Knowing what you do and why your customers buy from you is important before you start creating edumarketing content.  Follow these simple steps to discover your expertise.

Step One: Identify Your Expertise

The first step is to identify your expertise. If you are a financial planner, your expertise is helping people invest, save money, and increase their wealth. If you are a mortgage professional, your expertise is helping people qualify for financing a home of their dreams. Your broad definition of your expertise is great for the local Chamber 30-second elevator pitch, but to successfully build an edumarketing plan, you need to know a bit more. To drill down on your expertise, answer the following questions:

1. What problems do you solve?
2. What questions do you answer?
3. What specialized solutions do you offer?

When you can quickly share the problems you solve and the questions you answer, you can connect with your customers and help them understand how you can help them. 

It's the base of your edumarketing content.

Step Two: Determine Your Topics

Next, take your answers from Step One and write down each as a topic. Don’t expand on them yet, simply write down each answer. Save this sheet as your topic list. You will find that you can constantly add to this list over time. No matter the question, if you have an answer, you have a topic. When determining your topics, you want to consider who you want to read, view or learn from the topic and what action you want them to take. 

Step Three: Identify Your Distribution Channels

Distribution is how you deliver your content and engage with your audience. Your distribution channels may be determined by your geographic location or industry but should not be determined by your development expertise. It is easy to outsource to experienced professionals. For example, you may use a ghostwriter to write your content and a videographer to create your videos. If you are looking to develop a complete edumarketing plan that includes online learning, you will want to hire a professional who has a complete understanding for developing educational marketing programs. You don’t have to start out utilizing all distribution channels. You can begin by adding blog content to your website and then move on to creating videos and then an eLearning channel.

Step Four: Develop Your Content

Start with the following:

1. Take a topic
2. Write out the answer or information to the topic
3. Determine your delivery method(s)
4. Develop your content

You may use the topic and information in a blog post or create a quick informational video to place on YouTube or Facebook. You may create a checklist to use to capture leads on your website or an online course for your eLearning site. You may create a PowerPoint slide deck to use in a webinar or you may use the topic as a discussion in your podcast. You can develop several different deliverables for each topic. The most important thing to remember is to take your topic, write your content, then develop your deliverables. Yes, this process does take a bit of upfront work, but once you have done it, you will be thankful because you will end up with a strong list of topics that will support you in your marketing and business goals and position you as the expert in your field. 

Create a content hub to organize your content for your various distribution channels like blog posts, videos, social media, presentations, eLearning, eBooks, etc. If your topic is long, then you may want to create one cohesive paper and/or presentation. Although the content you create may be divided into multiple deliverables, creating one single presentation or whitepaper gives you more control and will help you:

• Divide your broader topics into smaller topics
• Develop multiple content for various distributions channels
• Build FAQ’s