One of the primary reasons for the decline of traditional advertising lies in the way the Internet era has affected the consumer. Buyers today prefer to receive information about products and services on their own terms rather than from biased paid advertisements that nobody really pays attention to anymore.

When you seek to educate your prospects you assume the role of a trusted adviser. You bring value to the table by educating your prospects about issues that they may not even be aware of. You help guide them out of a state of confusion and uncertainty, and lead them to clarity and understanding.

What’s the point to all this, you might ask? By replacing confusion with clarity, you’re going to outshine and outsell your competitors simply because a confused mind never buys.

Education-Based Marketing Tactics
Build a responsive educational funnel for your prospects that caters to the specific types of information that they need at any given time. Create separate content that address the specific questions and issues that your prospects are raising. Your content might take the form of:

• A series of emails delivered over a set period of time via your autoresponder.
• White papers that examine case studies and challenges that your company has successfully addressed.
• Downloadable e-books that provide in-depth information and how-to tips about specific topics and areas of interest.
• E-newsletters that can be sent to your list of prospects on a monthly basis.
• E-courses built around topics of interest and delivered on auto-pilot over a period of several days or even weeks if you prefer.
• Webinars that allow you to conduct an educational outreach to many prospects at the same time.

Why Education-Based Marketing Works
People rarely buy from someone that they don’t like or trust; this is as true today as it was 100 years ago. You create that comfortable feeling in the mind of your prospect by building genuine rapport, and I’m not talking about a lame ice-breaker type of comment along the lines of “How about those Red Sox?”

The only kind of rapport that really matters is the kind where you put your prospect’s needs above your own, dig deep to uncover the important needs and issues, and provide appropriate solutions.

Resorting to the old-school methods of hard-ball pitching your product or service lowers your standing to that of your hard-sell competitors and usually destroys whatever rapport you had with the prospect. By leading with an education-based approach you not only differentiate yourself from the competition, you can build rapport quickly, increase your credibility, and position yourself as a trusted advisor.

How to Improve Your Education-Based Marketing Efforts
Pay attention to the questions and issues that are being raised by your customers and prospects. This is valuable information that should be incorporated into your educational funnel.

Revise your content creation strategy to focus on writing about solutions rather than products. Remember that consumers are usually searching for solutions to problems or issues as opposed to products. When you position yourself as the solution, the sales will usually follow.