Educational vs. promotional content: striking a balance

Content is meant to drive leads and demonstrate your abilities to address customers’ pain points, but to be effective, it must also avoid overt self-promotion. Great content offers value and engages leads, encouraging them to continue through the marketing funnel with the promise of gaining more knowledge along the way. Poor content simply tells those same people “buy from us.”

Are you unsure if your marketing content strikes the right balance between promotion and education? Let’s take a closer look at the differences between the two.

Educational Content

As the name suggests, educational content teaches your prospects something useful and new. In order to fulfill this role, it should contain these two key elements:

• Specific, actionable insights: When you offer valuable information that answers a prospect’s question or proves advantageous to their business operations, you show them that your company is knowledgeable. Actionable insights are always more impactful than vague observations.  
• Niche, valuable information: The best content won’t be found if it’s directly competing with a flood of other materials. The way to set your content apart is to find your content niche: the aspect of your audience’s needs that no one is addressing quite the way you can. Add value by filling this content need.

If you need inspiration for a new educational content campaign, explore what other businesses are doing. One business producing top-notch educational content is Proposify. The company, which offers tools to help agency owners streamline the proposal-creation process, produces a weekly podcast, Agencies Drinking Beer, in which every episode is a conversation with an agency owner about a topic such as managing client expectations or tactics for generating new business. Want another example? Take a look at Solo Practice University’s blog, and its advice for lawyers in business for themselves.

Promotional Content

Content marketing is different from traditional advertising. Promotional content is what results from a business producing marketing content as if it is just a new form of advertising. If your content contains these elements, it’s probably time to revisit your strategy:

• A CTA that isn’t seamlessly incorporated into the content, but rather is the content: There are few prospects who will stay engaged with a piece of content that does nothing more than sell your products and services. Deliver ideas, inspiration, and insights first. Sell second.
• Common industry knowledge branded as your own: If your content marketing offers no new insights to your audience, they’ll assume your services don’t offer anything unique either. To catch your audience’s attention and earn their trust, you have to share something they actually need, and something they can’t get anywhere else.

Overtly promotional content is all too common on platforms like LinkedIn. How often have you started reading a post from a “thought leader” there that started off fine, but by paragraph two turned out to be about nothing more than a few empty reasons why you should buy the author’s book or sign up for their seminar?

Educational content is about giving your leads something valuable in the hope that they will eventually become clients, and promotional content is about telling your leads to become clients, in the hope that they will eventually become clients. Marketers, when you are on the other side of this relationship, which type of content do you prefer to experience?

Want to learn more about smart content marketing strategies? Read our whitepaper, The 5 new laws of content.

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