Founder & Chief Executive Officer
You can post viral content. You can dance on TikTok. That will get you views, and views are genuinely worth something.
Conversions come from the other stuff. The content that educates somebody and shows them you are the right person to buy from or hire. That content is harder to produce, and it is what actually makes money rather than only generating numbers.
Both types have a job. Being honest about which job each one does is what stops you wondering why a popular account is not producing work.
Attention and conviction are separate problems, and they respond to different things.
Entertaining content solves attention. It travels, it gets shown to people who do not follow you, and it puts your name in front of volume. That is real value, and anybody dismissing it entirely is ignoring how discovery works.
Educational content solves conviction. Somebody watching you explain how a thing works, or answer a question they have been carrying, learns something about your competence that no amount of entertainment conveys. They finish with a sense that you know what you are doing.
The mistake is expecting one to do the other’s job. A dance gets you seen by thousands of people who learn nothing about whether you are good at your work. An explanation of a genuine problem gets seen by fewer people, several of whom now trust you.
Summary Entertaining content solves attention by travelling to people who do not follow you. Educational content solves conviction by demonstrating competence. Expecting either to do the other’s job is the error.
Worth being specific about what has to happen in somebody’s head before they hire you or buy from you.
They need a problem they want solved. They need to believe you can solve it. They need enough trust to hand over money and, in a service business, access to their business. None of that gets established by being enjoyable to watch.
It gets established by demonstration. Somebody who watched you explain why their website is invisible, in terms they understood, now has evidence about how you think. That is what being shown you are the right person to hire looks like in practice, and it is why educational content does commercial work that entertaining content cannot.
Summary A conversion requires a problem, belief that you can solve it, and enough trust to hand over money and access. Demonstration establishes those, which being enjoyable to watch does not.
The effect here is measurable, and larger than I expected when I first read it.
Conductor ran a study using three articles attributed to mock brands, covering almond milk, backyard party ideas, and backpacking, with participants split into control and test groups and surveyed immediately and again a week later. Consumers were 131% more likely to buy from a brand immediately after reading its early-stage educational content. A week later they were still 48% more likely to buy. When shown a lineup of four brands, 83.6% chose the one that had educated them.
That last figure is the one worth sitting with, since it describes a competitive situation. Four options, and the overwhelming majority went with whoever had taught them something. Conductor does not publish the sample size, so treat the precise numbers as indicative, and the direction is unambiguous.
Teaching somebody something does not simply make them like you. It makes them pick you over alternatives.
Summary Conductor found consumers 131% more likely to buy immediately after reading a brand’s educational content and 48% more likely a week later, with 83.6% choosing the educating brand from four options. The sample size is unpublished.
The honest part of this, and the reason more people do not do it.
Educational content requires you to actually know something and then do the work of making it understandable. You have to identify a real question, think through a clear answer, and explain it in a way that helps somebody who knows less than you. That is genuine cognitive effort every single time.
Entertaining content can be produced from a trending audio and a decent idea in fifteen minutes. The format does the work, and the skill involved is real but different.
So there is a sorting effect. Plenty of businesses can produce entertainment, and considerably fewer are willing to repeatedly do the harder thing. The difficulty is the barrier, and the barrier is why the few who clear it stand out. If educational content were easy, everybody would have it and it would stop distinguishing anybody.
Summary Educational content requires knowing something and doing the work to make it understandable, every time. Entertainment can come from a trending format in minutes. The difficulty is the barrier, which is why clearing it distinguishes you.
The argument that convinces people fastest has nothing to do with trust, and it is about shelf life.
A viral video has one life. It runs, it peaks within days, and then it is gone, with no mechanism for anybody to encounter it again. Nobody is searching for the dance in March.
An educational page keeps working. Somebody types their problem into Google eight months from now and lands on the thing you wrote, at the exact moment they need it. That is what search engine optimization operates on, and it only has educational content to work with, since there is no search query a dance video answers. The same holds for AI tools, which surface content that resolves a specific question and have nothing to pull from entertainment.
So the harder content buys you something the easy content cannot. Strong website design gives that library a proper home, a capable web developer keeps it fast as it grows, and a good SEO company makes sure it gets found. Educational content on your own website is an asset that accumulates, while social content is a performance that ends.
Summary A viral video peaks in days with no way to be found again, while an educational page can be found at the moment somebody needs it months later. Search and AI tools have only educational content to work with.
None of this means abandoning reach, and I would not recommend it.
Use entertaining content for what it does well, meaning getting in front of people who have never heard of you. Use educational content to convert the attention you earned, and keep the educational work on your website where it compounds rather than only on a platform where it disappears.
The practical version looks like a handful of educational pieces that live permanently on your site, with social content pointing people toward them. One genuinely useful page can be referenced in posts for years. That makes the hard work go further, which is the only realistic way to sustain producing it.
Judge each type by the right measure too. Entertaining content should be judged on reach, and educational content on enquiries, signups, and whether people arrive at conversations already convinced.
Summary Use entertaining content for reach and educational content for conversion, keeping the educational work on your website where it compounds. Judge each by the right measure, reach for one and enquiries for the other.
Dance on TikTok if it suits you, and enjoy the views, because attention has value.
Understand that conversions come from the other work. The content that teaches somebody something and shows them you are the right person for the job is what turns attention into money. It is harder to produce, which is exactly why it separates you from everybody producing the easy version.
Make the hard content, put it somewhere it can be found again, and let the easy content point people toward it.
Sources:
Conductor, study using three articles attributed to mock brands with control and test groups surveyed immediately and one week later (consumers were 131% more likely to buy from a brand immediately after reading its early-stage educational content, and 48% more likely a week later; 83.6% chose the brand that had provided educational content when presented with four brands; sample size not published).
https://www.conductor.com/academy/winning-customers-educational-content/
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