Educational vs Entertaining Content: Pick the Wrong One and You’ll Lose Both
Educational versus entertaining content is one of those debates that sounds strategic but usually isn’t. Most brands don’t fail because they chose the wrong content type. They fail because they never stopped to ask what their content is supposed to do commercially, and then built a strategy around the answer.
The choice between educating and entertaining your audience isn’t a philosophical one. It’s a commercial one. And the answer depends almost entirely on where your audience is, what they need from you at that moment, and what business outcome you’re trying to move.
Key Takeaways
- Educational and entertaining content serve different commercial purposes. Mixing them without intent produces content that does neither job well.
- Most B2B brands default to educational content without testing whether their audience actually needs more information, or just more confidence to act.
- Entertaining content builds brand salience and emotional affinity, but it rarely converts cold audiences on its own. It needs infrastructure behind it.
- The strongest content programmes use education to build trust in high-consideration categories and entertainment to maintain presence between purchase cycles.
- Format follows function. Before deciding how to produce content, decide what commercial job it needs to do.
In This Article
Why This Debate Keeps Getting Framed Wrong
I’ve sat in a lot of content strategy meetings over the years. The pattern is almost always the same. Someone on the team pulls up a competitor’s Instagram account or a viral B2C campaign, and suddenly the question becomes: “Why aren’t we doing more of this?” The conversation shifts from strategy to format, from commercial purpose to content aesthetics.
The framing of educational versus entertaining is itself part of the problem. It implies a binary when the real question is sequencing. What does your audience need from you at each stage of their relationship with your brand, and what format best delivers that at scale?
When I was running iProspect and we were growing the team from around 20 people toward the top five of the UK agency market, one of the things I noticed consistently across client accounts was that content investment was being made without a clear theory of how it would change commercial behaviour. Brands were producing content. They weren’t producing content strategies. There’s a significant difference, and that difference shows up in the P&L.
If you’re building out your broader content thinking, the Content Strategy & Editorial hub covers the structural decisions that sit behind questions like this one, including how to build frameworks that hold up under commercial scrutiny.
What Educational Content Actually Does
Educational content has a specific job. It reduces uncertainty. In high-consideration categories, whether that’s B2B software, financial services, healthcare, or anything with a long sales cycle, buyers accumulate risk before they commit. Educational content is the mechanism through which you help them reduce that risk without requiring them to speak to a salesperson.
Done well, it does three things simultaneously. It demonstrates expertise, which builds trust. It answers the questions buyers are already asking, which improves organic visibility. And it moves people closer to a decision without requiring a conversion event at every touchpoint.
The Content Marketing Institute’s planning framework makes a useful distinction between content that attracts, content that nurtures, and content that converts. Educational content does the heavy lifting in the middle of that model. It’s what keeps a prospect engaged between the moment they first become aware of you and the moment they’re ready to act.
The failure mode with educational content is producing it without a clear point of view. I’ve seen brands publish hundreds of articles that are technically accurate and genuinely useful, but completely interchangeable with anything a competitor could have written. That’s not a content strategy. That’s a content catalogue. The best educational content teaches something and positions the brand simultaneously. It’s not just informative. It’s informative in a way that only you could be.
When I was judging the Effie Awards, one of the things that separated the shortlisted work from the entries that didn’t make the cut was specificity of insight. The brands that won weren’t just communicating facts. They were communicating a perspective on those facts that felt earned and proprietary. That applies equally to content as it does to advertising.
What Entertaining Content Actually Does
Entertaining content has a different job. It builds salience. It keeps your brand present in memory during the long stretches of time when your audience isn’t in the market for what you sell. And it generates the kind of emotional association that makes people more receptive to your commercial messages when they eventually do need you.
The problem is that most brands confuse entertainment with virality, and virality with commercial value. I’ve watched clients spend significant budget on content that generated impressive reach numbers and almost no downstream commercial impact. When we traced back the audience, it turned out the content had reached people who had no realistic path to becoming customers. The content was entertaining. It just wasn’t entertaining the right people.
Entertaining content works when it’s built on a genuine understanding of what your audience finds interesting, not what your marketing team finds interesting. Those two things are often not the same. Unbounce’s thinking on content strategy ingredients touches on this gap between what brands want to say and what audiences actually want to engage with, and it’s a gap that entertainment-first strategies fall into more often than educational ones.
The other failure mode with entertaining content is that it requires sustained investment to maintain its effect. Educational content compounds over time, particularly when it’s indexed and discoverable. A well-constructed pillar page or evergreen guide can generate traffic and leads years after it was published. Entertaining content, especially social-native content, has a much shorter half-life. You can’t build a content programme on entertainment alone without committing to the ongoing production costs that come with it.
How Category and Audience Stage Should Drive the Decision
The most useful lens for this decision isn’t “what do we want to make?” It’s “what does our audience need from us right now, given where they are in their relationship with our category?”
In low-consideration, high-frequency categories, where purchase decisions are habitual and largely emotional, entertaining content does more commercial work. Fast-moving consumer goods, fashion, food and drink. The job isn’t to educate. The job is to stay present and emotionally relevant so that when someone is standing in front of a shelf or scrolling through options, your brand comes to mind first.
In high-consideration, low-frequency categories, where purchase decisions are researched, discussed, and agonised over, educational content does more commercial work. Enterprise software, professional services, financial products, healthcare. The job isn’t to entertain. The job is to be the most credible and useful resource available at the moment someone is trying to make a decision.
Most brands sit somewhere between these poles, which means the answer is usually a sequenced combination. Entertainment builds brand presence and attracts audiences. Education converts interest into intent. The mistake is treating them as alternatives rather than as different instruments in the same programme.
Moz’s approach to pillar pages is a useful structural model for how educational content can be organised to do more commercial work. The architecture matters as much as the content itself. Producing educational content without a structure that connects related topics, guides readers deeper, and signals topical authority to search engines is producing content that underperforms its potential.
The Measurement Problem That Nobody Wants to Talk About
One of the reasons this debate persists is that educational and entertaining content are measured differently, and the metrics for entertaining content are much more visible in the short term. Shares, views, comments, reach. These numbers are easy to report and easy to celebrate. The commercial impact of educational content, particularly in long sales cycles, is harder to attribute and easier to dismiss.
I’ve been in client reviews where a piece of educational content that had been quietly generating qualified leads for eight months was deprioritised in favour of a social content push because the social content had better engagement metrics. The team was measuring activity, not commercial contribution. When we rebuilt the attribution model and traced revenue back through the funnel, the educational content was doing significantly more commercial work. It just wasn’t getting credit for it.
This is a structural problem in how most organisations evaluate content. Crazy Egg’s content strategy thinking makes the point that content performance needs to be evaluated against business goals, not content metrics. That sounds obvious. In practice, it’s rarely how content is actually assessed.
The honest answer is that both educational and entertaining content are hard to measure with precision, and anyone who tells you they have a clean attribution model for top-of-funnel content is probably being optimistic. What you can do is build honest proxies. Track whether educational content is reaching people with the right intent signals. Track whether entertaining content is building brand recall among your actual target audience. Demand honest approximation rather than false precision.
When Brands Try to Do Both at Once
The most common response to the educational versus entertaining question is to try to do both simultaneously. Make content that’s educational and entertaining. Informative but fun. Useful but engaging. In theory, this sounds sensible. In practice, it usually produces content that does neither job particularly well.
The reason is that educational and entertaining content have different structural requirements. Educational content needs depth, clarity, and a logical structure that guides the reader toward understanding. Entertaining content needs emotional resonance, pacing, and a hook that works in the first few seconds. When you try to optimise for both simultaneously, you tend to get content that’s too shallow to genuinely educate and too dry to genuinely entertain.
There are exceptions. Long-form documentary content can be both genuinely educational and genuinely engaging. Some brands have built real audiences through content that teaches through storytelling. But this requires significant production investment and a level of editorial craft that most marketing teams aren’t resourced to deliver consistently. The brands that do it well, and there are some, treat it as a media production challenge, not a marketing content challenge. That’s a meaningful distinction.
A more practical approach is to use entertainment as the mechanism for attracting attention and education as the mechanism for converting that attention into something commercially useful. The entertaining content gets people into your orbit. The educational content gives them a reason to stay and a path toward a decision. Mailchimp’s thinking on omnichannel content is useful here because it frames content not as individual pieces but as a connected system, which is how it needs to function if you want it to do commercial work across different stages of the customer relationship.
The Brief Is the Strategy
Every piece of content should start with a brief that answers four questions. Who specifically is this for? What do they need to think, feel, or do differently after engaging with it? What format best delivers that outcome for this audience? And how does this piece connect to the broader content programme?
If you can’t answer those four questions before production starts, you don’t have a content brief. You have a content request. And content requests produce content activity, not content strategy.
The educational versus entertaining question should resolve itself once you’ve answered the brief properly. If the audience needs to reduce uncertainty before they can act, the content is educational. If the audience needs to stay emotionally connected to your brand during a long period of low intent, the content is entertaining. The format follows the function. It’s not the other way around.
I’ve worked with brands that had genuinely impressive content production capabilities but no editorial framework connecting what they produced to commercial outcomes. The volume was there. The strategy wasn’t. MarketingProfs has written about how content marketing has always been a strategic discipline, not a production exercise. That perspective has held up well. The brands that treat content as a strategic asset rather than a production output consistently get more commercial value from it.
The broader content strategy decisions that sit behind this, including how to build an editorial framework, how to structure content around commercial priorities, and how to measure what’s working, are covered in more depth across the Content Strategy & Editorial hub. If you’re working through these questions for your own programme, that’s a useful place to start.
About the Author
Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.
