“No one wants another salesperson in their life, and everyone wants to learn something. If you can stop selling your product, and start educating your target audience, you have created the best situation to make the eventual sale.” — Ritchie Havok
Education is a very powerful channel for getting to your best customers. We know that selling a customer is always breaching rapport while educating builds a relationship of trust and mutual benefit. If people recognize you as the “company in the know” you naturally become an industry leader in your field. Once you are the place people go for the latest current information, who do you think they are going to call when they need to hire a professional? I always try to hire industry leaders when I’m looking to do business with others, and I encourage you to do the same:-)
An educationally focused marketing strategy is an incredibly powerful way for companies of any size to build a brand while increasing the value proposition to customers and those that come in contact with your messaging. It’s important to always remember there is only about 3% of the population looking to purchase what you are selling at any given point–on average. The reality is for those selling shoes, tires, real estate, or photography services, in general, you can expect about 3% of your possible client pool actively search to purchase what you are selling.
This means your appeal must be gripping to those that aren’t looking to purchase what you are offering at all. Once we represented a carpet cleaning company and started by doing a little research about the health and safety of carpets in the home and office. After some tweaking, we came out with an Executive Report titled, “Your Carpets Could Be Making You Sick.” We went on to give riveting statistics about EPA studies on the importance of clean carpets and how it related to the quality of the air in your home and office–and its impact on your health and the quality of your life. This got the attention of almost everyone who had a carpet. Better yet, this report also greased the way directly to upper company management and started this client of mine into the commercial carpet cleaning business. A business with even higher profit margins. All this by simply educating the consumer. You can also do the same for your company, whatever the industry, with profound results!
Ritchie Havok International has a product they call a Core Story. The executive summary above was a part of that marketing work product. If you haven’t heard of a Core Story I encourage you to read more at their site. It is without question the most powerful marketing product/service we have ever seen, and it can be implemented in any industry to slaughter the competition. Below is a quick outline of what a core story can do.
An educational marketing strategy is only as good as its surrounding support systems. A well-researched and developed Corporate Identity can only produce profits if the underlying business model and Core Profit Centers are solidly in place. I’ve seen a few huge online marketing hits where the companies were not ready for the simple traffic that we brought to them. Now that you understand what education-based marketing is think about all the marketing messages you come in contact with daily where the author is educating you. This is very powerful stuff and those that understand it and utilize it in their corporate identities destroy the competition no matter what the industry.