I’m going to show you 6 different teaching techniques you can use to make your marketing content even more useful to your readers. Most students don’t want to be there. What if, as a teacher, instead of saying that your students will hear a lecture on “asymptotic complexity,” you say that they will learn how to “find inefficiencies in code and speed up their applications.” That’s already more attractive and speaks to what students really want to learn. Using the desire method in your content: This concept is all about focusing on benefits to readers and customers. Games are more fun than work Ask anyone whether they’d rather read a textbook or played a video game, and you’ll get the same answer 99% of the time. No, you don’t have to create a video game for your content, but there are ways to make your content more game-like and fun for readers. When it comes to content, you can use that in two ways. You can see that I have short paragraphs like this one in all the content I create. Here are examples of different ways to teach it: Visual: Write a blog post on how to pump up a ball; you could include pictures. As you can see, there are multiple ways you can teach a topic for each learning type.
Sometimes, marketing takes the form of entertainment, but often, you get to assume the role of a teacher.
This is really powerful. You can become one of the few educational influences in most people’s lives after they leave school.
Beyond helping your business grow, inbound marketing allows you to make a real impact.
Partly, that’s why I’m still so passionate about it even after all these years.
Once you start thinking of yourself as an educator, you can become an even better marketer by learning from traditional teachers.
I’m going to show you 6 different teaching techniques you can use to make your marketing content even more useful to your readers.
1. Use the “desire” method
You might already be using this method even if it’s not intentional.
The “desire” method is all about getting students’ attention.
Think of an average class, even at the university or college level. Most students don’t want to be there.
They feel like they’re learning something that probably won’t be very useful and just want to know what’s on the exam so that they can pass it.
One of the main reasons for this is because lectures are set up to teach about a topic, not to satisfy a desire.
For example, in a computer science course, you might have a lecture about sorting algorithms or asymptotic complexity.
Even if you have an interest in computer science, those titles alone won’t get you excited about learning.
What happens in the first few minutes of those lectures?
More or less the same thing every time. It’s usually a slide about “what you will learn,” which again just lists the specific things included in that topic.
The solution is to build desire: What if you started off with the benefits of learning the topic?
Back to our example about asymptotic complexity, which basically just classifies how fast an algorithm can run (how complex it is).
What if, as a teacher, instead of saying that your students will hear a lecture on “asymptotic complexity,” you say that they will learn how to “find inefficiencies in code and speed up their applications.”
That’s already more attractive and speaks to what students really want to learn.
The intro slides could focus on how coders at Google use the concept of asymptotic complexity in their daily work. Or how a long-time coding problem was solved because someone found a way to reduce the complexity of the coding solution.
Using the desire method in your content: This concept is all about focusing on benefits to readers and customers. More so, it’s about conveying those benefits in the headline and at the beginning of any content.
While many marketers don’t know why they do it, this is the reason why having a benefit-driven headline is so important. If you’re teaching something that will help your reader accomplish something, make it clear!
In addition, your introduction is your chance to show your reader what could be possible if they learned what you are about to teach. Cite statistics, case studies, personal experiences, and anything else that shows how great the results can be.
2. Games are more fun than work
Ask anyone whether they’d rather read a textbook or played a video game, and you’ll get the same answer 99% of the time.
Educators have realized that students learn better if they are fully engrossed in a lesson, which happens if they are having fun.
That’s where the concept of “gamification” came from.
No, you don’t have to create a video game for your content, but there are ways to make your content more game-like and fun for readers.
Let’s look at a few ways you could do this.
Example #1 – Quizzes can be fun: A quiz can be either fun or boring, depending on the topic.
Online quizzes draw engagement and grow in popularity when done right—that’s a fact. A study of 100 million articles in 2013-2014 found that 80% of the most popular pieces of content were quizzes.
For example, the top one was: “What Career Should You Actually Have?”:
By framing it around fun careers (Oprah on the intro image), the creators drew people to the quiz.
When you create a piece of content, consider designing a quiz to go with it.
There are many free tools, such as Qzzr, that you can use to create a quiz. You just copy and paste the HTML code that it gives you into your content:
If you use WordPress, you could try the SlickQuiz plugin, which allows you to create…
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