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Creating Marketing Materials
Education Over Selling Rules the Day
John Jantsch | February 20th, 2009 - 09:41 AM
(25) Found this useful. Do you?
Hopefully, by now you’ve concluded that today’s marketing requires lots of content, lots of education, and lots of trust-building via expertise sharing.
The tri-fold brochure just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Today’s smart marketers think in terms of information products more than marketing collateral — education over selling rules the day.
The best way to tap this necessary marketing shift is to think in terms of kits or suites of information. The most practical approach for the typical small business is the creation of on-demand, flexible and personal marketing kits, press kits and new customer kits.
These multiple page-documents, often housed in a pocket of a custom file folder, allow small business marketers to tell the entire story in a range of formats that take in the learning styles and personalities of a broad range of prospects.
A typical marketing kit might include the following pages:
- Your core differences: Use one page to outline 3 or 4 key ways that your organization is different. Make these the most important value benefits and not sales mumbo jumbo.
- Your products/services: You do need to tell your audience what it is you have to offer.
- Success stories: Profile a number of successful customer engagements and try to involve your customer as much as possible and share specific results if you can.
- FAQs: You know the kinds of questions that get asked or should get asked — list them for those readers that are looking for a specific bit of information.
- Processes and checklists: Show proof of how you get the work done in a professional manner by sharing your process maps and checklists as marketing documents.
- Your company story: Everyone loves a good story and everybody has one. Share your personal story, why you do what you do, and make a deeper connection with prospects.
- Testimonials: Let your customers sing your praises and let your prospects see this third-party validation.
- Articles: If you’ve published articles or received some great press, include copies of these in your kit.
A new customer kit can include information on:
- Key contacts: List everyone that your customer might need to contact.
- How your process works: Set the expectation for what will happen next so that there are no surprises.
- What you need from the customer: If you need information from a customer or need to set a meeting, let them know what to do to get started.
- How your billing works: Let them know how your billing works, how you expect to be paid. This demonstrates your professionalism and can help avoid misunderstanding after the work is done.
A basic press kit should include:
- Overview: This should be solid background information, not a sales pitch.
- Key staff bios: Let journalists know the key facts about people in your organization that they may need to interview ( with photos).
- Suggested questions: In some cases if you are noted expert, author or inventor or a unique process you can aid journalists by listing important questions.
- Potential story ideas: You should be thinking of these at all times internally, but you may also want to develop some key story ideas that tie into themes and industry trends.
- Customer stories: Journalists love success stories, so profiling your customers and offering their success stories to journalists can be a win for all parties.
The flexible nature of these kinds of information products make them easy to change, grow and personalize almost on a case by case basis.
In addition, this is exactly the type of education-based content that should be going on your website in an effort to build visitor trust and search engine attention.
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[...] is to serve your customers and educate them on your area of expertise. Read John Jantsch’s tips for creating marketing materials that emphasize education rather than a sales pitch and apply those principles to your blog posts. These posts represent your [...]
I love the fact that selling the old school way is dead.
Haven’t we always wanted more information without the sales pitch.
For a radical right brained person, I can finally stomach business development again.
Way to go John!
I think it is not business so much but marketers that are still holding on to the old methods of marketing. Being authentic and transparent, the new way, requires a real stretch for most. Giving the customer a lot of control.
Real business, real people, real products. If you can get that across, I think it beats Gates and Seinfeld!
There is so much benefit to educating customers and being consistent in your efforts to do so. Being there for your customers when they are in need. Your future clients will get a chance to know you, like you and trust you and in doing so go through a very important part of the buying cycle. This is also a very good way to position yourself in the industry as an expert. When you can establish your expertise in a certain field, your ideal customer will seek you out and you will be able to stop competing on price.
What I love about the education-based approach is that it removes the “yuck” factor from the sales process. It’s a much easier approach for small business owners who are uncomfortable with sales and marketing.
Marketing is about preparing a qualified prospect to make a good decision about a marketer’s product or service. That’s no small task. Certainly, as John points out, it’s not something that a mere tri-fold brochure can do nor, should it be expected to do all by itself.
Consumers require information to make an informed decision about a product or service. Failure to provide that — as a precursor to the decision to buy or not — fosters neither a professional selling environment nor a quality experience for the prospective customer.
John is correct. The means of educating prospective consumers have changed and smart marketers will, if they haven’t already, make those changes a part of their everyday marketing efforts.
I like your concept of flexible educational information packaged in kits. Having worked with both engineers and healthcare personnel, I’ve found that the “trust meter” goes up when engineers can migrate to technical data or FAQs whereas healthcare personnel prefer to learn the opinions of peers in testimonials and success stories. John, thanks for reminding me that we all learn and process data differently!
I like that you start with “Your core differences” I always assume that your audience will likely only take away 1 “resonator” so it’s smart to start with it!
Great post. keep ‘em coming!
[...] out my first article – Education over Selling Rules the Day. Make sure to leave comments and say [...]
[...] out my first article – Education over Selling Rules the Day. Make sure to leave comments and say [...]
Great information that underscores the fact that business as usual just doesn’t cut it in today’s market place. This was an excellent post in that you’ve spoken the complete truth and empowered each reader with what is needed in a kit. Thanks!
I agree that the tri-fold brochure has lost its place in the marketing materials line-up; I’m not sure however that the small business owner is ready to produce (or have produced) the number of information sheets that you talk about. (Yes they should hire professionals to produce the material but typically small business owners are pretty independent and cost conscious and want to do it themselves – then the business gets in the way, then the marketing materials are left undone or incomplete.)
But Kris – they just have to, it’s become the expectation, don’t do it and get ready to compete on price, do it and get ready to charge a premium for your services.
[...] press release is different from a press kit (see John Jantsch’s great tips on creating press kits and other marketing materials). You can think of a press kit as being about [...]
A humanized approach to “educating” rather than straight “selling” is indeed refreshing. Thanks for the great post!
It’s new I think; but I like http://saleseverything.ning.com/
it says that educating is closing.
[...] Don’t sell. Instead, educate — John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing explains how you can use marketing materials to educate your customers and build trust. [...]
[...] Don’t sell. Instead, educate — John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing explains how you can use marketing materials to educate your customers and build trust. [...]
You made some very good points. Providing more options for the distribution of information is the key. That’s why you can buy an information product and receive the PDF, MP3, and AVI version of the same product. When small businesses learn to advertising their products in such a way they can increase their sales.