Educational marketing can help you attract more potential
customers and establish yourself as an expert.
So, What Is Education based Marketing?
In its purest form, education-based marketing is the use of shared knowledge to generate trust from your target audience.
Using educational marketing messages, businesses can expose a need and help their customer understand a need that their product or service solves. As the term states, it’s the process of educating your prospects with valuable information setting yourself as an expert in your particular field or industry, and, over time, gaining your prospects trust and respect. If done correctly, education-based marketing is a tool that can lead your prospect to the logical conclusion that they need to work with you without you ever mentioning a sale!
Normally, there are three stages before a prospect can be converted to a loyal customer – awareness, consideration, and decision-making.
A typical buyer’s journey always starts with awareness; a problem they realised – it will be something that is of particular interest to them. What are your prospects searching for every day? What do they google on their phone? These topics are not necessarily about your or any other specific product, they can be anything that provides a solution to issues or problems that relate to their every day life if you were in their shoes. It can be topics such as an effective way to lose weight, get fitter, relationship challenges, tips on how to increase sales, the best gadget or app for their needs, or how to increase interactions on social media.
After realising these, what will they do next?
Rather than aggressively selling, what we are doing is educating them. With educational marketing , a great approach can also include letting them have the option to enter their email address or other contact information on the website, in case they are interested in knowing more.
Next is the Consideration Stage where the main goal is to provide content that can highlight what your company can offer or guarantee, its unique features, and what sets it apart from other similar brands. While the first stage is about educating the client on information regarding their problems, the Consideration Stage is formally introducing you as a trusted advisor, where free trials, demos, and scheduled webinars can be effective.
The last step before they decide whether to purchase your product or not is the Decision Stage. It’s often where they will take time to conduct an in-depth review, compare the pros and cons of different brands, and consider several possible approaches. Offering a consultation with an expert or providing them estimated and price quotes can help them in this decision making but might not be needed if enough loyalty was built up during education.
Just providing information is not enough. You need to strengthen your sales arm by building an ARM. The Accelerating Relationship Model (ARM) is a simple process that provides a level of comfort and respect in the customers mind before making the viable core product or adding in the extras that really amplify the sale in both profit and engagement, devotion and desire.
Pardon the pun, but this helps to “ARM” your staff with the arsenal they need to win sales in today’s environment.
Part of the Sales Machine System incorporates the ARM technique and not only keeps everything on track for all of your staff to relate to the customer wherever they are on the buying cycle, but also to identify the next step and provide encouragement if asked.
Compliant Sales Training provides you with a full range of changes, techniques and tactics that address your strategy, provide training opportunities to all staff, get staff buy in, create effective processes and multiply your sales by 2, 3, 4 and more.