PART I: What is “the Mash-Up”? While training and educational content aren’t traditionally considered part of advertising and marketing campaigns, it is important that they are intertwined in order to provide value to the target audience.
Using Training and Education as the Basis for a Marketing Campaign
Providing valuable training and education is integral to the success of marketing and advertising campaigns. Additionally, viewers that find your campaign informative are more likely to share the campaign with others, multiplying your exposure.
To ensure that your audience will not only understand the benefits of your products or services, but also begin to believe that your company is in fact credible, a marketing message should be only implied. The main focus of your campaign should be to provide your audiences with useful information to guide their decisions. Providing viewers with valuable information without pushing brand representation in their faces helps to build trust and credibility.
By offering something of value first, your company becomes more authentic. You are effectively sharing knowledge that is relevant to your company as well as to your target audience, becoming an influential voice in your market. It is only when the trust and influential voice has been established that you should begin to weave in an implied marketing message pertaining to your products and services.
Educate and Train Internally Before Focusing on External Audiences
Your internal audience (the employees) needs to be educated and trained as well. In addition to knowledge about your products and services, employees need to not just understand but also believe in and support the company’s message. Providing valuable information to both employees and customers creates a positive and respectable company reputation, which translates to credibility of your brand, products, and services.
[NOTE: You cannot just throw information at clients and employees, hoping they will find it useful… You need to have the awareness of your clients and employees to KNOW what type of information will be useful or relevant to them.]
If your message is based upon overtly self-promoting content, your audience will have no reason to trust that you have integrity as an expert in your field. This may ultimately prevent them from respecting and trusting your company and the messages it delivers. The goal is to build valuable training and educational content to achieve buy-in and build brand loyalty – ultimately attracting more clients/customers while establishing loyalty from those you currently work with.
Each audience you educate should receive the same basic content, but the content needs to be delivered in a way that is appropriate and specifically tailored for each respective audience. In other words, alter the tone and delivery of your message to suit each audience.
Mash-Up Part II
In part two of “The Mash-up of Training and Marketing”, we’ll speak about each audience and the how to provide an informative message that addresses the needs of each.
