You want unforgettable marketing?
Teach the shit out of everything.
Teaching makes you memorable. It’s the best marketing tool you’ve got.
Present the best pitch, the most polished landing page, the coolest creative. It doesn’t matter. Your audience forgets you in seconds.
Teach them something, though, and your audience does two things:
- Stop and pay attention: They stop what they’re doing and listen
- Store the knowledge you provided: They keep what you taught them and, with that, a reminder of you and your brand
The Teaching Recipe
The first thing your customers spend with you is time. If you want to grab and keep their attention, give them a great return on time invested.
So this isn’t about providing cute factoids. You can’t ask for anything else in return. Teaching the shit out of everything requires that you:
- Deliver useful knowledge
- With zero friction and
- Make it easy to consume
Do that, and they pay attention. Then they save the knowledge, and every time they look back at it, they remember you. Best marketing ever.
Examples: Competitive Cyclist & dndspeak
I followed Competitive Cyclist because this video showed me a workout that didn’t make me want to cry:
dndspeak provides these nifty lists:
- Both of these have zero friction. This is an Instagram post, and everything I need is right there
- They’re both super-useful. Step-by-step strength training? Sweet! Ideas I can steal for my next Dungeons & Dragons campaign? Perfect
- They’re easy to consume. They’re not fancy. They’re brief, well-executed, and clear
Because of that, I stopped watching inferiority-complex-inducing videos of professional cyclists flying up mountains and paid attention. I watched the video. I read the list. And then I saved it. Every time I refer back to that content, I remember Competitive Cyclist and dndspeak.
Oh, yeah: I’m using Instagram examples, but this works on your blog, in email (definitely email), whatever.
Amanda Natividad’s zero-click content
Amanda Natividad’s Zero-Click Content is built to teach the shit out of everything.
- Zero-click means zero friction. Everything I need is there
- She packs useful information into every tweet, article, and email
- It’s always well-executed. Not flashy. Clear
She put it into practice here.
Never mind the likes and the reshares. Look at the bookmarks. Those people paid attention and stored the knowledge. Every time they refer back to it, they’re reminded that Amanda taught them something cool.
Linode’s Linux Learning
If you’re learning Linux, Linode lets you learn for free.
Linode team, you can use that bit of marketing alliteration if you want. No charge.
Seriously, Linode provides these great tutorials. I don’t have to sign up for anything. There’s no gigantic popup blocking my view when I land on the page. Just knowledge.
They catch me right when I need them most. So I stop, take notice, and then bookmark their site. When I need an answer about something Linux, Apache, or Nginx-related, I go there first. And every time I read their stuff, they give me a tiny poke: Hey, Ian, you can sign up for Linode. It’s a call to action that still lets me read their teaching content:
It worked, by the way.
What if I’m a bigger brand?
Teaching the shit out of everything always works. If you’re a small brand, you can’t afford to create friction.
As you grow, you can turn up the friction. BMW offers a performance driving school, but you pay for it.
If you’re a midsized B2B brand? Don’t make me complete a 10-field landing page so that I can download your whitepaper. That’s too much friction, even if I know you, because I don’t know if your whitepaper is going to teach me anything. Grab a few great lessons from the whitepaper. Publish them, post them, share them. Now I know it’ll be worth my investment of time. I’ll fill out the form to get the rest of the learning. Teach me, then ask me for something.
If you want to sell it, teach it
Like all sustainable marketing, this requires patience. You need to teach consistently across lots of channels.
But if you teach the shit out of everything, folks notice you. And some of them become customers. It’s not magic. It just works.