An educational content marketing strategy is focused on the prospect's values and providing answers to their most pressing needs and questions. It helps businesses gain legitimacy as a resource for relevant, topical, enlightening, and helpful content. This can be through blog posts, videos, newsletters, webinars, and shared content from reputable sources. Educational content’s role in marketing is not promotion; instead, it is used to start a relationship and encourage interaction. It increases brand awareness in a comforting, non-aggressive way, and the strategy is built around topics of importance to their audience. Businesses can use data on hand about a customer as the relationship develops to craft personalized content and be proactive in shared content. It’s crucial that the content is quality and represents the impression they want to make upon prospects. Successful educational content marketing strategies start with a thorough understanding of the customer and prospect so the content can be focused on their needs, challenges, and interests. The content calendar should contain topics of relevance and offered across an integrated mix of print, direct mail, email, website SEO, and social media. Content can be interactive with quizzes, contests, and one-one-chatting. Businesses use the information they gather about prospects throughout the educational content process to build desire for their product and eventually convert the prospect into a customer.