Education as Marketing

One of the best ways to market your product or service is through education.

NO, I’m not talking about educating people on how to use your product or service….that’s a sales pitch and people get skeptical when you’re trying to sell them (for good reason).

I’m talking about teaching people how to improve their lives/businesses/looks/etc in general.  If you sell the world’s greatest lip gloss, then you should be teaching a free class on makeup selection, application and cleaning.  To as many people as possible, as often as possible.  I don’t care if there are 5 or 500 people in the room….it’s worth it.

Here’s why this works:

1. You meet face-to-face with your target customers on a regular basis.  You WILL learn about them…what inspires them to buy, what scares them, and completely new ideas that you would have never thought of behind a computer.
2. You build trust and credibility.  Anyone that has ever taken the time to teach me something useful has about a 9000% better chance of selling me their product or service down the road.
3. Influencers are in every audience.  Again…it doesn’t matter if there are 5 people or 500 people in your “class”….you will often hear from one of them afterwords with something like “I’m in a group that would love to hear you teach again” or “I run a blog dealing with….” or “My brother in-law is the lead buyer for Target….”
4. It’s fun.
5. It’s extremely cost effective and can be used to see places you’d never otherwise see, with a tax writeoff.

Build your brand by building your audience.

Make your audience smarter.

Listen to your audience and make your company smarter.

Win.