Over the past few years, content marketing for businesses serving educators feels like it’s gotten complicated. Is the path to success paved with keywords as a part of a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy? Or do marketers have to “pay to play” via search and social advertising? What about the increasing role artificial intelligence (AI) plays in how customers discover education businesses?
The truth is these three tools—SEO, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and AI optimization—all contribute to building brand awareness and credibility with future clients at educational institutions:
- Optimized web content performs better for traditional search and AI discovery
- PPC campaigns help ensure visibility for quality content even before a potential client knows what they need
- Compelling photography, illustrations, and video content drive interest in your business by providing more engaging search results and social media presence
It is worth noting that recent investigations into AI search results show that PR can significantly influence what users find as well. As Semafor suggests: “The best way to get your client’s message into the output of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the rest is by talking to journalists.” That is why it is important to build your credibility and manage your reputation with a partner like CB&A, A FINN Partners Company. SEO and PPC help build and enhance how future customers find you, learn from your expertise, and choose you as their vendor of choice.
So let’s dig into three ways SEO, PPC, and AI combine to deliver marketing results greater than the sum of their parts.
Let Them “E-E-A-T” Valuable Content
As we’ve previously shared, when deciding between PPC vs SEO for education marketing, you may be familiar with the acronym “E-E-A-T,” which sets the criteria for effective organic content rankings:
- Experience – demonstrates that authors have a proven track record in a particular area. If you want to build credibility among educators, you’ll need to show you’ve delivered results for similar organizations and have valuable knowledge to share in this sector.
- Expertise – illustrates that your team has the skills required to deliver value to other professionals in your space. For education, this means showing that you deliver products and services in a manner that embraces what’s unique to schools and the communities they serve.
- Authority – shows where a brand’s website is in relation to other websites focused on similar topics. For the education sector, this could include coverage in trade publications like The Hechinger Report and EdSource that will link back to your site, as well as guest content on education-related blogs.
- Trust – reflects the integrity of the website based on the care and attention authors pay to accuracy, honesty, and quality of information. When connecting with education professionals, you’ll want to ensure you’re building relationships along with accountability by fact-checking content, linking to reliable sources, and protecting the security of your users.
While E-E-A-T is foundational for SEO, it also guides other elements of your content marketing strategy. If you leverage your experience and expertise to share industry-leading insights, you can share that knowledge via downloadable content—driving traffic to a web page optimized for relevant keywords—and you can further amplify your marketing campaign by launching ads. Paid search campaigns can help you reach people based on the keyword research you’ve already done to write optimized content. Specifically, you can target keywords that are easier to rank for in your SEO strategy while bidding on higher value, more competitive keywords in your paid search plan. And you can leverage audience targeting via social media ads to reach people based on what you know about your ideal customer profile.
Generating high-value content clearly directed at meeting various audiences’ unique needs is essential for AI visibility, too. Past marketing tactics like “keyword stuffing,” or attempting to cram irrelevant keywords into a page to drive search traffic, don’t work. And as Google has said, newer attempts to “game” search, like using generative AI to write low-value content, can negatively impact search results if content clearly fails the E-E-A-T test. Like traditional search, AI in search and social has evolved to more effectively surface relevant content based on users’ needs and interests, and trying to game the system can hurt you.
Optimize Content for Today’s Web
Users consume content in a variety of ways based on different use cases. To re-share CB&A’s previous guidance, content that’s optimized for search must be accessible to users with disabilities, provide a mobile-friendly experience, and follow best practices for online security. These same characteristics also improve the performance of search and social ads—it doesn’t benefit your brand to draw hundreds of users to your website via advertising campaigns if they can’t access your content on their mobile device, or they’re unable to learn from you due to a disability.
AI on search and social channels adds new ways for users to experience your content with compelling photography, illustrations, and video. While it’s always been best practice to make your content visually appealing, AI tools surface visual and audio content to provide exactly what someone is looking for in the format that most immediately meets their needs. This builds on the trend of video becoming essential for brand awareness. As social media channels increasingly prioritize video content, YouTube has become the second largest search engine in the world. AI tools mine this audio-visual data to more effectively deliver content to users across online channels that match their immediate interests and goals.
Because visual content is one of the most important factors for being found via AI-assisted search, you can build and scale graphic and video content based on your budget. While hiring a creative team to do this for you may not be financially feasible, free and low-cost tools are plentiful. For creating and editing graphics, Canva is a great resource, even with the free tools it offers, which are user-friendly and robust. For video, consider how you can re-purpose webinars to share informative content, or you can use your smart phone to tell branded stories. However, remember to carefully plan how you will align your content with the business goals you set out to achieve:
- To raise awareness about your business, join conversations about current events or jump on social media trends
- To drive consideration for your products and services, host a webinar or offer your expertise and authority by providing an update on a hot topic or innovation in education
- To increase decision-making for your company, share content that encourages leads to build relationships with your team members
Focus on Delivering Value in Many Ways
Content marketing for education businesses requires patience. The vast majority of people for whom your products and services are a perfect match aren’t looking to buy anything yet. According to Search Engine Land, 53% of all searches are informational—people aren’t immediately looking to buy a product or service, they’re looking to solve a problem or achieve a goal. Similarly, research from LinkedIn shows that only 5% of B2B buyer groups are “in-market” at any given point. To win trust and build relationships, it’s important to deliver enough high-value content over the long haul so your audience will turn to you as their new business partner when the time comes to make this investment.
Successful marketers develop a variety of materials to deliver value and build trust with future education clients long before they’re looking for a new vendor. While there are countless creative ways to do this, common deliverables include proprietary reports, webinars and events that feature diverse yet relevant perspectives, and white papers that describe how educators can address common pain points and achieve bold goals. By leveraging best practices for SEO and search advertising, marketers position their brand’s content to align with the audience as they are searching for answers to common challenges. To reach a broader audience and build awareness of your brand, you can leverage social media ad targeting to present unique solutions and opportunities to relevant people—wherever they are in their purchase decision.
PPC vs SEO for Education Marketing Isn’t an Either/Or . . . It’s a Both/And
As we’ve seen, paid media and organic marketing work best when deployed together, and taking action to deliver the right content to the right audience is even more important with the growth of AI tools. This starts by intentionally developing content that focuses on E-E-A-T. Because AI is re-shaping user experience, it’s critical to include compelling graphics and video because more people are discovering content through audio-visual experiences. Lastly, it’s important to provide a wide variety of content types aligned with your audience’s diverse pain points, goals, and questions. The majority of your future customers aren’t looking to buy anything today, but with the right content strategy they’ll remember you when they are.
