With all the distraction it can supply, it's sometimes difficult to remember that the primary purpose of the Internet and the content we find there is to educate us. Our world is full of complex problems, the solutions to which are not common knowledge for the majority of the population. Every day, people go online to get educated. When executed properly, educational marketing is not only an effective strategy, it's one of the best ways to establish yourself as a credible expert, demonstrate your value as a service professional and acquaint your ideal prospects with the uniquely differentiated aspects of your service and product offering.

Educational content goals

Providing prospects and clients with valuable and actionable insights serves many purposes. Obviously, it can be engaging and increase the perceived value of your marketing material. It can also improve many aspects of your company's relationship with its potential clients. Not to mention that action is the goal of any piece of good marketing material. If you aren't inspiring your prospects to take the next step along your marketing funnel, they'll never advance to the client stage. There are a whole litany of objectives achieved by good educational content. Yours might include: Goal No. 1: Establish authority and credibility. More than anything else, educational content establishes you as an expert in your field. By increasing the amount of trust and respect you are perceived to command, you work towards creating a relationship of trust with those that interact with your material. Goal No. 2: Qualify leads. Educational material is a great way to make sure that the prospects you are attracting qualify as your ideal clientele. Unlike open-ended and innocuous marketing material, educational material casts a wide net over the population seeking answers to pertinent questions while also filtering out those who would not be attracted to your specific area of expertise. Goal No. 3: Decrease buyer's remorse. When clients have spent some time with your educational material they have given you a tremendous opportunity to inform them of what the experience of engaging your services will be like. This is a great way to make sure they know what they're getting. Think of your educational content as the trailer, and your services as the main attraction. Goal No. 4: Improve SEO. Educational content gives you a chance to organize your online presence around the language that your potential clients are typing (or speaking) into search engines. By answering the questions that they're asking Google, you'll increase your position on search engine ranking pages and earn more exposure to a larger audience.

Demand for educational content

Content that educates creates a special connection between the audience that receives it and the entity that supplies it. There's an inherent transfer of value and a bond is formed that becomes the basis of a long-term relationship. Consumers want to be educated. In a recent survey by OneSpot, 68% of potential clients said they wanted content that informed and educated while only 11% said they wanted to be entertained. Another study found that potential clients were 131% more likely to engage an insurance professional immediately after reading content they considered educational.

The hallmarks of great commercial education

In their book "The Challenger Sale," Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson make a strong distinction between simply educating people and providing something they refer to as "commercial teaching." Commercial teaching leads to establishing the value of your service offering. It demonstrates your expertise and showcases your unique take on the issues that are most important to your audience of prospects.

Follow these four steps to initiate a system of education:

Step No. 1: Lead to your solution's unique and defendable strengths. Your service offering is composed of a series of features. Think of yourself as a piece of software that has specs describing exactly what it will do for a person. Take time to understand the individual aspects of your offering, then create educational content that demonstrates why your features are so important to your prospects by illustrating the benefits of each feature. Step No. 2: Challenge the customer's assumptions. One of the most powerful ways for you to demonstrate your effectiveness is to show prospects you can not only solve their problem but that the problem was completely different than they originally thought. In neuro-linguistic programming, this technique is called reframing. It involves changing a person's perspective by providing them with truly insightful material. Step No. 3: Catalyze action. Educational content is not just informative, it's inspiring. When prospects feel they have been armed with new actionable insights they don't need cajoling in order to take the next step; they're excited to engage. Knowledge is power, so be sure to provide a clear path for your prospects to exercise their newly acquired power and take action. Step No. 4: Scale across customers. Online marketing allows you to create content for a massive audience. There is no limit to the number of people you can educate and inspire. Use distribution strategies like social media and email marketing to reach the largest number of people possible and continue to grow your audience by collecting their information and including them in future campaigns. Educational content is a powerful technique that can take your online marketing efforts from a perfunctory exercise to a real avenue of growth for your agency. Take the first steps today to populate your website and online profiles with valuable commercial educational material and watch as the velocity of your marketing efforts begins to increase. Rick Fox is the president of Agency Revolution. He can be reached at [email protected]. See also: 6 ways to sell more insurance in 2018 6 important tips for insurance agency content marketing