Educating Your Audience: How & Why You Should Do It

In today’s age of technology, engaging your audience online is key to making a significant impact in the market. It takes more than attracting more likes, shares, and comments, but making meaningful connections with your existing audience and engaging new and potential customers. All these efforts can culminate in establishing brand authority, boosting your brand, and ultimately improving your ROI.

Social media is by far the most effective channel to connect and engage your audience on a personal level. However, you have to do more than establish a social media presence. These days, your online success depends largely on educating your consumers, empowering them with insights that can help them better understand your products and how it can be of value to them.

What is Customer Education?

Customer education isn’t exactly advertising. It refers to the set of activities or processes that can help your customers make the most out of your products and services. It can be anything from providing hands-on experience to organizing workshops, and/or creating and sharing useful content.

With the ongoing pandemic and social restrictions, it makes much more sense to create and put out content where your customers can easily access them. You can upload it on your website or send it via email or social media. In this case, you can create a downloadable file like PDF and make sure that your intellectual property is safe from misuse or unauthorized distribution by adding a password to protect PDF files. We’ll discuss more of this later in the article.

How to Educate Your customers

There are several ways to educate your customers at every stage of the buying process. But, you first have to understand what customers view as a success to be able to provide exactly what they need.

• What problems do your products or services solve?

• What results should the achieve to measure the effectiveness of your products/services?

• How do your products/services align with their goals?

• Do you have different goals for every demographic or segment?

Any type of content created specifically to educate your audience should show readers and potential users the value your brand can offer. It should not only appeal to their emotions, but to their rationality as well.

4 Types of Content to Experiment With

• Infographics

It’s been proven repeatedly that humans are mostly visual learners. It means they are more likely to retain visual information than written or spoken information. It should be no surprise then that readers would not only enjoy looking at infographics, but are more likely to remember the information in them. This makes infographics a great type of content to use on your educational content. The best part? They get shared and shared up to three times more often than other forms of content.

• Case Studies

Your audience may want to hear about the features and specifications of your product. But, you should tell them stories about people and their success stories with your products/services, too. Case studies can take many different formats. But, the key here is to make your study relatable by talking about real people, their failures, and the journey they took to get to success.

• How-to Guides

Most websites these days contain how-to guides and the reasons are pretty self-explanatory: they are used to solve a problem or answer to the specific needs of your audience. When you’re thinking of writing a how-to guide, make it more in-depth. Think of it as a list blog that discusses each bullet point in detail. Most of the how-to articles that rank on Google’s first page of search results are usually a 7-minute read or about 1,600 words long.

• Resources

A list of resources and tools is also another way to add value to your audience. This gives them plenty of options and the power to make the decision based on their preferences. Lists can be boring so make sure to not forget the visual aspect: Break up the text, add visual elements, and ultimately make it easier to read.

Now, these types of content can take many forms. You can go traditional by publishing it as a blog or convert it to different forms of content like podcasts, live videos, or short educational videos which you can upload on social media platforms like Tiktok, Facebook, and Instagram. This way, your content can reach out to a wider audience and increase its chances of engaging new, potential customers.

Where Converting to PDF Can Help

Providing educational tools and resources is an effective and scalable option for strengthening your consumer education efforts without taking up too much of your manpower. You can easily set these tools up and manage them without exerting a large amount of effort. Plus, once these are created, you can use them over and over again to reach a wider audience at scale.

Besides the formats mentioned above, you can look up PDF to distribute your content. You can work with your content marketing team to create engaging, user-friendly, and shareable content in PDF format and take advantage of the benefits it has to offer:

• It maintains the original format of the document

• It has a small file size compared to other formats

• It is accessible on any operating system

• It easily integrates non-text elements such as images, hyperlinks, etc.

• It can be password-protected

Password-Protect Your PDF with PDFBear

With all these things said, it can be concluded that educating customers is something you, as a business, can greatly benefit from. But, most still shy away from it out of fear that their business secrets will be leaked to their competitors and negate its core benefits of educating more customers and earning their trust. However, it’s time to let go of these assumptions and empower your customers with insights that can provide better value to them.

One of the steps you can take to ease your mind is to convert your educational materials to PDF and encrypt it with a password. This will allow you to keep prying eyes away from your documents. The good news? You can easily do it with a PDF converter like PDFBear.

Explore more options with this online-based service by visiting its website today.