123. Pamela Wilson on Educational Content and How it Helps in Building a Brand – Part 1

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• 003. Jon Morrow (Copyblogger) On How To Use Blogging To Build A Highly Successful Business Online
• 073. Darren Rowse — Problogger Founder — Shares His Secrets Around Prolific Content Creation, Podcasting, & Facebook Live (Part 1 of 2)
• 074. Darren Rowse (Problogger) Shares His Blogging Success Secrets (Part 2 of 2)
• 075. Joe Pulizzi — Founder of Content Marketing Institute — Does Your Content Fit Into Your Buyer’s Journey?
• 107. Sonia Simone CopyBlogger Co-Founder on How To Be A Prolific Content Marketer (Part 1 of 2)
• 108. Sonia Simone CopyBlogger Co-Founder on How To Be A Prolific Content Marketer (Part 2 of 2)
• 116. Brian Clark On How To Humanise Your Content, Create Empathy Maps, and lots more!

Key Points and Insights

• 0:31 – Intro
• 2:41 – What is educational content? What role does educational content play in building a brand?
• 4:53 – Above the line Marketing
• 5:00 – Targeted Marketing
• 5:20 – Content marketing is a conversation between a buyer and a seller
• 5:40 – “Know like and trust.” by Bob Burg
• 7:04 – Using Content Marketing to build trust
• 8:57 – Consistency in publishing content
• 9:44 – How will educational content evolve? What role will educational content play in content marketing?
• 15:55 – Intro to Part 2

    – How to create content consistently that is valuable and competitive?
    – How to create a content if you are not a writer?
    – How to produce a content that is not repetitive?

What is educational content

1. It provides useful and educational information to prospects. 
2. It is engaging and actionable.
3. It builds a strong relationship based on trust.

What is the role of educational content in building a brand

1. It helps build trust by providing useful and actionable information that delivers a transformation to the consumer.

Transcript

Machine transcript, lightly edited for reading. Speakers aren't marked. The intro and closing voiceover are left out.

Hey guys, our guest for today teaches people how to make the most of their presence on the web at bigbrandsystem.com, where business owners can discover the powerful combination of marketing strategy design in building a memorable brand. Her specialties include content marketing, online marketing, copywriting, small business marketing, branding, print and web design, and making businesses sound and look great.

She's also a keynote speaker and enjoys sharing valuable practical information in her talks. I'm delighted to welcome Pamela Wilson.

Welcome, Pamela. Thank you so much for having me, Ash.

And I have to say I was laughing because it's a long list of specialties and it's only because I've been in this for 30 years. Wow.

So you end up developing all these specialties when you plug away at it for that long. So let me just get this right.

So you started when you were four, is that right? Right, yeah, that's a good way to think about it.

Yeah, I've been doing it for a long time and at the beginning of my career, I was focused on design. So I was helping people to market their businesses, but from the visual standpoint primarily, I was not a writer.

I didn't consider myself to be a writer. And whenever a client needed any kind of writing, I would find a writer and hire a writer.

So this whole second half of my career, which has been a lot more about writing and content marketing and now writing a book, it's been a surprise to me, a delightful surprise. Right, cool.

Well, I wanna say to the listeners and the viewers that this is a first part of a two-part series. And in this first part, we're gonna talk largely about writing and especially about how content marketers who don't consider themselves writers can actually become successful at content marketing.

We'll be talking about how you, Pamela, you define the term educational content and how it relates to content marketing. We'll be talking about how the online industry is evolving and where you see the content marketing and online education going in the online space.

And in the second part, which we'll talk about the most common challenges and the quick wins and action steps listeners can take. So let's jump into part one.

So Pamela, can you share your definition of educational content and where you see educational content playing a role in brand building? And this is a three-part question.

And how do you see the principles that you talk about in Master Content Marketing, the book? How do you see them applying to this conversation?

Right, so the way that I define educational content is, well, so to give you some context, I have been doing this for a long time, as I mentioned, and marketing the way it used to be done was all about pushing messages out on unsuspecting people, right? Whether they had asked for them or not, you were pushing your messages out at them and trying to get them to pay attention.

And I was responsible for a lot of those messages. I mean, in my day, I created a lot of things that probably annoyed people, right?

Nowadays, marketing really is more about education. So rather than pushing those messages out on people and annoying them, you are trying to draw them in with information that they can use, engaging content that they can apply to their own lives, content that actually builds a nice relationship that's based on trust.

So I think it's such an important shift. And honestly, it just makes me feel so much better about marketing because you feel like you're being useful and you're kind of being of service rather than just pushing messages out.

And Master Content Marketing, the book I wrote, it's really about that shift. It's about how to help people create marketing that's actually useful, both for the people who receive the marketing and also useful to build your business.

Yeah, now there's a couple of comments I just wanna make about that, Pamela. It's interesting that you say the pushing of messages and that really reminds me of my background in the corporate world.

I worked in marketing roles quite a bit where we talked about above the line marketing where you looked at just talking at your customers through television advertising, radio ads. There was no targeting in those days and we just put our messages out there into the ether and hope that the right audience connected.

Today with auto responder sequences, with geo tagging, all these sorts of things that are available, targeted conversations are very much an option which never was. Technology didn't permit it before.

And I love how Chris Garrett said it in episode six. I love how he said it.

He said, "Content marketing is a conversation happening between a buyer and the seller." And the question is whether you wanna be a part of that conversation or not.

Because let's face it, as a seller, if you're not part of that conversation, you're not gonna make a sale these days. Or you're certainly not gonna build a know, like and trust relationship, which Bob Burg talked about in the previous episodes.

I've had him on the show and he's been on twice. And I really like how, I think, I believe he coined the phrase know, like and trust.

Yes. At least that's what Darren Rowse said when I interviewed him.

That's who it's attributed to, yeah. Right, yeah.

And this know, like and trust thing has become such a cornerstone of content, hasn't it? Because if people don't feel like they know you by through your content in which you try and reveal a bit of your personal self, your personal brand, you make yourself relatable, then they don't feel like they'll trust you if they don't know you.

And if they don't trust you and they don't know you, they're not likely to like you. So we're talking about.

Or to buy from you. Well, that's right.

That's the next progression, isn't it? And Bob Burg talked about it in his book.

He talked about his book, The Go-Giver and The Go-Giver Leader. And he touches on the know, like and trust principles in both of those.

But absolutely, that's such a key to selling these days, at least in the online space. Sure, you might have some sales that happen face-to-face and there a person has the opportunity to know like and trust you because they shake your hand, they meet you in person, there's body language.

But when you're trying to sell en masse through content marketing, you do need to establish that authenticity which happens through an inductive kind of relationship in your content rather than talking at your customers. Ash, it's like you read my book.

Because one of the things that I say is I come from a business world where you got together with people, you shook their hands, you had a coffee with them, you had a meal, you went into a conference room and you made a live presentation to them. And that, when you are solely marketing online, I mean, a lot of people still have offline businesses and they function that way.

But when you are solely marketing online and that's the only way that you're reaching your audience, then you really do need to rely on a different set of tools to build that same kind of trust that you can get from a face-to-face interaction. And one of those things can be content marketing.

If you show up on a regular basis with consistently helpful, engaging information that people can use, they'll trust you. They'll feel like they know you.

And I'm sure you've had this happen to you. People will say, I feel like I know you.

Like you meet them in person and they'll say, I've heard your voice, I've seen you, I feel like I know you, I know about you. And of course, they don't really know you, but they understand what drives you a lot more than anyone ever understood 15, 20 years ago about the companies that they interacted with.

And to me, that is the most powerful thing that content marketing can do for you. It's really funny because in episode 80, one of my clients who I featured on the show, her name is Amanda Farmer and she's a lawyer, I think at the end of that episode, she actually says, geez, I feel like I've known you for a lot longer than three months because she'd been listening to my podcast prior to that.

So podcasting particularly seems to create that connection, but I totally agree. So the know, like and trust model is an absolute cornerstone of creating good quality content.

Another really important word you mentioned there is consistent. I think consistency creates that sense of trust, that reliability.

So if you're creating content, whether it's a podcast or YouTube videos, and I must say, I almost put my hand up and say, I'm guilty of breaching this covenant, but I think that it is important to try and be consistent. So if you commit to a weekly schedule, then try and publish weekly.

You don't have to record your podcast weekly, you can batch record them, you can produce them over a week, you can produce a month's worth of content or a year's worth of content, but make sure you release it in a consistent format that is useful to your listeners or viewers or readers. Absolutely, right, absolutely.

Yeah, showing up like that on a regular basis goes a long way toward building that kind of trust. Yeah, okay, so let's talk about where you see educational content going in the future.

How do you see it evolving and what's its role gonna be in content marketing? So educational content, honestly, I have sort of a broad definition of it.

So my broad definition is that content marketing that we provide to people who are basically prospects, they're not customers of our businesses, they are people who we're trying to draw to our business. I consider that to be educational content because you're providing information and you are guiding people on the topic that you have some expertise around.

So that is educational content. It's just that it's unpaid educational content.

It's content that's basically marketing your business. Then you can shift over and have paid educational content and that's the kind of content you might put online and sell.

So that could be an ebook, it could be a course, an autoresponder that people pay to sign up for. It could be a webinar that people pay to attend.

It can take a lot of digital forms, but that's kind of the paid side of things. What I have seen in the last, well, let's say seven or eight years that I've been involved in online educational content is, first of all, I think the standards are higher than they used to be when I first started, right?

So the standards of the quality of audio, the quality of video, you know, it used to be people could just open up a text document and type into it and that was their ebook, which, you know, people expect a little bit more nowadays. So the standards are definitely higher than they used to be, but I also think that we have a better understanding of how adults learn than we did before.

I think people have realized that adults are busy, especially adults who own businesses, we have a lot going on. And so shorter, more compact lessons that people can just watch in snippets tend to work better than very long sessions that they have to block out a couple of hours to consume.

So I, you know, and portability is important as well. That's where podcasting I think has become so popular because it's something that you can consume concurrently with another activity.

So you can be right exercising, washing dishes, you know, whatever, gardening. Absolutely.

And you can be listening to a podcast. So that kind of information I think has really transformed educational content and has made people more aware about what formats truly work best.

The other interesting thing Pamela about podcasting is that I'm finding from my podcast is that a lot of the really time poor people, typically professionals or up and coming entrepreneurs, they tend to listen to podcasts quite a lot because it's in their off-screen time. And as you said, they consume podcasts, you know, while doing other activities like exercising or gardening or, you know, even sometimes falling asleep.

It's nice to listen to audio while you're falling asleep. It's off-screen time.

It doesn't mess with yours, you know, your melatonin levels because of the blue light that comes out of your phone or whatever, because you're just listening. There's something soothing about just listening to audio.

And when I spoke to John Lee Dumas in, I can't remember which episode, I think 38 or something, I really like what he said, where he said it's the first sense that we connect with when we are in our parents' womb, you know, we are mom's womb. The sound is the first sense we really connect with.

It's the first thing we hear before we even see. So it's kind of, we're kind of hardwired to respond to sound to some degree.

It's so intimate also, I think, because you're literally stuck in someone's head. Yeah, exactly.

You're stuck in their ears. And I mean, there's not much else that compares to that.

I think it's amazing. And I'm sure you've had the experience where you meet somebody at a conference and they say, oh, I recognize your voice.

Yes, oh, it's really weird, yeah. And they talk to you like they've known you for years and you've kind of, you know, you've never really met them and you're trying to pretend that you don't want to be rude.

So you're trying to go like, yeah, okay, you know, and then afterwards you realize they've been listening to your podcast. Exactly.

And the thing is, it's a great way to meet people, even though it's a little disconcerting, but I love meeting people because I feel like you can start so much further along in the conversation because they kind of know you, you know, you've gotten the basics out of the way and you can start a conversation that sometimes can end up being a lot deeper because they are familiar with your work. Comes back to the know, like and trust thing we talked about at the start.

Definitely, definitely. And I think that really has been a big change in online education and we're still getting a handle on how we can use those things, but format and production quality is huge.

That's been a big change. Now, this is a good opportunity for me to set the scene for part two of this conversation because one of the things that I think a lot of people struggle with, I know I certainly did and still do, is how do you create content consistently that is valuable and that is competitive in this very noisy world?

And when I say noisy, I'm not talking about just static noisy, I'm talking about good quality signal type noisy where there is so much spectacular content, it's an embarrassment of riches. Oh, and I totally agree, I totally agree.

There's so much and it can be disconcerting if you're the person who's creating content to think how in the world am I going to stand out among all of that other content that's out there already? Yeah, yeah, and how do I create content if I am either a solopreneur or I'm not a Copyblogger, which is something I want you to talk to in the next one.

I was gonna say I have a technique, so I can go through it in the next episode, yeah. I have a process that makes it easier.

Awesome. Not easy, but easier.

Okay, the other question I wanna touch on is how do you produce content which doesn't end up being repetitive? But we'll talk about that in part two of this two-part series.

So a quick recap of this first part. In this first part, we talked about educational content, we defined it, we talked about the fact that content is becoming very much an inductive process rather than talking at your listeners.

You wanna try and draw your listeners into the conversation. We talked about it being a cornerstone of building the know, like, and trust relationship with your audience, and we talked about the fact that content is changing.

In the next episode, we're gonna talk about the biggest challenges we see around creating high-quality content standing out from the crowd and creating content that isn't just repetitive. And Pamela is going to share her secrets from the Master Content Marketing book which teaches business owners who don't consider themselves writers how to create content marketing.