To compete in the modern business world, the average company must be engaged in some form of content marketing. By producing high-quality blog posts, articles, white papers, videos, podcasts and other content, businesses can establish themselves as thought leaders in their industries and build trust with their target audiences.

Increasingly, schools and school districts have been adopting this same approach—with considerable success. While these organizations technically are not selling products and services in the traditional sense, districts today must be able to “compete” with traditional private schools and increasing numbers of charter and private voucher schools.

Better communication with families

Content marketing allows a school district to maintain constant communication with current and prospective parents, guardians and families. Perhaps you have an interesting event coming up. Rather than simply posting the event to your district’s website calendar, you could blog about the event both before and after. The same is true for curricular innovations, district milestones and other important accomplishments for your organization.

Establishing a content marketing strategy allows you to open up more lines of communication. Thus, if you have something important to communicate about your district, you will have more channels through which you can reach your audience.

Managing your district’s reputation

When you use content marketing to regularly highlight all the positive things that are happening within your school district, it’s much more likely that your target audience will begin to develop a positive image of your organization and its work. This can be important when it comes to garnering support for a referendum, as well as convincing families with young children that your district is the right choice for them.

Spending some time to create content around all the great things happening in your schools gives you the opportunity to build up a lot of good will amongst your stakeholders.

Greater online engagement

For better or worse, most people today live a good portion of their lives digitally. This gives your district an opportunity to reach people through a variety of channels, including a blog, social media and email marketing. For example, you can promote your district’s recent blog posts to your Facebook and Twitter social media platforms. This provides the added benefit of allowing your organization to interact and engage in conversations with stakeholders online.

Although there are numerous benefits of content marketing for educational organizations, it can be difficult for schools and districts to find the resources to make it happen on a consistent basis. Many districts approach this challenge by asking teachers and other staff members to create content periodically, easing the burden on any one person.

Content marketing is still in its infancy in the world of K-12 education, but we expect it to be an ever-important strategy as schools and districts work to compete like they never have in the past.