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5 Ways to Educate Your Prospects for More Sales

It's impossible to sell a product or service without demand ' no matter how low the price or how big the discount.

Education-Based Marketing creates demand by showing the prospects why they need your products and services, how to make intelligent buying decisions, and how to best use it after they buy.

Education-Based Marketing creates a 'halo' surrounding everything you sell.

When you promote an individual product or service, only that particular product or service benefits. But empowering customers and prospects benefits every product and service you sell.

Information pre-sells and differentiates. It builds customer confidence and positions you as credible, knowledgeable and trusted. Information sets you apart. You become a unique, trusted advisor.

Education-Based Marketing answers questions that must be answered before prospects will buy:

1. Who benefits from the product or service?
2. What benefits does the product or service provide?
3. When is the product or service needed?
4. Where is the product or service used?
5. How do you choose and use it?

Conventional advertising is hard to create because it's judged by its creativity ' how effectively it attracts attention, how cleverly it delivers its message and how memorable it is.

Education-Based Marketing, however, is easy to create because the goal is to inform, rather than interrupt, manipulate or show-off. All you have to do is answer the five questions listed above.

Education-Based Marketing saves you money because technology has caught up with technique. You can do most of the production yourself using desktop-publishing software, saving on expensive outside production costs.

You can distribute educational messages for free as web site downloads or as e-mail attachments. Five ways to educate your prospects include:

• White Papers. These analyze challenges and trends and show how to benefit from your products and services.
• E-books. These offer in-depth, procedural descriptions that demonstrate your competence and communicate how-to-buy and how-to-use tips.
• E-mail newsletters. You can keep in constant touch with customers without addressing, printing and postage costs.
• E-courses. You can automatically deliver information in chunks over a period of several days ' or even weeks.
• Teleseminars. You can also present teleseminars, which permit prospects to get to know you in an informal, interactive environment. Free line rentals are available; others cost about $25 an hour.

Education-Based Marketing works best when you keep in touch and deliver information at frequent intervals.

A monthly One-Page Newsletter, for example, is far more effective than a bimonthly four-page newsletter or a quarterly eight-page newsletter.

Customers and prospects give you their total attention when you offer information that helps them achieve their goals.

Education-Based Marketing's effects are cumulative. The more information you share, the more your market will look forward to your messages and refer coworkers and friends to you.