Promote and Profit with Education-Based Marketing

  • 1 min read


Consumers today are savvy when it comes to spending their money. No longer do they fall for traditional marketing tactics. Instead they are researching, getting referrals and vetting businesses before buying goods and services. But marketers can be savvy, too, by shifting their focus on sales and instead building trust and rapport through education-based marketing.

Education-based marketing provides information in lieu of a sales pitch. The prospect gains information that can help him make an informed decision, as well as generate positive feelings about buying or hiring you because you gave them something for free. For example, if you’re a copywriter, you can give a list of copywriting mistakes to avoid. A web designer might provide a tip sheet to understanding fonts.

Here are tips to creating education-based marketing materials:

1. Determine what you want to teach by inventorying the most common questions prospects ask. Go through emails and comments on your blog or social media to find out what people want to know about your product, service or industry.

2. Create materials that deliver your message.  This can be long like a report or short such as tips that appear on the back of your business card. You can write articles and conduct seminars. The key to a successful educational message is that you give something of value that doesn’t require a purchase. This isn’t the time to sell your service or wares, so avoid including a pitch.

3. Share your message freely. Post your message on your blog, send to your newsletter, and get it out to where your market can see it.

4. Nurture the relationship. Once you’ve provided some education, you can follow up finding out if the prospect has more questions. Depending on how you’ve set up your message, you can follow up with more educational information. For example, you can use an email autoresponder to deliver more tips.

Consumers prefer to do business with companies they know, trust and feel like cares about them. You can generate that kind of relationship through educational-based marketing.

Picture of Leslie Truex

Leslie Truex

Leslie Truex is a career design expert who has been helping people find or create work that fits their lifestyle goals since 1998 through her website Work-At-Home Success. She is the author of “The Work-At-Home Success Bible” and “Jobs Online: How To Find a Get Hired to a Work-At-Home Job”. She's appeared on CNN.com, Fox Business, Redbook and a host of other media outlets discussing telecommuting, home business and other flexible career option. She speaks regularly on career-related topics, including telecommuting, home business, marketing, personal development and authorship. Learn more about her at LeslieTruex.com.

TRENDING AROUND THE WEB

There’s a particular loneliness that comes from being the person who notices everything in a room full of people who notice nothing, and most of us learned to stop mentioning it before we turned twenty

There’s a particular loneliness that comes from being the person who notices everything in a room full of people who notice nothing, and most of us learned to stop mentioning it before we turned twenty

The Blog Herald
Research suggests the happiest people in midlife aren’t the ones who finally found themselves — they’re the ones who stopped outsourcing the question of who they were to the people around them

Research suggests the happiest people in midlife aren’t the ones who finally found themselves — they’re the ones who stopped outsourcing the question of who they were to the people around them

The Vessel
Research suggests the happiest people in midlife aren’t the ones who finally found themselves — they’re the ones who stopped outsourcing the question of who they were to the people around them

Research suggests the happiest people in midlife aren’t the ones who finally found themselves — they’re the ones who stopped outsourcing the question of who they were to the people around them

The Vessel
8 signs someone has a truly difficult personality hiding underneath a perfectly reasonable first impression, says psychology

8 signs someone has a truly difficult personality hiding underneath a perfectly reasonable first impression, says psychology

The Vessel
People who bounce back from difficulty with genuine strength almost always trace it back to these 7 habits they were quietly building in the ordinary moments of their lives long before anything hard enough arrived to make those habits matter

People who bounce back from difficulty with genuine strength almost always trace it back to these 7 habits they were quietly building in the ordinary moments of their lives long before anything hard enough arrived to make those habits matter

The Vessel
7 conversations psychology says most adult children never have with their parents until it is too late and that take less courage than the years of silence that came before them

7 conversations psychology says most adult children never have with their parents until it is too late and that take less courage than the years of silence that came before them

The Vessel
Load more
CATEGORIES
Explore