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In this episode I'm going to be sharing what I believe is the most effective marketing strategy ever. What it is? Why it works so well? and most importantly, How you can use it in your business? Let's get to it Hey there my name is Adam Erhart, modern marketing strategist and welcome to The Modern Marketing Show, where we help you grow your business by generating more leads, sales and customers. So if you're interested in learning the latest and greatest marketing strategies, tools, tips, tricks and tactics, well you may want to consider subscribing and hitting that notification bell. When it comes to marketing strategies, there's no shortage available, you can do this, you can do that, you can do both, you can do everything, you could do nothing, like many people do, sadly. But time and time again, there's one underlying strategy that's just proven incredibly valuable and is really heralded by some of the top names in the industry and has been that way for decades. It's a strategy that I use to build my very first six-figure business back in the day and it's a strategy that I've used on every single business since then. It's also a strategy I'm using right now and it's a strategy I highly recommend that you use and deploy across any business venture you ever come across. It's just that effective. But before we dive into exactly what it is and the specifics behind it, first a little bit of foundational and marketing principles here. At any given time there's a very small percentage of your ideal target market who are ready, willing and able to buy from you. Basically, of all the people that you really want to sell to, well there's only a very small percentage of them who want what you have, have the money to pay for it and are actively seeking the solution to their problem right now. Now, depending on what statistic you read or where you get your information, this number can be as small as 2% or as high as 10% or anywhere in between, but regardless of whether we're talking about 2% or 10%, that's a pretty small number. So, what strategy is going to enable you to capture the 2% to 10%, who are ready willing and able to buy right now, while also still reaching the 90% or 98%, again, depending on the statistic, of those people who aren't willing to buy right now but who maybe at some point in the future and how can you reach them in a way that builds trust and goodwill and positions you as the authority and go-to expert in your industry. Well, the answer to that my friend and the strategy that I believe is probably the single most of have one available today is: Education based marketing. The reality is is that with an education based marketing strategy you're going to sell a lot more products and a lot more services and basically do a lot more business then you would otherwise if you're just trying to sell right off the bat. Alright, so what exactly is education based marketing. Well, essentially the name kinda says exactly what it is it's: marketing that focuses on educating or informing or in some way entertaining your target market with content. Basically, with education based marketing you're giving value in advance. So, you're going out there and rather than simply pitching or trying to make a sale which can come off as kind of cold aggressive or sleazy, depending on how you do it, well rather than that you're leading first with value. Now, when it comes to education based marketing, EBM for short, well there's a number of different strategies and styles available that are going to depend on you and your style, your business and your customers preferred form of content. You can use video, like we're doing here and you can put that video on YouTube or Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn, you can use audio and maybe to a podcast, of course there's good old-fashioned text which you can use in a blog or on your website or through different social media sites and there's even image based education based marketing. Oh that's a mouthful. Basically, you could create an infographic or some kind of visual depiction or explanation of what you do or how your service helps. Regardless though of what style you choose, the important thing to remember is that you choose one and that you start to create content that educates and informs your target market. So why does education based marketing work? and most importantly, why does it work so well? Well, there's a nifty thing that happens when we take this position and essentially when we take on the role of a teacher or someone who's educating or helping or providing value. Well our market can't help, but to see us as the authority and as an expert on the subject. All of which I'm pretty sure you can agree, are good for business. You see, we tend to respect people that teach us things. This has kind of been baked into our society since very early times when we're told to sit in class and be quiet and do what the teacher says. But aside from just the social constraints, we also do respect people that teach us things because they help us, right, by giving us information and giving us knowledge and training us and that, they helped us to succeed, which is why we respect authorities that teach us things. Also by providing education based marketing it kind of hits on the know like and trust factors all at once by providing that level of care and attention and info. But perhaps the single most important reason of all and the reason that I believe that education based marketing is just so incredibly effective, is that because it proves that you can help people by actually helping them. You see, rather than just standing out there cold and making a pitch or making a claim and saying hey we're the best and we're the greatest and come do business with us because we're so good - and that was a terrible sales pitch- Well, rather than doing that, when you use education based marketing, you're actually helping them and showing that not only do you know what you're doing, well you know what you're doing enough to be able to help them do it. So, you teach them something ideally, something that they can use and implement and get an immediate win from, which only further proves that you're the right person for the job. This means whether they're looking for something right now or whether they're just interested and might be looking to buy some time in the future, well you're gonna become the clear and obvious choice for the job. Now, you can add to this the fact that education based marketing destroys obliterates and completely banishes any sense of neediness or desperation or anything like that which totally kills your chances of making a sale. After all, when it comes to sales and marketing, one of the least attractive traits is neediness, but by deploying an education based strategy, well, it gets rid of that because you're basically saying: "look, don't really need you, here I'm just trying to provide as much value as possible. If, on the other hand, you want to do business with us, that's cool and we can talk later". On the other hand, if you come out and just make offer and pitch and try to get the sale as much as possible, well you look needy and desperate and you can't hide it, everyone can tell and it kills your chances of success. So, don't do that. Alright, so how do you use education based marketing in your business? Well, it's my firm belief that the vast majority, if not all of your marketing, should be education based. This even includes your ads or the times that you're blatantly making an offer, which is totally cool, you have to make offers, but you can wrap them up in a way that actually provides value to your target market. I can almost remember the exact day that this all clicked for me, because it was the day that we went from getting our clients good results to absolutely amazing and essentially, the only shift that we really did was seek to make every single ad that we created provide value and educate alongside making the sale. Not only did our short-term sales spiked but the clients long-term sales only continue to grow as well and all because of this simple shift that really just meant providing more value answering objections, helping solve problems and giving everything that we could in advance by positioning the client as the expert and really making them the obvious and clear choice for the job. Now, one of the most common objections to using an education based marketing approach is that "hey Adam, I don't want to give away all my secrets" "I don't want to tell everyone how to do everything because then they'll just go do it themselves" to which I say: what you can do here is you can teach the What and the Why and not the How. What I mean here is what you do and what it's all about, why it's important and why they should care but not necessarily the How and How to do every single intricate detail, after all that is what your business is for. Now, the catch to this is that there is two types of different people: the type of person that's going to want to do it all themselves and the type of person that's going to want to hire you and really the type of person that's gonna do it all themselves, well by teaching them how to do it you're really, again, just helping yourself by positioning you as the expert and they probably weren't gonna hire you anyway. But by showing the How and teaching them how to do that, well you do tend to attract the person who's really has no interest of doing themselves at all and then they're gonna see you as more of that expert and more of the authority. Alright, so now let me share how this might play out in a business-to-business or B2B type business, as well as a business to consumer or B2C business. First up is the business-to-business or B2B business. This is a business whose customers are other businesses. So we need to tailor our education based marketing strategy ingly. First off the purchase price, decision making time and length of the relationship all tend to be a lot higher, so we really need to step up our education based marketing content game. Fortunately, this strategy pays off and is well worth the effort because when we're talking about a B2B business, well we're not selling a pack of gum or a deck of playing cards or a t-shirt or anything like that we might be selling agency services or really expensive enterprise software or something that could cost tens of thousands hundreds of thousands maybe even millions of dollars over the client relationship. So, it's clearly worth the extra effort here. Now, when it comes to a B2B, education based marketing strategy, you want to make sure that your strategy covers all facets of your business and leaves no stone unturned, most importantly, don't be afraid to dive into the technical and logistical and all the rationale sides of your business and why this is going to be important. Also, depending on the nature of the industry, you're probably also going to want to prepare some more traditional forms of education based marketing content, like white papers or case studies or real-world results of some of the things that your business was able to achieve for prior clients. Alright, so now let's contrast that with a B2C or business-to-consumer. Business seeing as a business to consumer business is selling directly to the consumer and typically at a much lower price point with a much shorter decision time and typically in a more transactional opposed to a more relational way, you're gonna want to do things a little differently here. In this case, you want to make sure that your education based marketing strategy focuses more on the emotional side and less on the logical side. Sure you can still touch on a few of the features and some of the stuff around it but again you really want to be benefit driven here and really focus on that emotional side that end state that your business is going to help the consumer get to by purchasing your product or your service. Also, keep in mind that with B2B you're going to be trying to reach and market to a much smaller number of people. So your marketing can be a lot more tailored and a lot more specific. With B2C on the other hand, you're going to have a more broad or mass-market appeal, so you've got to make sure that depending on the targeting or the media choices that you're using, well, you've got to make sure that you keep your brand accessible and appealing to those that you're trying to reach. That said, thanks to some of the targeting features we now have available with many of the online advertising platforms, we really actually can focus and narrow down our message so we can appeal to very specific segments of our market kind of one at a time making it seem just that much more tailored and customized and specific and therefore a lot more profitable. Also, in B2B we talked about using more traditional tools like case studies and whitepapers and articles and things like that. Well, with B2C you can afford to get a little more creative and you definitely want to leverage the online tools we have available, including different video ads and different online pay-per-click ads and all of the social media targeting and features available which are only continuing to get better and better every single day. Regardless though of whether your B2B or B2C, using education based marketing as the key underlying strategy is just a phenomenal tool to help really increase your ROI, both in the short term and the long term. Alright, the next thing you're going to want to do is take a look at the video I´ve linked up right here when it's released next week. It's the next part of our B2B vs. B2C series. So, make sure to check back for that video. Thanks so much for watching and I'll catch you next time on The Modern Marketing Show. So, why do the brand awareness camp and the lead generation camp why don't they get along? and what is it about brand awareness that the lead jenner's just don't like. Well, first...