Learn how you can effectively promote your language school and gain competitive advantage over rivals through knowledge-sharing.
Content marketing is a strategy consisting in creation and publication of valuable content with a view to drawing interest, attracting and involving a precisely defined group of recipients, who will consequently become our customers.
What does the value of content marketing consist in?
First, it will make us stand out against the background of competition and build our expert image. This will help directly influence our potential customers, establishing a lasting relations with them. This is important in the times when people know how to block advertising emails, banners or pop-ups, and consequently traditional forms of advertising in the world wide web are becoming less and less effective.
Second, we will improve our chances to rank high in search results. Google algorithms (Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird) may become our allies, as long as they get what they like, i.e. valuable and original content… Google introduced them to limit the potential for “artificial” enhancing of website positions and to give preference to the websites that are useful for users.
The more you give, the more you get
The content available under content marketing may be comprised by articles, video, podcasts, posts, e-books, infographics, FAQ lists or photos. Language schools most frequently opt for:
- Blog – this is where you can place linguistic advice and info about lifestyles, culture and work in the country where a given language is used.
- Newsletter – it enables regular provision of information to subscribers about what is going in the school and promotion of courses and entries in our blog,
- Fanpage – mainly at Facebook and Google+’ the latter is important because Google gives preference to websites connected with its own social medium,
- E-books – in this form we can publish phrase-books, exercises or practical advice. It is worthwhile taking care of interesting graphics of the e-book and ask those who download them to leave their e-mail address and consent for newsletter subscription in exchange.
When creating our content, let’s make sure it educates the recipients and provides them with entertainment. Users will appreciate such content and will be willing to make it available in social media.
7 steps to own content marketing strategy
There are many companies specialising in content marketing in the marketplace, but use of their services usually entails significant expenses. For a start, good effects can be also brought by performing such actions on our own. People teaching foreign languages are experts in their field and have valuable knowledge they can share with their customers. No copywriter from a hired agency will have this advantage.
To develop own strategy:
- Collect as much information about your potential customers: learn who they are, what they are guided by and what their needs are.
- Create persona. Invent three to five fictional characters and assign features of your customers to them. Create each element of your content with at least one persona on mind.
- Take care of the cohesion of message. Think who you are, what you want to give to people and how you want to be perceived?
- Define the objectives of your content marketing actions. Remember to make them as specific and measurable as possible.
- Put together everything you have ever written or created and check what you can use in your marketing actions.
- Create a publishing plan. Decide what you want to publish and how often you are able to do that.
- Publish and analyse. Owing to such free tools as Google Analytics, you can check which of your actions bring about the best effects. Draw conclusions and try to improve all the time.
Self-promotion through content marketing actions has one serious disadvantage – it is quite time-consuming. Nevertheless it is worthwhile trying find the time for them, because they can bring excellent effects, which is confirmed by examples of schools applying this technique.
How do you think, is content marketing right for you?