Our Marketing Is So Useful…

The purpose of our marketing is to promote a product and drive acquisition, often via sales. The challenge and the work of marketing is how to do that effectively and efficiently. The best marketing is effective precisely because the impact of the marketing transcends mere production promotion and the transaction of sales. It leaves people better off for the interaction: smarter, happier, or more confident. The marketing itself is still a kind of transaction, not necessarily something people purchase but something you offer in the hopes of extending your relationship (greater sales, higher customer lifetime value, etc.).

A softer measure of marketing effectiveness is how long your “customer,” the other person, keeps what you have offered. Through your marketing you have offered someone a promotional item, often some kind of actual product, or advertising message, or even just an idea. You want to plant an idea that they will keep returning to until they engage with you formally. If it’s a product you’ve offered, usually a “lite” version or a branded representation, you want them to keep it a long time because it’s of enough value that they continue to use it. That’s free continuous marketing! You’ve engaged someone to recruit on your behalf!

Inevitably some of the people you’re recruiting as potential customers or for some other long-term engagement will choose another option. One goal of your promotional materials then should be to create something so valuable and engaging that they hang on to and continue to use it even if they do opt against buying from you or engaging with you long-term. 

A lot of educational marketing materials hit this sweet spot. Consider home services. Maybe someone ultimately ends up contracting another company for the service they need immediately, but they never forget which company taught them exactly what they need to know about the issue. When this happens they even become your missionaries! Every time the issue comes up with friends and colleagues, they refer those friends to you and your website because that’s where they’re going to find the information they need for the issue at hand. Some of those referrals are going to turn into business for you!

One important and common concern to address is this: What if competitors see what you’re doing and copy you? In a global and altruistic sense, the end result is better education about your topic and smarter consumers. That’s good in a big-picture sense even if it doesn’t net more sales or relationships for you. The important thing is to ensure the quality of your actual marketing product such that copies and imitators may resemble or replicate what you do, but never surpass or exceed what you do. And indisputably you were the first to do it, given how easily traceable everything is in this day.

A classic example is recruitment marketing for university admissions. The best recruitment marketing is not for the university in general. In some ways, a university diploma is a commodity. All degrees serve a similar function, a credential indicating some sort of learning and ability. The distinction is often the prestige and reputation of the university conferring the degree. Even the distinctions like GPA, Dean’s List, Honors Roll, etc., are quickly lost in the interest of brevity and succinctness on a resume. 

Therefore the best recruitment marketing for a university is by academic discipline, specifically targeting groups of students with keen interest in that one area. The content experts are the faculty who teach the discipline. This allows for much deeper and more meaningful engagement with prospective students. Whereas the university representative (admissions counselor) can represent everything the university offers in general terms, the faculty can really go into depth in the specific area of interest for a student. They can geek out together. They can even teach the student before the student enrolls. The student literally becomes smarter for the transaction: a better nurse (majoring in health professions), a smarter physicist (majoring in engineering), a stronger teacher (majoring in education), a keener reader (majoring in English)… A better student and a budding professional.

The best recruitment marketing that is discipline-specific is so useful and enlightening that even if a student doesn’t enroll at that particular college, they still keep and are using your materials as they graduate from another college years later. Probably they have a good experience earning their degree somewhere else, but they never forget that things started to click for them through you and the interaction with your faculty. Is it a risk that others will copy what you do? Yes, but if the worst-case scenario is better foreign language speakers (liberal arts majors), savvier investors (business majors), more creative artists (arts majors), more empathetic counselors (social work majors)… smarter people, then that’s a win for the world. And if you do it right, you drive more enrollment for your school because you become known as “the place to go” for business, or science, or psychology, or any of a hundred other majors.

So make your marketing so useful, so valuable, so engaging, so compelling, that people will keep and propagate your materials regardless of whether they buy from you.