Education: The Most Powerful Tool in a Marketer’s Kit

This article is part of a series on leveraging education as a marketing tactic:

• 5 Tips for Successful Educational Marketing
• Education: The Most Powerful Tool in a Marketer’s Kit (this post)
• How to Build an Education-Based Marketing Program

Technical audiences are notorious for being skeptical – even downright hostile – when it comes to marketing. It’s hard not to take it personally, but it’s understandable when marketing activities are usually targeted at the people who hold the purchasing budget.

End users – technical or not – can be your biggest advocates and influencers, and they’re often the?first to research vendors. Getting them on your side early is a key to success, but starting with traditional marketing tactics is a recipe for disaster. Whether you’re in B2B or B2C, one of the best ways to build trust with end users is to arm them with knowledge of the industry, insight on latest trends, and advice on solving common problems.

Build Trust by Providing Value

The concept of “building trust” is pervasive in business. In fact, it’s so widely accepted that we rarely stop to think about the “why”. So, let’s start there: The need for trust comes from the human brain’s need for "certainty," which became ingrained for survival. Like so many evolutionary traits, certainty continues to drive our behavior even though we’ve evolved past it being a life or death necessity. When we have certainty, we get a sense of stability that frees us to be innovative and excel in our jobs.

Certainty = The quality of being reliably true

What does certainty have to do with trust and marketing? I’m getting there! Trust is key in establishing certainty in social groups because it increases the predictability of our relationships. When trust exists between two people (or a person and a company), that sense of predictability generates the goodwill we need to take the relationship to the next level. Bringing us back to marketing, if your customer base is absolutely certain about your good intentions, they’ll trust you. Especially with highly skeptical personas, the trust-building process is a prerequisite before you can even consider pitching a product.

Trust = A firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something

Building trust with your customer base is a lot like building trust with your team, your partner, or even your kids. And it’s just as simple. When we do nice things for someone with no expectation of compensation or reward, that kindness engenders trust. In other words: Consistently provide value and you will gain their trust.

Value = A sense of importance, worth, or usefulness

There are multiple ways you can provide value to your customer base. If you’re like me and work at a company with a free product, then the gift of that product is an excellent way of providing value with no strings attached. But a free product by itself isn’t a silver bullet, and not every marketer is lucky enough to have that option. But what all marketers can and should provide to our customer base is valuable knowledge that helps them improve themselves and others in their circles.

In a B2B, that looks like helping your customer base get better at their current jobs or giving them knowledge or skills needed for their next job. Regardless of industry or product type, you can find success by providing educational resources that help your customers:

• Solve a problem
• Grow a new skill

Overcome the KPI Catch-22

It can be hard to produce content that shares knowledge but doesn’t directly promote your products. Not because creating the content is difficult, but because marketing (especially product marketing) is so often prioritized around lead generating activities and product evangelism. It’s a catch-22 because you’re unlikely to be successful with growth activities when your marketing team hasn’t earned customer trust. But when you’re not incentivized to do education-focused activities, you’re probably going to have trouble with your revenue-related Key Performance Indicator (KPI) attainment.

Here’s how you can overcome the KPI catch-22:

1. Map the funnel: Build a plan that demonstrates how a customer will come in through an education-focused activity and what it will take to transition them down the funnel. Perhaps that’s an email nurture program or retargeting with ads. But make sure there’s a link from your product- and brand-agnostic activities to your revenue-influencing activities. You might even insert educational activities at multiple points in the funnel to ensure you retain trust.
2. Gain allies: Identify people who can help advocate for building a trust-focused marketing plan. Depending on your company size, this group should probably include representatives from marketing, sales, and product management. But be prepared to focus on buy-in, because this group might not be experienced with this kind of marketing. Come prepared with information about what it takes to earn your audience’s trust, some examples of companies that do it well, and what kind of outcomes you’re expecting with the addition of educational activities.
3. Set education-based goals: In addition to your growth marketing and product marketing goals, think about how you can quantify the value in education-focused marketing. I like to see these as awareness and engagement goals. For awareness, that could be website traffic or event registrations. For engagement, that could be livestream attendance or joining a community forum.

TL;DR?

Education-based marketing activities can be a hard sell. But with planning and collaboration, you can drive a culture change with impacts well beyond marketing.

Demonstrate Expertise and Authority

The final component is to use this educational marketing program to demonstrate expertise and authority in your field. Obviously if you sell software, it’s probably not useful to start a YouTube series on bicycle maintenance. By communicating on topics relevant to your business, you build brand credibility that can translate to revenue. This can be done through traditional tactics like thought leadership articles, speaking engagements, ebooks/whitepapers, and webinars. You can also adopt tactics from the learning & development and developer relations fields, such as hands-on workshops, meetups, and livestreams.

Borrow techniques from other disciplines, like learning & development or DevRel.

When you provide value and demonstrate expertise, the customer journey could look like this:

1. A potential customer discovers Company X’s education content on software development best practices while they’re researching how to solve a software development problem at their company.
2. They attend a workshop from Company X, where they acquire valuable industry experience that helps them solve the problem, which in turn impresses their boss.
3. That positive experience cements Company X in their memory as a trusted advisor.
4. In the future, they’ll have other problems to solve, and Company X gets short-listed for research into commercial solutions.

Share Your Thoughts

In the next parts of this series, I'll talk through the steps to building your educational marketing program and give examples of how I've done it successfully at NGINX .

In the meanwhile, I want to hear from you! How have you successfully incorporated educational strategies into your marketing plans? Have you hit road blocks? Share your experiences and ideas in the comments!