Customer education marketing is an effective sales tool to attract and retain customers within the aesthetics, beauty, and wellness industry. Just consider – imparting your knowledge, skills, advice, attitudes etc to existing and prospective customers is a great way to persuade them about the quality of your offering. It’s not a new tactic but adopting a customer education-based approach is a great way to boost your PR and marketing efforts! In this article, we define customer education marketing, discuss its benefits, and share practical ideas you can implement for your business.
What is Customer Education Marketing?
Also known as education-based marketing, customer education marketing is the discipline of teaching customers how to use or find value from your products or services. Educational based messages can be presented by a company or brand either before or after a customer makes a purchase, for example:
- Before a purchase, customers will be educated about the value of the product or service.
- After a purchase, a customer may receive advice about how to use and get the most value from the product or service.
Many brands consider the full lifecycle of the customer within their product or service in order to define a customer education programme that will exploit the full potential of each customer. For example, providing an aftercare and support plan post-treatment is a great way to retain clients and encourage repeat sales.
The role of Customer Education Marketing
Much like PR, customer education marketing can help your business to establish credibility and build trust with both existing and prospective customers. Its key role is to persuade customers using educational messages to purchase your products or services, this is done by teaching them:
- Why they need your product or service
- How they can use your product or service (and what the benefits will be for them)
Which brands use Customer Education Marketing?
The products and services sold within the aesthetics, beauty and wellness industries are often innovative, science-based, results-focused etc. It’s these attributes which make them ideal for education-based marketing. However, not all brands need customer education marketing, it is only effective for brands with products or services that:
- Are complex e.g. aesthetic treatments like lasers, injectables or peels
- Require users to change existing behaviours (like specialist skincare to tackle rosacea, acne etc)
- Are updated regularly with new features e.g. SaaS companies
- Need extensive support
Customer education vs sales messages
Customer education marketing predominantly uses educational messages to persuade customers about the value and key benefits of products to build a need and demand for them. Customers are encouraged to take time to consider this information before they commit to a purchase. Educational messages are also great for sharing among wider audiences, either at a product launch event or on social media.
Traditional marketing uses sales-based messages which are often urgent and to the point, their role is to showcase the USPs of the product or service as concisely as possible and urge the customer to buy now.
The main benefits of customer education
When your customers fully understand your brand and its products or services, they are more likely to feel a stronger connection with you and this can have a positive impact on your business. The main benefits of sharing education-based marketing messages with your existing and prospective customers are:
- Customer engagement and satisfaction: Educational messages during onboarding new customers mean they will know how to get best value from your product or service. From the outset they are fully engaged which will boost the volume and quality of your customer reviews helping you drive more sales! You may also notice a reduced level of complaints, after sales enquiries, product returns, and customer churn.
- Trust: In an industry like aesthetics where the knowledge gap between consumer understanding and the professional can be wide, adopting an education-based approach to your messages is an effective way to build trust and credibility with your target audience. It can also instil them with confidence about your product or service.
- Market leader positioning: Companies that utilise customer education marketing can effectively position themselves as market experts. How? Educational messages which feature industry specific knowledge or facts help a brand get a step ahead of their competition!
- Increased sales: All of the above can boost your revenue and the lifetime value/spend of each of your customers. Your conversion rate from prospective clients will improve as their confidence in you is higher and existing customers have higher potential to upgrade or purchase again because they are happier.
5 customer education marketing ideas
Knowing how to build and implement education-based content into your overall PR strategy is key for business owners in the aesthetics, beauty, and wellness industry. Below we share our top 5 customer education marketing ideas to help you boost your PR strategy:
- Think customer first: Existing and prospective customers will likely have many questions about your brand and its products or services, so think from their perspective and use the answers as the basis for your educational-marketing content plan. Every customer will have multiple touch points with your brand during their lifecycle, ensure that you map these out and when creating your content consider how your brand, product or service adds value in every message.
- Host a live event: Our clients, including Medik8, see fantastic engagement and sales results from the events we host together. Whether you host a treatment launch in your clinic for your customers or an interactive event for press and influencers, they are the perfect opportunity to showcase your portfolio and educate audiences on the true value of your brand and its products or services.
- Explainer videos: Consumers today love to learn from videos and we highly recommend you get involved, a great way to start is on your social media channels where videos often get higher reach and stronger engagement. You can present to camera and introduce your treatments or film a treatment in action, just remember to pre-empt customer questions and demonstrate its value. Videos are a great way to demonstrate your personal expertise too!
- Ask the expert: Invite your customers, followers and their friends and family to join your brand or business for a Q&A session on your preferred social media channel. You could do an Instagram live and/or ask attendees to submit their questions in advance. This is a great way to build relationships with existing and prospective customers whilst boosting your profile.
- Client case studies: Build credibility by sharing a customer success story, just remember to keep it relevant and relatable to your customers. Start with the situation before explaining the solution and summarise with the results and a glowing customer review. Before and after photos should absolutely be included for aesthetics treatment case studies!
Getting started with customer education marketing
Consumer education marketing is a resource-heavy practise; messaging is more complex, is delivered better in long formats such as video and messages need creating for every touch point. The key to success is all in the planning and creating content based around your customer’s rather you’re your brand’s perspective. We recommend devising a strategy or programme which predominantly features evergreen content that you can utilise time and time again, this will save you time and budget in the long term.
As accomplished PR experts in the aesthetics, beauty and wellness industry, Kendrick PR support numerous brands with their customer education marketing needs and devise bespoke strategies that deliver tangible results. Please do get in touch to book your complimentary discover call with us!
Why choose Kendrick PR
Founded in 2015 by award-winning communications expert Julia Kendrick, Kendrick PR are an experienced and passionate team who thrive on creating tangible success for every client. Since launch, we have delivered outstanding results for some of the industry’s most innovative brands and exciting entrepreneurs, such as ALLÉL, Debbie Thomas, The Private Clinic, Oxygenetix and Medik8 – and we’d love to support your brand.