(Un)usual Strategic Advice for (Un)usual Times: Three Ways to Make Educational Content Marketing Actually Generate Sales

SUMMARY

• Coronavirus is forcing people to work from home like never before. Researchers are using this time to catch up on educational opportunities like attending more webinars or downloading more papers.

• While the high turn-outs are great for companies targeting this audience, it doesn’t always translate into more leads and more engagement, as hoped — especially during these unusual times. 

• There is a golden opportunity waiting to be seized. By asking three key questions about your educational content, marketers can transform their content, like webinars or papers, into a genuine and enduring strategic asset for the company.

As of this writing, we’ve in the midst of experiencing drastic disruptions to global productivity as the novel Coronavirus has effectively shut down the global economy. Professionals in virtually every industry are being asked to work from home, and those whose work requires a specialized facility such as a laboratory or manufacturing equipment are trying to figure out how to stay productive during this time. 

Our own global survey of the life science community has revealed that many researchers are using their time to catch up on analysis, writing, reading, and planning for future experiments. In turn, the companies who market to technical professionals are marketing their educational content in an attempt to generate leads and engage this market — and it is working! 

Marketers are reporting unusually high turnouts to educational content such as webinars offered by suppliers. 

In usual times, marketers celebrate high levels of engagement with their audiences. And in technical markets, educational content — especially webinars — is often the go-to tactic with marketers because they generate two quantifiable metrics: leads and engagement. 

While engagement with branded content has the potential to turn into a higher affinity for the brand or desire for a product, this tactic rarely drives actual commerce even in usual times. And chances are, such high click-throughs on educational content and record turnouts to webinars won’t actually produce any substantive results in unusual times such as the pandemic. 

There are three reasons why most educational content marketing programs don’t deliver results, and marketers can fix these issues to create their educational content efforts from metrics-generating activities to result-generating ones by answering the three below questions.

Why are you educating your audience? 

Most marketers in technical industries engage in educating their audiences about technologies, products, applications or protocols. Yet in most technical decision-making models, education is the second stage of a decision, following recognition of a need or provocation about the status quo. If marketers first define their provocation, their educational content will be much more effective in driving sales, because audiences will have a vested interest in solving a problem.

Is your educational program idle or guided? 

Educational content should be developed to drive audiences to want to make a change in their work. But better understanding about a topic rarely leads to behavior change. Even if audiences are invested in learning, there’s little correlation between engaging in educational content and taking the action to make a change. Well-designed educational content delivers three key moments: a new idea, the specific change that needs to be made, followed by a prescription of how each audience member should move into action. Delivered in sequence, the new idea/change/prescription moments will work in concert to transform educational content, and audience from idle and uninvested bystanders to active, guided change agents.  

Are you following up — or nudging— with more education?

Most content marketing programs place audiences on a never-ending loop of more educational content, effectively setting their mindset for idle learning rather than taking next actions. The biggest opportunity in pivoting audiences comes from developing a smart, directive follow-up that leverages human behavioral levers — or nudges — to drive people into taking action. An example of a powerful nudge that can drive audiences to action is invoking their desire to stay consistent with prior choices. Here, marketers can set up a small action (i.e. a poll question) during the webinar, and then reminding registrants of the choices made, prior to asking their audience to take the next action. 

These are indeed unusual times. Having lost virtually all other channels, companies are doubling down on digital content to establish or maintain connections with audiences. Instead of merely doing more of the usual tactics, marketers have a truly golden opportunity to transform their educational content marketing into a genuine and enduring strategic asset for the company. This is a worthwhile and enduring effort, as the world evolves to a new meaning of usual times.