Why Teaching is the New Marketing

It is REALLY hard to jump into the mindset to persuade someone to buy from you. First off, you have to have mind-blowing powers of conviction. And second, you really have to believe that your solution is the best thing since sliced bread.

And THEN you have to talk about your product constantly and how great it is. And in doing all of this, you are making “the product” the whole focus of your marketing. Wait shouldn’t your customer be the focus of your marketing? A-ha!

But thankfully, today, you don’t really need to be so persuasive, you just need one thing: to show your mad skills. In this video we’ll talk about why teaching is the new marketing and I’m also going to show you how to use something called the “Halo Effect” to your advantage. Trust me this is gonna be goooooood!

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Okay, so now it’s YOUR turn. In the comments below I want you to tell me what is the ONE thing that you could teach your audience to invoke the Halo Effect?

VIDEO SCRIPT

The Fear Around Self-Promotion

In traditional advertising, the sole purpose of marketing is to persuade someone to buy from you. In fact, the advertising mantra went something like this:

“Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art”

-William Bernbach (popular ad-man of the 60s and 70s)

Two Products With Similar Benefits, Marketed Differently

The first example is of a face cream ad which claims to reduce under-eye wrinkles. The ad copy is purely persuasive and attempts to get you to purchase immediately.

The second example is from a YouTube video that first teaches what causes under-eye dark circles and wrinkles, then gives you natural, organic solutions to the problem and then drops a link to it’s product in the description box below.

So here’s what we just learned:

When you are marketing solely to persuade someone to buy from you, you are concentrating on creating a customer. And perhaps you’ll succeed too.

When you teach someone a new skill, you are creating a loyal, raving fan.

How Does “Teach Marketing” Work?

1.First of all, teaching helps you become a giver rather a taker. Instead of pushing your product, you give information that will benefit your audience.

2. Teaching helps develop trust. How? Because teaching positions you as an expert. It’s real easy to trust someone who’s helping to educate and empower you. And people love to buy from authority figures.

3. Teaching gives you the opportunity to tell stories that relate to your business. And people retain stories more than product info. So in other words, the information you provide supports the products that you sell.

Who’s Using “Teach Marketing” Effectively?

Now, there’s a whole range of companies that are using “teach marketing” to their massive advantage. Companies like HubSpot or Marketo which exist to raise the collective tide of marketers. But I want to talk about two entrepreneurs who’re using the same principles in their business.

Michelle Dale is the owner of Virtual Miss Friday, a virtual assistant (VA) firm providing administrative, marketing and creative services to clients. Today, Michele regards herself as “VA thought leader” by educating and helping other VAs build a 5-figure business though her online courses and digital products.

Or take the example of Debbie Hodge who runs a scrapbooking blog called “Get it Scrapped” that makes her a full-time income. She does this by teaching scrapbooking though a membership site with a nominal fee.

I love how John Jantsch phrases this phenomenon:

“I’m not simply suggesting that you demonstrate your expertise. I’m talking about going to the point where you show someone, anyone, precisely how you do what you do.”

Now some insecure people will assume that if they teach someone how to do something, then they’ll expose all their trade secrets and no one will need to buy from them because they’ll learn how to do stuff by themselves, In fact, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

How “Teach Marketing” actually works is that it helps your customers self-select themselves. There will be some folks who’ll always prefer free and those people were never going to buy from you anyways. However there are other people who just want to purchase from someone who knows what they’re talking about. They need the reassurance that this person is legit. And there’s no better way to showcase your expertise than by teaching others.

How Does Teaching Invoke the “Halo Effect”?

The Halo Effect is a popular study in psychology. It essentially means that when a consumer has a favourable interaction with one aspect or one product of your company, that goodwill tends to carry over to the rest of the company’s product line as well.

So what does this mean for you?

It means that you can use the Halo Effect to generate goodwill by teaching people something related to your business. And if they love what they’re learning from you, then they’ll probably sign up to learn even more from you and eventually purchase your products and upsets. I see this working for my own courses, where I currently have one online course and people write in to me asking when I’m going to create my next course. So essentially, the people who learn from you become your customers for life and you get a HALO.

So there you have it. Instead of learning icky persuasion tactics, teach what you know. Isn’t this kind of marketing a whole lot simpler and lot more rewarding too?

I want to know in the comments below what you can start to teach about your work today to your current customers. Identify one area that your customers would like to learn from you and then go deliver them that information and sit back and watch the praise and goodwill roll in 😉

As always, if you enjoyed this episode, won’t you subscribe to my youtube channel and if you wanna go a little deeper, you can go ahead and sign up to receive email updates from me. See you next week on #CMtips

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