Today’s topic is all about education-based marketing—educating your prospects and customers on everything and anything that they would need to know and understand about your business.
This topic has been around for quite some time but it has really been coming to kind of a crossroads because the level of transparency that prospects and even customers are asking on a regular basis is just increasing at an insanely insane rate. I mean, people are asking things that they have never asked before. And there’s a lot of reasons for that and one reason is the amount of options that your customers or prospects have increased exponentially. If they’re able to really shop your business, they’re going to need to be more heavily educated.
The other big reason is just with everything going on around us. They’re scared and they’re nervous. They’re wanting to make sure that they make the right decision. So, in any kind of uncertain economy and uncertain times, education-based marketing becomes a really great strategy to use on a regular basis.
This is the perfect time to really separate your business from the pack. So how do you approach this? What do you do? What type of content, what medium, and all that good stuff? There’s a really great book called, “They ask, you answer”. The premise of the book and really the summary is getting a list of all the different things that your customers are asking and starting to answer those questions on the web. We’re going to talk through the mediums in just a second.
MAKE A LIST AND START ASKING QUESTIONS
The first step is really just getting a good handle of what is everything they’re asking. What do they want to know? What do they need to know? Is there anything that’s tripping them up in the buying process? Are they pausing? Are they asking for references to it? Obviously it depends on the type of local business you’re operating. But I want you to make a list—a really long list of all of those different questions—everything and anything.
The second list that I want you to make is a list of all the different questions that they’re not asking you that you feel that they should. Let’s say you have a pool business, whether you’re installing pools or cleaning pools—there are so many different questions around that business. You could make a list of hundreds of different questions—get those lists.
I also really want you to look a little bit outside the box of are there some things that they’re not asking you that they should be asking? So get all of these different questions on a sheet.
If you have a team, send that over to your team and ask them to add some questions. Because your team is gonna have some questions that you didn’t think of. There are lots of different ways to make those lists and just gather anything and everything onto that list.
CHOOSE THE MEDIUM OF CONTENT
Then what I’m going to want you to do is to figure out what is the medium of content that you’re most comfortable in. That’s the key here. Because what I’ve been finding is that some people are just not comfortable making videos or recording audios. Rather than you overthinking things rather than this turning into a whole production, I want you to just look at what are you most comfortable with doing. Is it a text, a video, or audio? And I just want you to start to pick a question today and you’re going to answer it on whatever medium you’re most comfortable in.
You could answer it on your Facebook page, copy and paste that, put it on your website and build out your FAQ page across your website. If you think you’re good at video, or you enjoy making videos, start with that and then get the other mediums of content out of it. Get a transcribe—now you have audio. You could take all those video assets and move them down the funnel, the audio, the transcriptions, or text.
However, if you’re not great at videos, I don’t want to pigeonhole you and have you start to really overthink this. The whole goal is to turn up the amount of education that you’re currently doing with all of your prospects and customers. You need to be educating them each and every single day.
CHOOSE HOW TO PROMOTE THE CONTENT
The next step I want you to look at is there a way or a tactic that you can use that’s a little bit more formal where you can gather all of these different people and educate them on a particular topic.
Let’s stick with the pool as an example. Could you do a webinar? Could you do a Facebook Live? Could you do live-tweeting? Think of ways where once a month for an hour, you’re going to give them some really good content on one particular topic. That topic is then going to get chopped up into little bits and pieces and you’re going to get that content out to the universe.
The whole play here is that I want you to stay top of mind that you and your business are the main and the only choice. And one of the best ways that I found to do that is by giving out the education—by way of text, audio, video, imagery, white papers, webinars, blog posts, social media content, or whatever you are again most comfortable with, and you and your team have the capacity to execute. That again is the key—I don’t want this to be a massive process that gets again over thought and it just ends up, never coming to fruition.
Pick the method that you’re best at and execute it. Now more than ever, you need to be over-educating all of your prospects and customers. Get out there, take some action, and start educating.
