Marketing and Sales Guru

We recently went over the definition of educational marketing and the benefits it can have for your company. This post will give you some ideas of how to create educational marketing, what tools work best, and how you can implement them in to you already present online marketing and PR plans.

To start, here is a list of some educational marketing tools that you may already be using:

1. A blog
2. Whitepapers
3. eBooks
4. Social networking tools
5. Press releases
6. Interviews
7. Videos
8. PowerPoint presentations
9. Webinars
10. Interviews

While this list does include most of the basics, I’m sure there are many more areas where you can share your expertise online, and even offline.

Applying educational marketing can be a tough task (especially when you’ve only ever done sales-based marketing), but it can be done. It involves the following steps:

1. Establishing what your educational message is. For instance, suppose you are a marketing consultant. Perhaps your prospects are asking themselves, “How can I market my business at the lowest cost?” or “Why are my marketing efforts not succeeding?” Now that you have defined what your prospect’s questions are, you can craft a marketing message that answers those questions. In the process of answering those questions you’ll be building a relationship of trust with your prospect.




2. Putting that message into a deliverable form. Take that message you’ve created and put it in a form that you can deliver to your customers/buyers for free. This can be through any of the methods we talked about earlier, like the blog or whitepaper. The key to making this a success is to get their contact information in return for the download. If you want to have more success in getting people to download and share your information, make it completely free with no need to give contact information. You may not be able to track the number of downloads, but you may be able to track the traffic that goes to a specific website, at least giving you an idea of how many people are clicking on a link.
3. Drive traffic through keywords, press releases, and collaboration with others in your industry. Optimize your website, blog, and press releases with keywords that customers are searching for to help drive that traffic to your free resource. Also, when using press releases make it clear therein that you want their next step to be going to your website, and from your website, make it clear that you want them to download your free eBook.
   
   In terms of where to share your free content, do your research and evaluate the distribution channels that will make the most sense for you to use in regards to your situation and company. This should be a part of your overall marketing or PR plans, so be sure you’ve defined this as it pertains to each campaign.
4. Follow-up with those who have utilized your resources. Be sure to follow up with the people who respond, share it with others (that you can track, like on Twitter or FB), and thank people for downloading the resource. Also, be sure to ask for feedback and comments from them, letting them know that you appreciate their time and their input.

Educational marketing is an effective tool that will benefit you and your customers, and when it comes down to it, your customers benefiting is all that really matters.

Check back for part 3: Why Educational Marketing Works.

Educational marketing is a tool available to everyone, thanks to the easy access to social media tools and platforms. What is educational marketing? Some may argue that it’s simply PR being done online, but the Internet has greatly blurred the lines between marketing and PR. The most important thing to remember, however, is that regardless of how you define it, educational marketing is a useful tool that can benefit both you and your customer.

A quick definition: it is a different way of marketing that entails the sharing of information and educational resources for buyers. Not a tactic to sell your company, but a way to share your expertise to assist buyers in their decision making.

So, why use educational marketing?

1. Consumers no longer rely on advertising messages to make buying decisions.
2. Educational marketing gives customers and resellers the background they need to understand your messages and appreciate your products and brand.
3. Educational marketing also gives your sales and marketing teams the opportunity to develop deeper relationships with your customers’ marketing professionals.

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