Accessible Education: 5 Reasons Why Content is Key for Your Online Learning Platform
Content marketing is a vital tool for businesses because it instils a level of confidence in a brand by demonstrating expertise, trustworthiness and authority on relevant topics as well as satisfying search needs.
This can help to win sales and conversions alike as well as earning valuable backlinks from high-quality websites.
As an online learning platform, your business could significantly benefit from the power of content marketing and search engine optimisation efforts. This is down to the level of confidence that visitors will need prior to enrolling with you or signing up for more information.
With this in mind, let’s take a deeper look into the relationship between content and digital education organisations. Here are five key reasons why quality content is key to the success of online learning platforms:
Demonstrate Your Credibility
When it comes to online learning, one of the most significant ways of building conversions is through demonstrating your credibility.
Online courses, in particular, can be significantly time-consuming and demanding challenges for users, and it’s of the utmost importance that they know their efforts will be rewarded with a recognisable qualification in return for their hard work.
To entrust you with their contact information (not to mention bank details), visitors will need to have confidence in your platform’s credibility.
By creating content for an on-site blog or news feed, you have a large canvas in which to not only build keywords and backlinks but to also build trust in your services and forge some levels of confidence in your platform.
Content marketing can influence users by showing that your education website is well run and possesses a great deal of industry expertise.
It’s also possible to make content from testimonials and product reviews as a means of getting the message across that your company is a great choice for customers.
The topic of education is a tricky one to demonstrate credibility in. While pass rates and satisfaction scores can help to show that your courses are successful, it’s only from content that interested visitors will gain a better understanding of exactly what you’re offering.
Make Your Platform Visible
Content gets you noticed. Search engine optimisation forms the cornerstone to great content and carries the power to drive traffic to your website as well as high-quality do-follow backlinks.
Primarily, your learning platform needs to be visible to the right audiences at the right time. Because so many users look to Google to find the things they’re looking for online, it can be easy to create content that utilises searchable keywords.
Simply speaking, if you can build articles that use the right blend of keywords and on-page SEO, you can make your platform much more visible at the top of Google’s results pages, as opposed to vying for space among rival organisations with advertising campaigns.
The best thing about optimising your content is that it can create a steady stream of traffic over time, rather than the more short-term approaches of PPC advertising campaigns.
Generate Awareness
Creating awareness of your organisation and brand can run up expensive PR bills. Content marketing, however, could be significantly more cost-efficient and every bit as expensive for your target audiences.
Here, it could be written content, video-based insights into your office environment, or copy optimised for social media, as long as it helps potential customers to feel more familiar with your company it can be a great asset.
When you produce on-site content, always make sure you talk of your business as if it were a living organism, as opposed to conveying yourself as an independent author. Readers can identify with a personable approach and build a level of trust in your organisation.
While brand awareness isn’t typically easy for companies to actually quantify, it’s an integral goal for marketing departments to get some form of branding under the noses of target audiences in order to build familiarity. High-quality and engaging content is one of the most effective and non-intrusive ways of developing branding.
Accommodate Niche Audiences
The great thing about content is that it can appeal directly to your readers’ wants and needs. The better you know your target audience, the more specific your content can be in appealing to their motivations. While sales and service pages need to be appealing in a more general sense, content pieces can cherrypick specific talking points among groups that you’ve identified as among the most likely to enrol into your learning platform.
It’s important to note that this approach requires a significant level of pre-planning and audience knowledge. If you can identify the needs of your target market, it should be down to your company to satisfy them through your content.
It may seem counterintuitive to pigeonhole your content to appeal to niche audiences, but in this current age of saturated content and hyper-competitivity, it’s effective to step back from your goals and look at where you can fine-tune your approach.
Call Your Visitors to Action
Fundamentally, the most effective benefit that content has over other forms of marketing is the discreet way in which calls-to-action (CTAs) can be added to your copy.
For an online learning platform, this is especially useful to encourage visitors to access further information or fill out sign-up forms.
The process of signing up to an online course can take a little time, so it’s vital that platforms can build enough levels of interest in visitors before asking if they’re willing to follow up on their interest online.
Be sure to supply your target audience with a healthy level of information and confidence-building copy before inviting them to sign up to a newsletter or share their email address for alerts.
Remember that online education involves plenty of effort and commitment for digital students. It’s only fair that online learning portals share the same level of enthusiasm.
Featured image by Nick Morrison on Unsplash