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In this article, you’ll learn about best practices from three of the best educational blog sites: King Living, Bill Ragan Roofing, and Dental Claim Support. You’ll see how these businesses use educational content to drive traffic, generate leads, and make sales, and you’ll get actionable tips and strategies that you can use to start creating educational content for your own business, and ultimately drive more sales.
So, whether you’re just getting started with content creation or you’re looking for new ways to take your content to the next level, this article has something for you. By the end of this article, you’ll be equipped to build trust with your audience and drive business growth through educational content. So, let’s dive in!
Why You Need to Focus on Education to Increase Traffic, Leads and Sales
Do you ever find yourself researching a product and leaving a website because you’re frustrated that they don’t have the information you’re looking for? This happens far too often, and by simply educating prospects, businesses can build trust and generate more sales.
When you provide educational content that answers your target audience’s questions and helps them solve their problems, you demonstrate your expertise and build trust. This trust is the most valuable commodity in business, and it’s what’s going to move the needle in any business.
One of the best strategies for providing educational content like this is called “They Ask, You Answer” (TAYA).
They Ask You Answer (aka TAYA) is a practical framework and sales and marketing philosophy that assumes one simple truth: if your prospect or customer asks a question, you answer, and in doing so, you will become the most trusted voice in your space and will gain more business than you ever have before.
Creating content that directly addresses your target audience’s questions and concerns is the crux of this framework. For your content initiative to be effective, your entire team should have an obsession with answering buyer questions, which means continually seeking out new questions and developing content to answer them.
If you can focus on creating content that answers buyer questions, you’ll increase traffic to your website, generate more leads, and drive more sales.
In the next sections, you’ll see three educational content sites that are doing it right and what you can learn from them.
King Living
King Living is a high-end Australian furniture brand that uses educational content to position themselves as an authority in their marketplace. Let’s take a look at exactly how they do this.
1. They keep it fun
While their content is educational, it’s also highly engaging. Take, for example, their Design Inspiration content. I don’t know about you, but when I want to do up a space, looking at design inspiration excites me and empowers me, getting me one step closer to purchasing whatever it is I need to get that space ready. And if I’m reading design inspiration from a leading furniture brand, who do you think I’m going to go to when I am ready to buy?
You can see a list of King Living’s Design Inspiration blog articles here.
Design Inspiration is something that King Living are using to not only educate potential customers, but to drive engagement, interest, and ultimately excitement.
2. The Buyer’s Guide
A Buyer’s Guide is a comprehensive resource designed to help individuals make informed purchasing decisions. The main goal of a buyer’s guide is to provide potential customers with all the information they need to make an informed decision about a product or service.
Think about it; you’re getting ready to buy a lounge but you want to know everything about lounges before you invest – what types of lounges are out there and what are the pros and cons of each, which colour suits your home best, and what do other people have to say about the lounges you’re looking at buying. Getting answers to these questions can be overwhelming…imagine how much you have to read! That’s where a Buyer’s Guide comes in and saves the day, packing all of that information you’re looking for into a nice, easy to digest guide so that you can make the right decision.
When you read a Buyer’s Guide, you’re not only getting all your questions answered, but you’re starting to trust the business that provided you the guide in the first place, and you’re getting closer to the point of being ready to purchase.
King Living uses a Learning Centre style Buyer’s Guide, which has all of the most relevant blog articles to help you make a purchasing decision on one page. It might have been better for King Living to put all of that information into one guide as this is easier to digest, however, the fact that they utilise this in the first place is a win – and it’s definitely something you should look at doing for your business.
Recap of King Living
You can learn a lot from King Living’s approach to content creation. The brand’s focus on educating its customers and establishing itself as a thought leader in the furniture industry is a great example of how you can use educational content to drive traffic, leads, and sales. By creating valuable and informative content that resonates with your audience, you can build a relationship of trust with your customers, ultimately leading to increased sales and revenue.
Let’s take a look at number two on the list!
Bill Ragan Roofing
Bill Ragan Roofing uses content to build trust with their audience – by helping solve their audience’s problems, they gain their trust, and ultimately their business. How do they do this through content?
1. Obsession with answering questions
What sets Bill Ragan Roofing’s content apart is their obsession with becoming the most trusted advisor in their space. They produce an extraordinary amount of content across every topic you could think of within the roofing space. If there’s a question out there, they’ve probably already answered it. And this is exactly where you want to be sitting as a business. With this mindset, you’ll become the most trusted authority in your space.
2. Leveraging content to drive leads
Right from the get-go, Bill Ragan Roofing use content to drive leads.
You can see in the above image, that simply visiting the website is a chance for them to make their next sale. A pop up appears shortly after visiting the website offering a free guide, which requires the user to fill out their information in order to download.
The big lesson here is simple – if you’re already producing content on your website, use that as an opportunity of leverage, to generate leads by having simple but effective offers across your website.
3. Using the Big 5 Topics
When it comes to producing content online, there are five topics that reign supreme, called The Big 5: Pricing, Comparisons, Problems, Reviews, and Best Of. These five are time-test and proven topics to generate more traffic, leads and sales than any other topics out there. If you’re producing content online, you’re going to want to write across these five topics – and that’s exactly what Bill Ragan Roofing does.
Here’s a quick explanation of the Best 5 Topics:
- Pricing – This topic provides insights on your company’s pricing model, pricing of different software relevant to the customer, pricing comparisons, and an explanation on how/why your company’s pricing is what it is.
- Comparison – This topic highlights the differences between any two topics of relevance to the customer. For example, “x Business vs Our Business”, or “x Product vs Y Product and which is right for you”.
- Problems – This topic addresses common problems that buyers face with your product or service or problems that your buyer currently has which you can solve.
- Reviews – This topic features reviews from existing customers, which adds social proof and builds trust with potential buyers. You might also write reviews of other businesses here.
- Best Of – This topic includes anything that is a “best” related article. For example, “best practices”, “best x product” “best brand” etc, helping customers find what’s best for them.
By creating content that addresses these five topics, you’ll build trust with potential customers, differentiate yourself from competitors, and generate more traffic, leads and sales.
Here’s some examples of Bill Ragan Roofing’s Big 5 Content:
By producing content around these five topics, Bill Ragan’s Roofing is maximising their ability to generate traffic, leads and sales.
Recap of Bill Ragan’s Roofing
The big lessons learned from Bill Ragan Roofing’s website include:
- You need to have an obsession with answering buyer questions
- You need to leverage every opportunity you can to present offers to prospects in order to generate leads and sales
- You need to produce content around the Best 5 Topics
Alright, last but not least…
Dental Claim Support
Dental Claim Support helps private dental clinics maximise their profits. When comparing to Bill Ragan Roofing, Dental Claim Support’s educational content is not as comprehensive, however there are some positives we can take.
1. Use of video for content
While blogs have long been a staple of content marketing, videos have the advantage of being more engaging and memorable.
They allow for a more dynamic and visually stimulating experience that can capture and hold the viewer’s attention in a way that written content often can’t.
When building out an educational content powerhouse, if you’re not considering video, then you’re running into a brick wall with a car. You need video.
And Dental Claim Support have realised exactly this. While the other examples on our list may have also used video, I’m pointing out Dental Claim Support’s use of video here because of how easy it is to access and how prominent and obvious they have made it.
By giving users options right from the get-go, they can ensure that they don’t miss out on those who would rather watch a video than read an article or a book.
2. The use of a quiz
While it’s arguable that a quiz isn’t a content piece, it is possible for a quiz to fall under the content category depending on how it is created and what its purpose is.
Quizzes can help you generate leads and increase engagement with your content. It’s also a great way to pre-qualify leads before your sales team even reaches out to the prospect.
Dental Claim Support use a quiz as the secondary call to action button on their home page, which when clicked, leads directly to the quiz.
Recap of Dental Claim Support
The big lessons learned from Dental Claim Support are:
- Mix up your content with video, and make it easily accessible on your website
- Use quizzes to capture leads, pre-qualify leads and engage users
How Can You Start Creating Content Today?
Creating educational content might seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Here are some steps you can take to get started:
- Form a Revenue Team by combining your marketing and sales teams. Here’s a guide on how to form a Revenue Team
- Hold a content brainstorming session with your Revenue Team to generate content ideas based on what prospects are asking in the sales cycle. The above guide includes information on how to successfully run these meetings
- Dedicate time to write three articles per week
- Promote your content – creating great content is only half the battle. You also need to promote it to reach your target audience. Share your content on social media, email newsletters, and other channels where your audience is active. Here’s a guide on how you can effectively promote your content
By following these four key steps, you can get started with building a powerful educational content website, generating more traffic, leads and sales for your business.
You might have a big team and no way to easily implement all of the above. If this is the case, you might want to explore getting your team trained with a certified TAYA Partner. If this is you, it may be beneficial to find out if TAYA is right for your business.
