Education-based marketing is when you spend more time educating rather than selling. Most small businesses do it backwards. They try to sell first and then educate second.
People love to buy. We all love to purchase things.
But nobody likes to be sold or pressured into making a buying decision. We all hate sales pitches. But we all love to get the best value for our money.
We’d much rather make the buying decision ourselves and that’s the whole premise of education-based marketing. If you give your prospects enough information, they will eventually buy from you…because people like to buy from those they trust.
When you educate a prospect, you build this trust. As a small business owner or someone in sales, you’ve got to mimic the Consumer Reports magazine.
Consumer Reports has been published since 1936. It shares reviews and comparisons of various products and services. It has its own in-house testing laboratory and survey research center. It’s totally educational and unbiased.
What I really like about Consumer Reports is that it is well-known for its policies on editorial independence, which it says are to “maintain our independence and impartiality... [so that] Consumers Union has no agenda other than the interests of consumers” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports).
That’s the approach you should take when marketing. I am not saying you should only educate your prospects. You could educate them to death and never make a dime.
What I am saying is that you should educate and then give them irresistible offers to buy more. Education naturally leads to sales.