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How to inspire buyers to take action

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Educating your prospects and buyers is essential in building familiarity with new products. While marketing communications can help build familiarity with your brand and your offerings, educational marketing provides more of a sharing, learning and bonding experience. Companies need to be proactive in providing the educational content that helps buyers make decisions, especially when products and services are new to them.

The way to do this is to first look at the product information that you currently provide for customers, and ask yourself these questions:

  • Does the information clearly describe the features and benefits of the product in an easy-to-grasp way? Too often product collateral actually buries the features in wordy text that proclaims benefits and only vaguely references the features. A well illustrated product backgrounder can be more useful than a brochure.
  • Does the information clearly show how the product can be used to achieve ROI? Here is where some real data and case histories can be very compelling. These can easily be included in a product backgrounder or white paper. You need proof to back up your marketing messages.
  • Can customers actually experience the product with a free demo or trial download? If so, is there a Quick Start guide or video tutorial available to ensure that customers can easily have a rewarding experience with the product? A technical support team or person can be invaluable here, because a customer’s ability to test the product easily and quickly can make the difference between “I’ll think about it” and “I’ll buy it.”

Getting attention and interest is one half of the marketing puzzle, but getting to the desire and action steps of the AIDA model is not as simple. Some newer versions of the communication model suggest a revision of AIDA to AIDCAS, which includes the steps of building confidence and ensuring satisfaction.

The confidence factor is what educational marketing provides. We hear a lot about content marketing today, and in less complex sales, the use of problem-solving content could support the entire sales process, if it is very consistent and useful.

But as we know, getting buy-in is more challenging for complex sales. Learning provides the interactive environment to experience your product more directly. Learning, or educational marketing, supports all the ways that customers make decisions, intellectually, emotionally and physically, thus giving customers the necessary confidence to buy.

Getting started with content

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Wordle: content metricsWhen developing your business messaging and content, start by clarifying your business goals.  Then you can align your messaging strategy with your goals to achieve your desired outcomes.

Of course, your first goal is getting visitors to read your content. Your content strategy should include plans for using benefit-laden messages and ensuring content quality. This checklist can help you get started.

Start with a needs analysis

  1. Define your target customer and their most important needs.
  2. Align your customers’ needs with content topics.
  3. Determine what keywords are appropriate for the content topics.
  4. Define a goal (desired outcome) for each page of your site.

Write and edit your content

  1. Write the topic-focused content that addresses your customers’ goals. Include a call to action.
  2. Edit and organize the content so that it’s very easy to read. Make sure you have:
  • Searchable, benefit-oriented headlines that use your target words.
  • Scannable content that provides a solution, such as tips and resources.
  • Zero jargon. Simplify your content as much as possible. Be clear and concise.
  1. Read your content out loud. People want to read content quickly, so make sure it flows.

Test readability and page load

  1. Run some simple readability tests on your content to see if you can further improve its consumability. Try this readability test at Editcentral.com. This will help you identify jargon so you can remove it.
  2. Test your page speed. If it’s not fast, you’ll lose readers. Try the free page load test at Pingdom.com. It tells you your page-load time and how fast it is compared to other tested websites. Shoot for 2 seconds or less.

Start tracking visitors

  1. Get a Google Analytics account and start tracking your web visitors. Which pages are they visiting and how long? How are they getting there? Do they sign up for offers? Once you have actionable metrics, you can refine and develop your content to meet your business goals.