What exactly is ‘Education-First Marketing’?
And why is it KEY to business success now?
A 10 to 20 minute read, depending on your speed.
In this Insight, I’ll explore why leading firms (in all professional services) now take an education-first approach to marketing.
And we’ll see why this is crucial to your firm’s long-term success, regardless of how you obtain enquiries for your services.
Do you ask clients to save all their questions till you meet?
We all know that marketing changed dramatically when ‘digital’ took off about 20 years ago.
But let’s face it, some peeps in our sector didn’t get the message – and life will get increasingly hard for them.
Why?
Because there’s a rapidly declining number of people who are happy to wait days (or weeks!) for a meeting to have some basic questions answered.
Why?
Well, in 1980 less than 8% of UK school leavers went to University – but now it’s nearly five times higher – at more than 36%.
So, we have an increasingly educated and digitally able population who see (smart phone enabled) ‘self-serve’ as the normal way to engage with services.
Are the older generations different?
In some ways, of course, but this group has rapidly become ‘tech savvy’ too.
About 90% of those aged 55 to 64 now own a ‘smart’ phone – and many know how to switch them on!
So, most people can now instantly find answers to money questions online – and that’s a big challenge if your website is not on their radar when those money questions pop into their minds – and they want guidance or advice.
Fancy a quick thought experiment? (they’re much less costly than full blown market research!)
If you asked your clients (and any spouses, adult children and friends) to list 3 websites that they ‘go-to’ for answers to money questions – would your website be on their list?
Should it be?
The truth, today, is that we all expect Insights from service providers before we hire them.
And while percentages vary between service providers, we know that most professional people decide on their supplier before they make any contact.
How do we know?
Because it’s what we all do!
Why content is *more than* King now!
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, famously said, “Content is King” way back in 1996.
He predicted that content would be the primary revenue driver on the internet, just as it had been in broadcasting.
And he said the low cost of distribution would help small firms and individuals to reach global audiences.
It’s hard to predict anything about the impact of technology on our lives, but Gates was right, on both points, almost 30 years ago.
And today’s respected business gurus agree on the importance of education-first (aka ‘Inbound’) marketing – as these quotes illustrate well:
- “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.” – Seth Godin
- “If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing.” – Guy Kawasaki.
- “Content is the atomic particle of all digital marketing.” – Rebecca Lieb
- “Marketing is telling the world you’re a rock star. Content marketing is showing the world you are one.” – Robert Rose.
- “Instead of selling, you educate and inform.” – David Meerman Scott.
- “The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.” – Tom Fishburne.
- “Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t.” – Seth Godin.
- “Content isn’t king, it’s the kingdom.” – Lee Odden.
Of course, large firms with big budgets have more marketing options than the rest of us, so it’s worth knowing what leading small business advisers, like Marcus Sheridan and Gary Vaynerchuk, suggest should be our focus.
Perhaps none of this is new to you – but some advisers are shocked by these ideas.
Marcus Sheridan: They ask, you answer.
Marketing and Sales consultant, Marcus Sheridan, rose to fame with his books, ‘They ask, you answer,’ and ‘Endless Customers’
And for years Marcus has advised business owners to stop deferring basic questions from prospective customers.
His view is that telling people to ‘wait until our meeting’ is now seen as an ‘old-school’ sales device – and a big turn-off to potential clients.
In any event, there’s no reason for us to wait if we can easily find others who are willing to give us immediate answers to common, basic questions.
And the explosion of AI just makes it more urgent to adopt this ‘helpful’ approach.
What sorts of questions could you answer?
That’s a big topic for another day.
Suffice to say, you need to plan your content library carefully or it’ll cost you a fortune to build and become a maintenance cost nightmare into the bargain!
Spoiler: One trick is to create lots of Evergreen content which answers the fundamental questions – that we should all have learned at school but didn’t.
That sort of content (if you know how to write it) will require little or no maintenance.
As an example, Marcus suggests an essential consumer question to answer up front is about whether people need our type of service at all.
Let’s remember that prospective financial planning clients face a bewildering array of terms to describe financial advice and planning services.
We have:
- Financial Adviser/Advisor
- Financial Planner – and Holistic Financial Planner
- Financial Coach
- Life Planner.
- Wealth Manager.
- Investment Adviser.
- Retirement Planner.
- Financial Consultant.
- Insurance Adviser
- Mortgage Adviser.
- Discretionary Fund Manager.
- Robo Adviser!
And these all assume the prospective client has completely discounted the increasingly popular DIY approach to money management?
Have they?
Either way it makes complete sense to follow Marcus’ advice – and help people deal with this question.
Here’s an Insight I prepared earlier – to do exactly that.
‘Should I pay for financial advice?
And, if so, what’s a fair price?‘
Our goal, Sheridan argues, must be to establish ourselves as a ‘go-to place’ in our sector for great Insights.
Does education-first marketing help in an AI-Search world?
While it’s early days, things are moving fast as you’ll have noticed when you search on Google.
Some leading marketing agencies are deeply concerned about the direction of travel with AI search – but the good news (I think!) is that it seems to be extending the trend established by Google to find content that meets users’ needs for reliable and valuable insights.
So, great quality education-first marketing will become even more important in the AI search world.
As you may know, for some time, Google has used EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) factors to assess the quality of our websites.
And those EEAT filters are applied more rigorously to content on “Your Money/Your Life” (YMYL) topics – where accuracy and balance is essential for people’s wellbeing and safety.
The top YMYL topics include:
- Medical / health advice.
- Financial advice.
- Legal information.
- News and Political/Economic events.
- Other topics with risks to our safety.
Thankfully, the best marketers in the Financial Advice sector, know that high SEO scores are not vital for smaller advice firms – or any small professional service firm.
So, SEO rankings is unlikely to be your main marketing aim.
They’re just a useful side effect of building a ‘Trustworthy’ brand with great content.
What moves the dial on trust?
This is far more important to understand – and this research into social cognition (by Cuddy, Fiske and Glick, 2007) can help us with this.
The research shows how our assessment of others (individuals and groups) is primarily driven by our perception of their warmth and competence.
I drew on that research to create this simple equation on the drivers of trust – which is similar to (but simpler than) the Trust Equation in the ‘Trusted Adviser’ book by Charles Green et al.
You’ll also note that, like Green, I’ve added a multiplier of reliability (R) which is essential for maintaining trust in relationships.
Other trust equations include an item for ‘Integrity’ which I could add – although Integrity is a given with genuinely warm and competent people.
If you accept these drivers of trust, the question about your marketing boils down to this:
Is there a better way to demonstrate your warmth and competence to your existing and prospective clients, than giving them high-quality and relevant financial planning insights?
Replace the term financial planning with ‘health planning’ or any other advice service – to see why education-first marketing is the approach taken by all leading firms.
It’s also why ‘Influencers’ are making such a killing!
And they’re not all con-artists either.
Check out Dr Julie Smith (the Psychologist) with c. 5 million followers on TikTok – to see this working well, in the mental health space.
How many ideas should you share for FREE?
As noted, you must plan your content library carefully.
If you don’t, and many do not, you risk wasting an enormous amount of money.
That said, the first question is ‘How do you feel’ about giving away any valuable financial planning ideas?
If you’ve heard the quietly spoken 😉 business guru, Gary Vaynerchuk, you’ll know that he suggests we give away all of our best ideas for FREE.
And yes, I know, that sounds crazy… until you learn that by working this way, ‘Gary Vee’ has built a tribe of around 45 million followers across all his Social Media channels.
That’s quite a following!
What’s more, Gary says that 99% of people who consume his content never apply the ideas on their own.
They want business advice that’s tailored to their unique situation.
Might the same apply to any (brilliant) financial planning ideas you share?
Yes of course it will.
But this only works if you avoid the content messaging trap which some Financial Planners fall into when they suggest that financial planning is simple common sense.
That messaging fails for two reasons.
First it’s simply not true – and building trust is about telling the truth!
Second, if you tell people financial planning is simple common sense – why would they pay you to help them do it?
You’ll just put people off your service!
The fact is – your content readers (or viewers) will value good quality (and relevant) generic money guidance. But, as Gary Vee notes, most will need professional help to apply those ideas to their personal situation.
And, all else equal (which many services are) who are they gonna call if YOU gave them the Insight on how to fix their problem?
So, please don’t view ‘giving away’ ideas as cutting you away from your valuable clients.
Sharing great Insights builds a bridge that keeps you connected – to your clients, prospects and professional introducers.
Great Insights (whether you write them or hire someone to create them for you) remind people who to come to when they next encounter the financial (or life) planning challenges you talk about.
What if you already have plenty of work?
If that’s you it’s great news – and proof that you offer a great service.
And that’s the foundation from which we must build.
You might, however, want to think how you deal with a similar response from potential clients who tell you:
‘Things are pretty good as they are or there’s no need to rock the boat.
Or, as Bert Lance, adviser to US President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s US Budget Office, said:
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it !
In today’s fast changing world, a better maxim is this:
If it ain’t’ broke, you still have time to fix it.
And I’m sure this is similar to what you tell your clients – about the need to plan for and build assets for the future.
A great content library is a massive asset to any business.
And if you choose not to build one – there’s a real and growing risk that your audiences will start to see other firms as the ‘go-to’ place for their questions.
Great Insights are also awareness stepping stones.
They give your prospective clients a much better view of what you do – and thus the value of your work.
And they remind your existing clients of this – which helps to keep them on board.
Who benefits from education-first marketing?
You’ll be familiar with the idea of a ‘Win-Win’ deal in business.
The difference with education-first marketing, is that six groups of people can win big – including you and your writer if you have one.
In working with leading financial firms, I’ve identified 25 wins shared by these groups of people, when education sits at the heart of a business.
Education-first marketing can help you to:
- Attract and convert more clients. Assuming your content is relevant and compelling, your existing clients will share it with family and friends.
- Give clients more value in your initial meeting. Those who grasp a key (financial or behavioural) concept before you meet, will generally progress faster on their plan in the time you have together.
- Help your clients see more value in your ongoing services – thus reducing the number who move to other advisers or give up on advice and become DIY investors.
- Protect your clients (and their family and friends) from scams and other money mistakes they might make between meetings.
- Equip clients and prospects to convert ‘average’ money decisions to great ones.
- Engage your future (inheriting) clients, before it’s too late. (Did you know that c.65% of inheritors plan to leave their spouse’s/parent’s adviser when the wealth-holder dies? Source: Schroders UK and Cerulli Associates USA)
- Obtain a stream of engaging ‘outreach’ marketing messages – from your new content for FREE!
- Focus your messages on ideas and services your clients value most.
- Decide which services to build or refine – because you better understand that value.
- Decide which services to discontinue – when you realise the value is hard to define!
- Shorten client meetings – and eliminate the rush and stress – for those clients who’ve learned the basic concepts before you meet.
- Give your clients more comfort with your advice. We humans feel comfortable with advice that’s consistent with (reinforces) what we’ve learned previously. We tend to reject advice that causes cognitive dissonance / goes against our prior beliefs.
- Reduce your firm’s lead time – for prospects to become clients – because your content builds trust before and after client meetings. So, you need fewer meetings.
- Reduce the enormous Risk faced by some firms (revealed in research from Oxford Risk) of inconsistent advice being given by different team members. Your Insights become ‘your house way’ to explain these concepts.
- Show the FCA your commitment to ‘Consumer understanding’.
- Waste less time on unsuitable enquiries – assuming your content is clear about who you can help and signposts other reliable services for those who need them.
- Save time on preparing to train your team. (What’s better than client-facing content as training material?)
- Have more fun in your training sessions. Receiving great educational content is always more enjoyable, relatable and memorable than the dry stuff too often shared by fund managers and product providers.
- Retain more of your best staff for longer – and find it easier to recruit new quality staff. Bright people like working for purposeful businesses which focus on education and development.
- Gain more client referrals from professional connections. These people can be hard to please, but they will share high quality insights with their clients for you. By doing so, they expand their proposition too!
- Expand into (or win more) Employee Well-being work. There’s a lot of demand for this, and only a few truly competent players.
- Enhance your reputation as a firm that helps others. You could win a prestigious award as ‘Financial Educator of the Year’ or become known as a firm committed to improving financial literacy.
- Become known as a consumer champion. If you warn people of the SCAMS and lies of the bad actors outside our sector.
- Help clients (and their families) build their capabilities and confidence* with money.
- Make the whole subject of financial planning less scary. And let’s face it, this topic is a monster for many people – who’d rather not talk about it.
Why does education engage people?
Before we get to that question – check out this picture of the marketing challenge I think most financial planners face.
The truth is that almost no one – worldwide – has a scooby doo clue of what you do!
So, marketing is different and harder for financial planners – and a few other professional advisers.
You have to engage people in a complex process that almost nobody knows much about!
And it gets harder!
The evidence (from Psychologists) shows that we do not tend to engage with complex and risky projects – unless we believe we’re capable and/or will have some sense of control.
We know this intuitively from a young age – and thank goodness for this natural human caution.
We’d not want people feeling confident about driving cars on the road or re-wiring homes without training!
Acclaimed Psychologist Albert Bandura, uncovered the detail of how we learn to engage in tricky tasks – back in the 1970s.
‘Self-efficacy’ is what Albert Bandura called our belief in our abilities, and he observed that we acquire it in four main ways:
First, and most significantly in Mastery experiences, where we practice and successfully perform tasks.
Second, in Social Modelling. Here we observe others succeeding at a task, and (esp. if those people are like us) we see the skill as attainable.
Third, through Social Persuasion. When we receive positive feedback or encouragement from others, we acquire more belief in our abilities.
Fourth, through our emotional and physiological responses to situations. We feel good when we make progress in developing skills.
The leading financial firms I’ve worked with realise that people engage more and become more resilient if we help them to build skills.
Most of us have goals of one sort or another – the big issue is that we don’t always convert our ideas into action.
And while there may be many reasons for this, Bandura found these keys:
- As we become more capable in complex tasks, we develop more interest in those activities and commit more strongly to them.
- We also recover quickly from setbacks and re-frame our problems as tasks to be mastered.
- Conversely, we avoid tasks if we don’t feel capable or in control.
The bottom line?
We all want to have a sense that we can succeed.
And we really do not like to expose our failings.
So, here’s another question for whoever is in charge of content marketing at your firm?
How, exactly, are you helping prospective clients (and their family and friends) to build confidence in their money skills?
What fundamental life and financial planning ideas or exercises (not Apps!) do you teach people to use?
What amazes me is how we (as a sector) invest millions to develop and share ideas between ourselves – between financial planners, product and platform providers and fund managers.
What saddens me is how few of those ideas are converted to content that a consumer could understand – let alone use!
Is this just me?
Do you want to transform more people’s relationship with money?
To make a real impact on people’s mindsets towards their money (and advisers!), you need great content.
My view (which aligns with my Chartered Financial Planner friends) is that great content passes three (ABC) tests.
The ideas we share must be Accurate and Balanced of course.
To build trust we must tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but.
The harder job is to create content that’s Compelling.
Content that grabs your audience’s attention, holds it to the end and leaves them wanting more.
This is the aim of all media creators – writing books, music scores or scripting films.
And we know that in all these areas success follows a Pareto distribution.
So, only a few (admired) players get most of the attention – and the income!
This means we have to work hard and be better than the rest.
We must be laser focused on creating content that hits this intersection.
Content that’s Accurate, Balanced and Compelling.
Anything else is just misleading or Dull Money Stuff.
And I’m sure we’d agree that the world has enough of that?
Have you heard of the four ‘C’s of content success?
Clearly we want Compelling content but it must do other things too.
And it helps to think of our written (or video) Insights as Conversation openers.
The funny thing is, if we write (or speak) in a conversational style – we naturally include questions in the headings – like in this post!
We might also include thinking tools and exercises in our library, to help people consider and reflect on the challenges we can help them address.
And we can now enable these self assessment tools in an App – like ScoreApp, Typeform, Outgrow, SurveyMonkey etc.
Of course, questions can only open a conversation.
Valuable conversations require attentive (deep) listening to what’s being said.
And what’s not being said.
Listening (deeply) is a hard skill to learn – so it’s quite rare… but that’s a topic for another day!
I’ve already noted the third and fourth C’s of content success which are about how we’re perceived.
Demonstrating our Competence and knowledge is vital and many firms do this well.
But do we come across as ‘Caring’ (with warm intentions) or Cold?
The research shows that it’s our warmth towards (care for) others that makes us attractive.
And, like so many Insights into human behaviour (recently revealed by Psychologists) we can usually find a famous quote (from an ancient Philosopher or Politician – as here) to prove we’ve always known these truths.
So, perhaps we could remember this quote.
I think we can use it to adapt our communications – at work and with friends and family.
Is your firm on track to be a ‘go-to’ place for answers?
You may have already achieved this status.
But if you’re starting on this journey or want to check if you’re on the right track, I might be able to help.
Just remember: it’s possible (and quite common) for firms to waste tens of thousands of pounds on unplanned and low value content.
And I really do not want you to do that.
So, in future I’ll offer you more ideas on ‘How’ (at a modest cost) you can build a winning education program.
I’ve helped a few firms do that and reach finals for prestigious ‘Financial Educator of the year’ awards in the process.
In the meantime, if you’d like to talk about what this type of Marketing could mean for your business, e-mail me at hello@paulclaireaux.com with a subject title of ‘Education-First Marketing.
Or simply call me on 07590 694 079 – and we’ll book in a meeting.
I’ll certainly give you some pointers where I can.
Thanks for dropping in.
Paul
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