factors in improving conversion rates. Edtech providers should leverage services including Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Vimeo, and others to create high-quality video & audio content.
7. Blog
Blogs are one of the core aspects of an Edtech content marketing strategy. The blog is the central repository of all your content assets and the leading driver of your inbound marketing strategy.
A blog has the individual ability to drive traffic, populate social feeds, grow email lists, enhance brand authority, build audience trust and offer valuable content in the process. Edtech blogs can increase up to 55% traffic while gaining a search ranking potential of almost 500%, according to Hubspot.
FAQs
How Do I Create Content for Edtech?
Creating content for Edtech (Educational Technology) is an exciting and rewarding experience. Content should be engaging, informative, accurate, and appropriate for the target audience. To be successful in creating content for Edtech, you should:
1. Understanding who your audience is and what they need to know before creating content is essential. This will help determine the type of content best suited for them.
2. Choose an appropriate platform for your content. Depending on the content you create, various platforms might be best suited for your needs.
3. Research the topic thoroughly. It is essential to do thorough research before creating any content for Edtech. You must ensure that you provide accurate and up-to-date information to your audience.
4. Edtech content should be visually appealing, incorporating images and videos to supplement the text. This will make the content more interesting and engaging.
5. Before releasing content to the public, it is important to test it first. This allows you to ensure that your content meets the needs of its target audience.
Final Thoughts
Content marketing for Edtech business remains one of the core strategies for attracting relevant audiences and retaining existing one’s today. The sector’s growth demands that providers offer high-value Edtech content ideas to engage, attract, convert, and retain customers regularly.
Content marketing is generally identified as the preferred method that customers demand from businesses by many professional marketers. In addition to being cost-effective for Edtech businesses, a defined Edtech content marketing strategy generates more leads and effectively increases ROI.
If all this seems too challenging to manage, reach out to us. At ThinkOrion, we know that a comprehensive digital marketing strategy is key for successful reach. That’s why we offer comprehensive Edtech marketing services, from creating effective PPC campaigns to driving organic traffic with SEO tactics. With our help, competitors will no longer overshadow your Edtech brand. We’ll use our industry insights and knowledge to craft high-performing digital campaigns that captivate people’s attention and draw them towards your product or service with ease.
