Product Education Through Organic Social

Key Takeaways

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Organic Social Tactic — Consolidate Educational Assets: Creating educational content that is related to your product(s) is a great tactic to provide long-term value for both your audience and your brand. It is valuable to consolidate this content into a place that is easily accessed by your audience for future reference (either on your website or social). On social, organizing content into areas such as IGTV, Instagram Guides, or Story Highlights, can boost its longevity and the value derived as the content can be revisited (instead of being lost in the feed). These areas can then become value-hubs where new and existing customers can learn from your brand and increase loyalty.

Blog Tactic — Recipes: Scratch Labs generates a high volume of traffic to their blog through non-branded keywords focused on recipes. Examples include “chicken fried rice recipe” and “rice cake recipe”. Although Skratch Labs focuses on drink mixes and energy bars, they aim to become a one-stop shop for all resources related to a healthy lifestyle including recipes, nutrition, and general life skills. 

Content & Messaging — Female Empowerment: Nuun aimed to educate their consumers by interviewing various female athletes to cover an array of topics such as mind and body balance, finding your passion, and tips to avoid burnout. In total Nuun published 5 episodes with 5 different female athletes who shared their stories and tips on female empowerment. Each YouTube video was trimmed into 2-6 minute snippets which were cross-posted on Instagram.

Other examples of brands consolidating educational assets:

• Driving 61% of Web Traffic with Search Ads and Blog Content
• Building an Effective Content Strategy That Drives 7M Web Visits Per Year

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Brands that aim to educate their consumers opt for either: creating a content section on their websites, or adding informational posts to their social media content mix.

Nuun

In September 2019, Nuun launched Nuuness TV on their YouTube channel. This campaign consisted of a series of interviews with female athletes covering an array of topics such as mind and body balance, finding your passion, and tips to avoid burnout.

Nuun aired 5 episodes with 5 different female athletes. The first episode with Alyssa Godesky gained 1K and 2.4% ER30 (percent of audience that engaged with the video in the first 30 days after it was posted). However, the following videos didn’t get more than 500 views.

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Nuun adapted their NuunessTV YouTube episodes to Instagram. The brand trimmed the videos into 26 short, 2-6 minute snippets posted as stories and saved to IGTV.

Nuun average Instagram Engagement Rate = 0.53%

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Nuun also occasionally shares tips and product information in their stories and saves them to their highlights.

Skratch Labs

Skratch Labs has built a highly engaged community on Instagram, with an average engagement rate of 2.2%. Their communication strategy is a mix of recipes, tips, memes, giveaways, behind the scenes content, and product shots.

Skratch Labs compliments their image posts with lengthy captions that provide insights about proper hydration, training outside in the cold, & competition snacking.

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Skratch Labs extends the life of its educational content by leveraging the recently-released Instagram’s Guides feature to make it easier for their followers to reference.

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Skratch Labs has also built out an elaborate blog section that lives on its own domain: blog.skratchlabs.com. The blog covers such topics as science, recipes, life skills, and more. 

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In 2020, traffic to the blog grew by +65% YoY.

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Skratch Labs does not run any ads to their blog domain, with 50% of blog traffic coming from organic search.

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95% of organic visits come from non-branded terms, with ~40% of search traffic being driven by recipe-focused keywords.

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Skratch Labs has created a positive feedback loop of traffic between their two domains, through the use of incoming traffic from other sites and organic search to create internal referrals.

Hydrant

Hydrant is another brand that invests in educational content. While they don’t extend their educational agenda to their social media channels, their Hydration Institute drives a significant amount (50%) of traffic to Hydrant’s website.  

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Hydrant’s blog covers a wide range of topics and not only helps to educate and provide value to their audience, but also drives substantial amount of traffic to its website. 

Hydration Institute accounts for 53% of all incoming organic search traffic to drinkhydrant.com.

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