Content Marketing in School: How We Started

I got the idea after reading Jay Baer's best selling book, Youtility. The whole premise is you have to help not sell to potential clients or in our case parents. Here is an excerpt from his webpage:

The difference between helping and selling is just two letters. But those two letters are critically important to the success of business today.

Youtility is marketing so useful, people would pay for it. It's a new marketing model for the age of information overload.

My district has done traditional media, digital and social media, but we have never tried CONTENT MARKETING. At least not to the extent of having a specific plan that focuses on content marketing.

I won't bore you with many details, but here are the 7 STEPS we took to jump into content marketing. Here is how we built School-a-Hoop.

1. Who is Our Target Audience

 

Most of you will say, "Duh, it's parents, stupid!" It is parents, but what do these parents need? What are their pain points. That is the question you have to ask yourself. Then you have to HELP cure their pain.

Brainstorm. Make a list. How can you help them feel confident that they are making the best choices raising their children? Those solutions will be the content you provide.

2. Find Your Experts

 

Who are going to find to help you solve these problems? They have to be experts. They have to be able to help your audience, or cure their pain.

We selected the obvious choice... our teachers. Why? Because they're the best teachers in the State of Texas. They're the experts molding hard-working, life-long learners. Each one of our teachers have their specialty. Use that specialty to create something special for your audience.

3. Find Your Device

 

How are you going to deliver your content? There are thousands of ways to create and disperse content marketing.  You have to find the best vehicle for your audience. You can do Video, SlideShares, White Papers, eBooks, Blogs... there are too many to list. We chose a blog to start with.  Easy to understand, and a great publishing tool for useful information.

4. Create Your Content

We went back to our experts, told them our ideas, and they gave us theirs. We brainstormed. We fleshed out our ideas. In the end, they are the experts, so we let them go and create something special. What they came back with was gold.

5. Revise and Rewrite

 

There is always room for improvement. Sometimes you have to shape your content for the particular vehicle you are going to present the material with. For our blog, we wanted to be more conversational and to the point. We focused on building lists and bullet points. We revised and we revised. Five drafts in some cases. Not necessarily for grammar, but to create the best possible solution for someone's pain points.

6. Choose Our Visuals

 

We know visuals rule in storytelling.  We took several days to choose the best possible visuals to help tell our story.  In the end we chose four pictures.  One to use in our blog post, and the other three were used to create additional material to promote the blog.

7. Getting the Word Out

 

We created an editorial calendar for each one of our posts.  We have a plan each week when we post an article.  It includes social media, interacting with other blogs, traditional media, email marketing and micro-content in the form of smaller content marketing pieces such as SlideShare.

It takes a lot of work for one post on our blog, but we believe in the end our content marketing will make us the respected leader in education in Carrollton, Dallas and the State of Texas.

Do you have any additional tips or questions? Leave them in the comment section below.