Educating Your Customers, Part 2: Lay Out Your Goals

A little while back we covered Six Tools to Use for Educating Your Customers. Knowing the different formats you can use to educate customers – about you, about them, about the situation/dream/solution/possibility – is all well and good. In fact, knowing the tools and considering them in a new way can help generate great marketing ideas.

But we all know that having tools means nothing if you do not know what they are for or how to make the most of them.

Educating Your Customers, Part 2: Lay Out Your Goals

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post called something like “Give your marketing a job.” Even then, I was incredibly concerned with the amount of totally aimless, goal-less marketing out there. I see it with social media marketing all of the time. There don’t appear to be any goals – even broad ones – other than “success.”

Why should we make goals specific?

The primary reason to get specific with your goals is so that you can realize when you’ve achieved them. Have you ever worked for a boss that has asked you to improve but didn’t specify in what way? Have you ever been asked to make something better and been left to figure out what that really means?

Now turn that around on your marketing – in this case, customer education. Are you putting tools to use but not being clear about what the definition of success is?

Goals Come First, Execution Comes Second

A really good customer education plan answers the question, “How exactly will this help grow the business?” and the answers to that question should be specific. Maybe they are broad at first, but they get really specific later.

In my customer education plan, I employ

• Blogging
• Video marketing (very, very recently)
• In-person classes (starting mid-June)

I have specific reasons for doing each of them. And the reason is not exposure or something completely vague like that.

• Blogging directly answers immediate questions that existing & future clients have about blogging. The goal here is to serve. By serving, I’m able to establish a trust relationship with them. I define success when the blog is directly responsible for helping me develop a relationship with a new client. I track this particular tactic by asking how a new client found me. If they say that it was through the blog, I consider that a goal achieved. Also, when someone I meet (in person) tells me that they read my blog and then goes on to tell me about their particular situation with blogging, I consider that a goal achieved, too. Over time, the blog needs to produce enough of these achieved goals to justify being used in this way (for me).
• Video marketing helps drive website and blog traffic. As you know, videos get indexed in Google. Because Tucson is a smaller market, it’s very easy to optimize video titles and descriptions to rank highly for Tucson-related terms. This is the primary goal: To rank the videos highly in search engines and send traffic to the blog or website as a result. That type of goal is incredibly specific and easy to track. In order to achieve it, the videos have to be good or at least interesting enough to influence the viewer to click through to the site.
• I’ve begun planning for in-person classes (the first is June 15) to generate consistent, recurring income. I’ll consider them a success if they are profitable. If I lose money on them (say, I spend more money on the venue than I make in registration fees), that would be a sure sign of failure. If the first class brings a profit but subsequent classes do not, I’d consider that a sign of failure, too, and would have to tweak things, offer different classes, or rethink pricing.

Customer Education. Do it, but just be sure you know why you are doing it.

I’m all for this type of marketing. It’s brilliant for so very many reasons. However, it’s best to figure out what you hope to achieve with it and to set some goals. Doing so will help you tweak and recalibrate if necessary in order to see them through to success.

What tools do you use and have you laid out aggressive goals for them?

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