Is Teaching the New Marketing?

When marketing is helpful, it changes the dynamic of your relationship with a customer. Instead of saying, “buy this,” you are encouraging them to “learn this.” It is a big difference and may be one of the coming trends in marketing in the next few years. When marketers help, train and educate, customers suddenly pay attention.

Is Teaching the New Marketing?

From webinars to online classes, there are multiple tactics that can be deployed by clever marketers in both B2B and B2C to help grow awareness and help new and potential customers solve problems.

Take Counter Culture Coffee based in Durham, North Carolina. These coffeepreneurs use education and classes to teach retailers how to make coffee properly. From learning about the right equipment to the proper way to store unground beans, to the right brew time for different varieties, this growing business is creatively using education to different themselves from other specialty roasters. They even have classes for consumers too who want to learn how to taste coffee, just as you might taste wine in a tasting room.

CCC has invested in regional training centers to help educate and teach what they know about coffee. As a marketing platform, it allows them to build a community of trained coffee drinkers. It is permission based, it is human and personal and most of all – it is helpful.

Dripping with Lessons

What could your business takeaway from Counter Culture Coffee and their marketing initiatives?

Could you put together local, regional or national training on your area of expertise?
Is it possible to leverage the power of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) like Udemy and Lynda to teach and train customers or users of your product?
How can learning become front and center to your marketing investments so that instead of advertising – you are educating, training and teaching people about meaningful differences between products or services that will be beneficial to the end user?
What happens when you become seen as a thought leader or educator to your target? Does it change the way you sell because your salespeople become educators? Do you get past the guards who don’t want to buy from you – but may want to learn?
Advertising is a weak way to build community. Educating customers is like glue, bonding together interested members.
Could educational seminars get under the radar of potential customers who would never attend a sales pitch but might spend an hour learning something that could be helpful to them?
Could your educational class or seminar be taught by someone outside of your company? Maybe you hire an industry expert, and your company is the sponsor of the free educational event. You get closer to your target and add value to becoming a partner or customer.
Can you take live classes or training you already teach and find a creative way to develop an online educational platform? How can you scale your current training through Google Hangouts, Webinars or Blabs?

Simple Suggestions for Success

Try this: sign up for classes offered by someone outside of your industry whose focus is to help you solve a problem. Take an online class to learn how to do repairs around the house, or how to cook a great dinner for your significant other on Saturday night. Maybe sign up for a webinar or in-person class teaching coding or how to build a website.

As you go through the class, see if you could find ways of transferring the approach to your business. Sometimes through a first-hand experience in another category, you realize an opportunity to help you get closer to your current and new customers.