Board logo

subject: Educate For Better Marketing Results [print this page]


Education based marketing, EBM, is another aspect of inbound marketing. There are two classes of marketing:

Sales based marketing, in which you take the role of a salesperson and deliver a sales message.

Education based marketing, where you take the role of an expert or educator to help prospects understand their problems and the solutions to them.

Sales based marketing is based on a sales pitch or selling message. It is used to help a salesperson reach out to prospective customers, such as cold calling, telephone solicitation, and direct mail, .

These kinds of activities today are called interruption marketing. We are inundated with Emails, television commercials, junk mail, and telephone solicitors. There is so much noise generated by sales based activities that the average prospect no longer listens. My personal method when watching my favorite hockey team is the mute button. I just dont listen. I also use SPAM blockers, junk mail folders and any other method I can to cut down the volume.

So how do you get through the massive amount of noise being generated by millions of companies and directed at your prospect?

Simply put you dont. Even if a prospect likes your product and your message most wont take the time to sift through the pile to see whats worth looking at.

Most prospects today dont look or read much of anything sent to them, if they have a need or want they do an Internet search, find the product or service they are interested in and learn about it.

What do they learn? In a word everything. They can find shopping services that compare features and price. They can find consumer driven quality reviews. They can study head-to-head comparisons between competitors.

For example is there a more sales driven industry than auto sales? How do the majority or people buy a car today? Speaking for myself, I research what I want on-line. I go to Kelly Blue book and price the vehicle with the options I want and print the summary. I then use Kelly again to get a realistic value for my trade and print that. I go to the dealer armed with my information knowing what I want, what it will cost me and what I am willing to pay. The traditional back room haggling is eliminated, if it starts in that direction I get up to leave. The last three vehicles weve purchased no one has allowed me to walk out the door. I got my deal because I educated myself.

So education based marketing simply put is educating your customs that you understand their wants or needs, and that your solution is the beat value for their money. Better marketing results today mean getting your message heard because prospects seek you out as a subject matter expert.

We need to acknowledge the fact that marketing has changed. They are going to look for the information somewhere, its readily available, how much can you gain if they get it from you?

I have an entire chapter in my book, Bottom Line Focus on education for better marketing results.

by: Martin Harshberger, President, Measurable Results LLC




welcome to loan (http://www.yloan.com/) Powered by Discuz! 5.5.0