Lead Customers to Your Content with Pedagogy

Image from Dive Rite's Historical Timeline

 In Greek, pedagogy literally means to lead a child.  The Latin-derived pedagogy means education.  In today’s world, pedagogy is used to describe instruction and learning.  You may recognize a couple of these pedagogical features from your college textbooks: 

• Did you know? 
• Historical Timelines
• Vignettes 
• Global Perspective
• Tips & Techniques
• Check Your Progress. 
• Outlines 
• Key Terms
• Case Studies
• Questions to Consider
• In the News
• In the Field
• Putting it Together
• Real Connections

 Use content rich pedagogical features to educate your customers, to solve a problem, to shed light on an issue, and to put your business in the spotlight.

 Take Dive Rite, for example.  Established in 1984 by two underwater cave explorers and diving instructors, the Florida-based company calls itself “the first technical dive gear company in existence”.  Today’s it’s also the world’s leading online community for serious divers with the help of content rich pedagogy.

In early 2006, the Dive Rite website was essentially an online catalogue. The company had long standing relationships with print media partners, and relied on them for most of its advertising. Dive Rite’s organizational structure and budgeting—like most retail brands—was set up to sell products, not to produce content. But the company knew it had a lot more to offer divers. 

So Dive Rite contacted content marketer Russell Sparkman who suggested the company establish itself as the “definitive resource” in the technical SCUBA gear market. The company launched a blog, an instructional video channel and a dynamic FAQ tool called the “Solution Finder.”

Dive Rite also reinforced its role as a SCUBA gear pioneer by writing itself into the story. The website features a historical timeline, which takes readers through the early days of underwater cave exploration up to today’s technical advances.  The timeline places the launch of Dive Rite into this history, highlighting the fact that the brand was around before virtually all of its competitors.

Dive Rite’s online brand took off because of compelling content presented pedagogically.  Textbooks and companion websites are an excellent model for gathering ideas for your next fantastic pedagogical feature.  Did You Know? is only the beginning. 

With the advent of instructional technologies in the education field, there has been a huge shift in pedagogy.  And now with the advent of Content Marketing and new Content Marketing delivery platforms, pedagogy is going to take on an entirely new definition.