How to Enhance Learner Growth Through Online Content Creation
By Ray O’Donnell
Delivering value to your target audience on social media keeps them coming back for more. One of the best ways to deliver that value is by providing them with learning opportunities about the topics they care most about.
In our experience, as users learn insightful advice and best practices from your content, they develop increasingly more trust in your business.
This inspires them to:
? Share your business with people who might need your products and services
? Cheer your business on via engagement
? Consider doing business with you
? Do business with you
Let’s take a closer look at how you can enhance learner growth through online content creation so you can build trust and generate quality leads for your business.
Host free and paid webinars
Give your target audience the chance to attend educational webinars on topics that align with their business problems.
Host free webinars to generate leads. And host paid webinars to generate leads who are ready to buy. (After they buy once, you can upsell them endlessly.)
Think about the learning process when structuring your webinars.
Consider integrating auditory, visual, and kinesthetic teaching styles to appeal to individual learners with various learning styles. To create high-value webinars, tease the solution to your audience’s problem. Give them just enough information — but save your meaty expertise for when they become a paying customer.
This encourages them to consider your business as the answer to their pain points.
But there’s a caveat when it comes to webinars. Many attendees drop off during the first third of the webinar.
Image via Banzai
According to a report by Banzai, it’s important to mention that you’ll include polls, handouts, and other interactive elements when promoting your webinar. This helps attendees look forward to an engaging session and provides resources they can take with them.
Banzai also recommends teasing the engaging and high-value aspects at the beginning to encourage your audience to stay longer.
Create expert blog content and repurpose it on social media
Publish authoritative blog posts based on specific topic clusters that align with your target audience’s search intent.
For example, if you have a B2B coaching practice, you might cover the main topics, such as B2B marketing, B2B sales, and B2B operations. You’d then have subtopics underneath each main theme to create your “clusters.” Using child and parent pages on your website, you'd interlink these so site visitors can easily conduct deep dives into your subject matter expertise.
Share blog content snippets on social media to demonstrate authority and generate website traffic. Pull insightful infographics, quotes, original research, and valuable advice — then repurpose them across your social media accounts. A great example of this is this VPN relationship map, that helps consumers make a more informed decision about their VPN provider.
You can also pull text from blog posts and use it to create original images, videos, and informative carousels for your social media content.
To make your blog content more accessible for people with visual disabilities, use text-to-speech tools for online learning. These tools “read the content out loud” so learners with visual disabilities can interpret the content. This is also helpful for auditory learners.
Be sure to also use speech-to-text tools when you’re creating video content. This helps people with hearing disabilities and reading/writing learners digest your content.
Share insightful carousel guides
Give your audience mini-educational ebooks by publishing insightful carousel guides. You can also share B2B news, stats, and best practices related to your specific industry.
Image via Jeremy Moser on LinkedIn
For example, if you run a recruitment agency that specializes in recruiting for engineering and IT roles, center your carousels around those buyer personas and topics. Share tips on how to position an engineering resume, find a high-paying IT job, and get promoted within each industry.
Make sure each carousel guide has a main learning goal that’s aligned with intent data. When tailoring your approach, refer to your overarching content marketing strategy and weave in your topic clusters to further position yourself as an industry authority.
This is also an effective way to scale your SEO.
In the final slide of each carousel, add your contact details and a link to your current offer. (Make sure your offer is relevant to the carousel and aligns with your business and social media sales goals.) If you’re a coach or recruiter, or if you’re posting on your personal page, add a headshot image of yourself here, too.
Post educational videos (short-form and long-form)
Publish short-form and long-form videos on your social media channels tailored for leads at various funnel stages. Use varied instructional practices and cater to different grade levels to see which videos help you get the most engagement and interested leads.
Use short-form videos for bite-sized educational tidbits — think quick tips. These are great for people who don’t have a lot of time to browse social media content. Create long-form videos for in-depth educational advice. These are great for people who want to study and dig deeper into the subject matter you cover.
For example, if you own a consulting firm for project managers, you might record short videos about how to save time planning projects. And you might record long videos about how to build elaborate project timelines using a Work Operating System, like monday.com.
End your videos with an invitation to join your email list for more tips, attend a sales webinar, or book a demo/discovery call with you.
Package your expertise into an online course for more learner growth
Create an official course that speaks to user intent and helps support student achievement. For instance, if you’re a growth mindset coach, you might center your course around how to eliminate limiting beliefs and find opportunities for growth and abundance. Or you might center your course around how to build resilience and thrive in the workplace.
Depending on your social media sales goals, you might gate your course and offer it for free in exchange for contact information. Or, you might create a more in-depth course and sell it as another revenue stream.
Share snippets of your course across social media using organic campaigns and paid ads. Hint: Ads work! In 2023,?social media ad spend?was approximately 207 billion dollars, and the projected spend continues to increase.
Image via Statista
Test various ad messaging, calls to action, and course offers to see which ones help you boost open rates, click-throughs, and conversions. Then scale your ads by doing more of what works.
Create funnels that drive traffic to either your online course download landing page or sales checkout page.
If you’re selling the course, consider starting with lead magnets for social media users who need more nurturing before they convert.
For instance, offer a free checklist template or webinar invitation so they can learn more before committing to the course. In exchange, you’ll also collect their contact information so you can nurture them with segmented email outreach campaigns.
You could also run an online membership where subscribers pay monthly or annually for your expertise. For instance, you might offer your members exclusive ebooks, white papers, and mini-courses in exchange for their membership. You might also offer them member-only promos, discounts, and gifts throughout the year.
Create an educational newsletter
Craft an engaging educational newsletter for your audience using LinkedIn, Substack, or Gumroad. Show off your expertise with industry insights, personal experience tidbits, and authoritative advice.
Then, share snippets of your newsletter on your social media platforms and via email. When relevant, send it to PR firms.
Similar to blog posts, you can repurpose endless snippets from your newsletter.
For instance:
Create an infographic to show your audience how to do something you mentioned in your newsletter.
? Turn an interview with an industry expert or client into an in-depth carousel post.
? Take a quotable line from your newsletter and create a text quote image.
? Grab a tips section and repurpose it into a downloadable checklist.
? Repurpose the tips and advice you shared into informative videos.
Add relevant calls to action throughout your newsletter where they fit in naturally. Be sure to also add one at the end of each newsletter. Invite readers to:
? Book a discovery call with you
? Join your email list for exclusive tips
? Sign up for a free trial
Again, make sure your newsletter fits into your overarching marketing goals and social media sales goals. Tailor it to your buyer personas, chock it full of expertise and value, and refer to your topic clusters for theme ideas.
For instance, if your main topics are B2B marketing, B2B sales, and B2B operations, you might add a section for each theme in every newsletter. Or, you might focus on one main theme per newsletter with a relevant subtopic. For example, if you’re focusing on B2B operations this week, you might write about how to create efficient workflows for daily B2B responsibilities.
Wrap up
Sharing valuable educational content helps your audience solve problems. It also encourages them to see you as an authority in your industry and across the topics you cover.
This generates trust in your brand, and nudges aligned prospects to join your email list, book a call, or jump right into working with you.
But you have to know what kind of content to focus on and how to craft it in a way that engages your audience. That’s why it’s important to factor in search intent, your sales goals, and your overall marketing strategy.
Most importantly, you need to leave your audience wanting more.
And that’s where we come in.
As B2B social media experts, we can help you deliver content that encourages your audience to contact you — and CONVERT.
We specialize in helping:
? B2B SaaS businesses
? Recruitment agencies
? Training companies
? Coaching practices
? Consultancy firms
? Technology firms
Book your free call now to learn more.
Best of luck with your educational content creation!
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