Marketing and Associations: What Is Educational Content?

To kick off this new series of articles on content for general interest, we chose to start with a piece covering the definition of educational content.

By positioning your association around this editorial marketing strategy — often integrated into lead nurturing — you will give new strength to your primary mission and, above all, extend the reach of your association's work.

How should you go about it? Who are your targets? Where should you publish? We will answer all the questions that will help you better grasp the fundamentals of educational content and make the most of it. This article is a preamble to other aspects of educational content.

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Definition of Educational Content

Producing educational content is a straightforward marketing method. It involves providing precise, free answers to equally precise questions. The questions addressed stem from analysing the needs of your buyer persona. Your answers can be short or very long. The length produced and published always depends on the study of your persona's needs.

Your educational content must be tailored. The goal is clear: to maintain the privileged relationship that is developing with your prospects. Everything must be put in place to strengthen that relationship.

This strategy forms the foundation of "lead nurturing", also known as "prospect loyalty building". Generally speaking, the success of lead nurturing depends on implementing segmented email scenarios.
Educational content production can, however, go beyond email. With that in mind, you must do everything possible to facilitate navigation between the questions your prospects are asking themselves.

On the other hand, you must absolutely apply all the creativity and subtlety at your disposal to capture the email address of every visitor to your educational content. It will then be far easier for you to generate a conversion.

Building Audience Loyalty with Educational Content

The three factors that will position you as a trusted association are the accessibility, precision, and accuracy of your answers. Consequently: the higher your level of trust and credibility, the more likely visitors to your site are to return to your association.

In this context, you must lead your visitors to see your answers as indispensable in solving their problems.
The goal is simple: to encourage them to subscribe to your newsletter so as to convert them into members of your association.
According to the blog comexplorer.com, only 25% of these leads will convert. According to the website wearethewords.com, "content marketing is capable of generating conversion rates six times higher than those of other marketing methods". Consequently, this strategy has the potential to transform your association into a reliable and recognised source of information. It should also make it easy for anyone to get in touch.

How to Produce the Right Educational Content

Of course, this strategy will only work if your target audience can find you. An SEO strategy must be developed in parallel with your educational content strategy.

Identifying Your Target Audience

This step is essential, and we repeat it every time we speak. For your educational content strategy to work, you need to know with precision exactly what problems your target audience faces.

Does your association address people who are directly concerned by its mission? Their close circle? What channels does your target audience use? Do they tend to watch short videos? Read written content? Seek information exclusively on social media? Will your target audience need an infographic to better absorb the data? A webinar? Would they like to download a white paper?

You must understand their habits before producing the right educational content — the content that will work. The content that will turn a visitor into a lead and then a member of your association.

Optimising This Educational Content

You need to carry out real optimisation work on your content and build an excellent internal linking structure to help your educational content climb to the top of Google's results.

To do this, there are tools that allow you to draw up lists of educational content topics.
We can wholeheartedly recommend using the website answerthepublic.com. It allows you to generate educational content questions and build semantic maps around the theme you wish to address. Answerthepublic draws on the auto-suggested results from Google and Bing to generate visual aids with suggestions around educational content.

Once you have obtained these educational content questions, all you need to do is provide an answer to each of the suggested questions. This will allow you to rank across the full range of topics your visitors are searching for.
Over time, this growing educational content — enriched by the experience of your members — will take on significant value. It will become content of general interest, rich in unique and globalised experiences, and above all rich in human values, making it irreplaceable.