How to turn research into content marketing: Step 1, Start Blogging
It is an exciting time of the year as we are racing into the holidays and the end of 2022. Universities will soon be on winter breaks, and professors and students will be taking time off from their labs. While the season of celebration and relaxation is quickly approaching, now is a critical time to consider how you can improve funding opportunities in 2023. With so many competing for research dollars heading into the new year, we can expect that finding research funding will only become more difficult. Not only is it the time to improve funding strategies, but it is also vital to select tools that are the most cost-effective such as blogging.
Last week, we discussed how content marketing improves research funding through:
- Improving your search engine rank
- Making your website more user friendly
- And positioning your lab or university as an industry expert
Content marketing allows researchers to reach a larger audience more efficiently and effectively while also developing branding, thought leadership, and trust with their target demographic in their respective research fields. Content marketing for reseachers can take a variety of forms to improve SEO and attract funding including blogs, video content, podcasts, interviews, slide shows and infographics. With a little creativity, scientists such as Dr. Andrew Huberman, Dr. Lex Fridman, and Dr. Bret Weinstein have all developed mass followings that drive funding opportunities for their labs through content marketing.
Today we will discuss one of the lowest cost and lowest barriers to entry formats of content marketing that all researchers can access: their own blog. Blogging will allow your researchers to drive website traffic, improve Search Engine Optimization, build topic authority, cultivate trust, and increase their citations.
3 out of the 5 top blogging trends for 2023, reported by a large CRM specialist, perfectly align with the expertise, knowledge, and data a scientific researcher holds:
- Legitimacy: readers are seeking to be educated from reputable and trustworthy sources. There is a massive amount of content online that is growing exponentially and individuals are struggling to sift through what to believe. As scientists and professors, your researchers have a wealth of knowledge and accredited educational expertise that will allow their readers to trust them and regularly look to their blogs as reputable sources of information.
- Original Data: having original data makes a blog stand out. Data is becoming increasingly more and more important and it’s seeping into all areas of life from strategic decision-making to personal health decisions. As predicted by McKinsey, by 2025 “most employees will use data to optimize nearly every aspect of their work.” With data shifting to being at the forefront of professional and personal decision-making, disseminating original data is becoming more and more valuable. Your researchers have unique access to original data through their studies that they can utilize to stand out from the crowd while building a following that will help them increase funding opportunities.
- Original Topics: as a society, we are overloaded with content on a variety of general topics. Capitalizing on a niche, an original topic allows bloggers to stand out amongst the masses by being an expert in their respective disciplines. Scientists garner unique perspectives and insights on very specific topics that they can develop topic authority on through blogging.
Your researchers carry legitimacy through published cutting-edge scientific articles, and they already have massive content libraries full of original insights and data to pull from. Utilizing blogging will allow them to transform these high-level insights into digestible content for a larger audience.
Not only is blogging a convenient and cost-effective content marketing strategy, but it is also a critical time for scientific researchers to enter the space as they can capitalize on key trends in 2023 to improve your research funding opportunities in the new year.
Leading academic researchers such as Steven Pinker, experimental psychologist at Harvard, and Charles Mathewes, professor of religious studies at UVA, are both leveraging content marketing to improve their research funding through their large blog followings; Pinker and Mathewes are both utilizing OpenScholar to effectively and efficiently manage their sites and content marketing efforts. OpenScholar provides universities and medical centers with an easy-to-use and individual researchers’ website-building infrastructure that empowers researchers to upload, update, and optimize their content marketing like blogging to immediately improve and expand your research funding opportunities.
Ready to start blogging? Stay tuned for next week where we will be covering best practices for blogging in 2023.
When you use OpenScholar to show your work, share your work, and collaborate on research, magic happens: science advances and outcomes are accelerated.
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