Craft Content Marketing Campaigns to Increase Consumer Education
Published: June 19, 2015
Author: Robert Cordray
Consumer education is one of the most critical ways of serving customers and attracting others. Competition in the world today means every company wants to be the best in the industry. Effective content marketing programs incorporate very robust consumer education strategies. It’s one of the ways of connecting with the audience, building a brand, and ensuring the business has a competitive advantage rather than just creating more content.
There are a number of ways of ensuring consumer education has been increased through content marketing campaigns. Let’s walk through a few of them.
1. Align the content strategy with the goals of the company
Consumer education campaigns must be geared towards ensuring the organization has met its goals. This can be building brand recognition, establishing a business as a leader in the industry, increasing the number of customers, and driving customer loyalty as much as possible. For instance, a company looking to increase its customer numbers can come up with content aimed at those people who might not know its services or products. Landing pages usually fit well into this category. Short bits of copy and vivid images can help a company walk visitors through their offering step-by-step, not unlike what Plugfones has done here. On the other hand, a company seeking to take customer loyalty a notch higher can come up with advanced content for its audience who might not be strangers to the company or the brand.
2. Align the content with marketing goals
Without a doubt, consumer education program is a part of the content marketing strategy and should work in tandem with the marketing goals, brand identity, and related messaging. Training consultants can tell you consumer education does not just seek to ensure the audience has been provided with information. The goal is to share very useful and relevant information clearly aligned with the buying cycle of a customer. As such, the audience will comprehend the product differentiators while offering reasons a specific product is much better than another.
3. Ensure that customers’ needs are met
It’s important for the customer education strategy to meet the needs of customers. Otherwise, it will be useless for any customer to simply follow a specific opportunity to learn online or watch online education videos if there is no way needs will be met. This means the purchasing journey of a customer needs to be known. If the content will be effective, it’s important that what a customer is looking for or needs is ascertained. This can be deciphered from the many stages a customer interacts with a brand, including any question that might be asked. These stages include information acquisition, product comparisons, usage of the product, and brand champion.
TurboTax does a fantastic job of this. Through content like Share the Cube microsite, TurboTax can interest customers in their offering. Once they move customers to their site to look into their software, they have a seamless walkthrough that makes filing taxes painless and even enjoyable.
4. Optimize the format of the message
It is important that in any consumer education strategy, the message format and technology to be used is selected well. Consumer education simply means something that the audience must participate in. As such, it’s very important to comprehend the experience of the audience, such as the device they are using to learn and the kind of interaction being sought (via social media with other product users, a video on the company’s website, etc.). You can come up with personalized programs that work with consumers on their personal terms, matching their experiences and knowledge.
5. Strive for interactive conversations
Companies have seen over 500% increase in leads just by creating interactive conversations. For instance, an engineering company can create videos and other forms of e-learning content that answers questions and explains diverse topics in engineering. At the end of the day, ideas will be brought to life via interactive conversations that offer knowledge to the audience and influence their engagement with the brand or product.
