Why I Believe Marketing IS Education

One of my main Spiky Points of View is that marketing is not really sales nor is it brand awareness. Of course, it can be used for both of those purposes, but its main function in the world today is education. No, this doesn’t mean marketing is the same as the teaching and learning that happens in schools and colleges. But it is about demystifying all kinds of subjects, and empowering customers to act on what they newly know.

The Foundational Principle

To believe that marketing is education, for that to logically make sense, you must first adopt another, deeper foundational premise: Most of your customers exist in the future. Put another way, most people out there in the world are not ready, willing or able to buy what you’re selling today, and maybe not tomorrow, either. That’s why we talk about filling the sales pipeline, or creating a marketing funnel. Intellectually, we know we have to draw customers through the stages of awareness, consideration, purchase and hopefully affinity. As with many things in life—in practice, it’s a bit harder.

Are Your Customers Ready, Willing & Able?

Before moving on, it’s worth parsing out those three reasons people don’t buy what you’re selling right now.

1.   First, they’re not ready.

This can be for multiple reasons, chief among them they don’t even know about you or what you’re peddling. We often call this awareness, which is synced with brand building. They don’t know your brand, your product and how buying what you’re selling can make their life that much better.

2.   Second, they’re not willing.

Beyond just not being ready, customers might not be willing to pull the trigger today. Plainly, it wouldn’t even make sense for them to own your widget at this particular point in life. Let’s say you’re selling an amazing countertop espresso machine, and your potential customer is a complete java afficionado with plenty of spending cash. But they live in a tiny apartment with absolutely zero counter space. Apartments, however, tend to be temporary. Whereas brand affinity can last a lifetime.

3.   Third, they’re not able.

Let’s stay with this coffee-loving apartment dweller future customer for a moment. Now imagine you’re a bank selling mortgages. You want this person to buy from you, too. But they can’t. Not because of lack of awareness or even interest, but because they’re not able – not yet. In this case, this future customer cannot afford what you’re selling, they’re not financially in a place to even qualify for a mortgage from you.

What changes when you think of this customer as someone who is not ready and not able to buy from you—yet? What does thinking of them in this way change about how you think about marketing to them?

The Opportunity Cost of Focusing Exclusively on the Now Customer

None of this is really new news, but many marketing organizations have amnesia about it, or else haven’t truly slowed down to empathetically understand the ramifications. For instance, if most of your customers aren’t ready to hit “buy” today, why do so many of us focus on promotions, offers, coupons and discounts – aka performance marketing? Of course, these approaches do “work,” as in more customers buy sooner than they perhaps would have naturally, but they still only slightly increase the “ready-to-buy” population. Research shared in a position paper by Australian Jonathan Dawes, published by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, specifically calls out that for B2B customers, they’re really only ready to buy about 5% of the time. To say that another way, this suggests that for some products with longer natural purchasing cycles, as much as 95% of your customer base is not going to buy from you today, no matter what you do. This means your promos might influence 5% of the total customer base, out of your total potential customers.

As companies, as marketers, we tend to focus almost exclusively on that 5%, or whatever the number is for your particular product or industry. These are your willing, able and mostly ready customers. While this research has become popularly referenced as the 95/5 rule, fixating on that exact number is an over-simplification. In fact, it was never set in stone or meant to be the point. It’s likely a fairly accurate actual percentage for many B2B companies, where purchasing cycles can routinely number years. And on the opposite end is something like groceries, which has an incredibly short purchase cycle, with many people buying perishables multiple times per week. We do have to eat every day, after all. Still, the general rule holds true across B2B, B2C and all types of products and services.

Whatever the actual ratio for your specific product or industry, the fundamental truth is this: Most of your customers exist in the future. You can think of it in similar terms to the innovation or trend adoption curve. You have your early adopters who jump right on that new trend right away, those adventurous gourmands and readers of Bon Appetit magazine who are spooning chile crisp onto vanilla ice cream right out of the gate. These brave gustatory adventurers are the tiny minority. Even now, you might be asking—what the heck is chile crisp? And why would anyone eat something called ‘chile’ with ice ceam? You, my friend, are a very late adopter. This trendy condiment that marries spicy and sweet in mouth-tingling bliss has been growing in popularity for years, if not a full decade at this point. And yet, you haven’t tried it yet, let alone purchased a jar to keep in your pantry to spoon on stir fries, scrambled eggs and so much more. Which, by the way, you totally should. Get with the times already! But the 95/5 principle is much the same. Obviously, you still want to be ready with marketing that will move the minority of ready customers to action now, but it also highlights the largely unmet needs of the vast majority of future customers. We well know what to do with customers who are ready to buy – or can be nudged into the ”ready” space. Coupons, offers, promos, even emails about sales or new products get these people to click buy now.

Educate Your Future Customers Starting Now

But what do you give to people who are super far from that crucial cart click? The answer is quite simple, if far from easy to actually execute: you give them education. Over the years, I’ve seen this called so many things – content marketing, advice and guidance, thought leadership. Those are all forms education can take, but truly they’re all pieces of the same puzzle. In fact, it illustrates the danger of not calling them all the same thing – education. When they masquerade under different names, they can easily become siloed. Content marketing becomes the handmaid of site and SEO/GEO. Advice and guidance is a particular type of educational information. Thought leadership is the purview of corporate communications and public relations. Social media is chasing “likes” and gaming ever-changing algorithms. When you call them all education, it’s easier to understand them as pieces of the same holistic puzzle, where all the seemingly disparate parts lock into place as part of a compelling big picture.

Hopefully you’re now formulating some version of this question: What education can my brand, my company, provide that will help my customers now and position them to buy from me in the future?

Let’s imagine a few specific examples. Since I worked in grocery for nearly two decades, I’ll start with food. As previously mentioned, this is actually a much more flexible and fast-moving population than for many other industries since many of us shop for groceries multiple times a week, and many perishable purchases are driven by impulse. However, many of the principles hold true even here. Entertaining is an illuminating example. Have you ever thrown a dinner party? It can be an intimidating undertaking, as well as expensive. But it doesn’t have to be. A grocery store that also sells wine, beer and spirits, as well as flowers and balloons, is uniquely positioned to educate and inspire its audience to host a sparkling get-together.

Understanding that you’re likely talking to hosts of the future who are not quite ready today, you’ll formulate an educational marketing plan to guide them to their destiny as a consummate party planner. To start, you might offer an article in your magazine with a simple plan for an easy dinner party, then amplify that anchor content with social media posts, including a video of the crockpot main course recipe. Then perhaps you’ll interview your sommeliers and cheesemongers for a series of how-to emails targeted to customers most engaged in these categories. Wine-and-cheese tasting party, anyone?

If you’re an architecture firm focused on building new schools and libraries, your education offering will look much different. Perhaps you publish a case study on your site that focuses on how most education clients secure funding for major building or renovation projects. Then you link to your anchor content from a series of social media posts highlighting the funding wins that have made recent public school projects possible – either your own or even examples from other firms and other cities.  You encourage your leaders to post about their expertise with securing necessary funding on LinkedIn, resulting in these architects being featured as experts in industry news.

In banking, the potential for financial literacy education is massive. The paycheck-to-paycheck customers of today can become lucrative multi-product customers of tomorrow – with the right education and support to get them there in due time.

Tap into Your Expertise

You are the expert in your vertical or industry, and by putting yourself in your customers’ shoes you can uncover the specific education they are craving for today, tomorrow and into their brighter future.

Perhaps these examples are sparking ideas for you, and also illustrating the absolute crucial importance of your brand in bringing this type of education to life. We tend to build brands with shiny veneers that guide how you want to come across in quick soundbites, commercials, radio spots and paid media. Even the most comprehensive brand guide tends to be shallow, offering a “LTF,” or “look-tone-feel” shorthand, as one company I’ve worked for named it. By its nature, education goes much deeper than that surface level. It’s an exciting space, where you can deeply inhabit your brand and bring it to life for future customers in authentic, human ways.

If you truly believe that marketing is education and become serious about bringing that ethos into being, you’ll need to focus on inviting real humans into the content you create and publish. These are your brilliant subject matter experts, hiding in plain sight within every company. We’ll dive more into this topic later in the SPOV series.

Cacti are a handy metaphor for all these prickly positions…

Spiky Questions

For now, I’ll leave you with a few key questions:

• In what ways is your marketing already education?

• What is one campaign you could try next that leans into educating future customers?

• Where do you see other brands and companies offering education?

• What changes for you as you consider the 95/5 rule as it pertains to your particular industry and company?

Want More Pricklies? Check out my full list of Spiky POVs.

Looking for quick-win ideas for turning your SMEs into content gold? Start here.

Loving the Liminal

It can be hard to find pleasure in those strange in-between spaces, when you’re feeling stuck between here and there, where you are and where you want to be. But those transitional places are doorways, too, openings to what’s next. In the Cynefin sense-making framework, there are liminal spaces between the four quadrants: clear, complicated, complex and chaos. The tension inherent in the imagined lines separating these areas is fertile ground for innovation, for significant change and meaningful revelations. I’m finding hope in that idea on a personal level, too, in the idea of leaning into the discomfort of navigating a transition because of the potential of what might await on the other side.

My friend, the liminal lobster.