How to Use Teaching to Grow Your Business

It’s getting harder and harder to get your customer’s attention. They are deluged with information — so they scan-click-delete.

Yet they cry out in the night for someone to explain things simply.

The rules of modern marketing have changed, and it’s only going to get worse. You’d better find the most effective and efficient marketing techniques to nurture your leads and build trust with your audience, or you’ll be left behind.

One technique stands out above all the rest – teaching. Passionate students become passionate clients.

Offering free classes helps you sell your services and products, and fill your business pipeline for all your offers. Participants in your free classes become one-on-one clients, mastermind group members, and participants in your paid courses, too.

But there are tricks to doing it right or you’ll lose your lovely customers in a heartbeat!

Getting known, as a teacher and expert — and a human being

Teaching gives your audience the personal interaction with you that’s missing in most marketing techniques today. When they experience you in a very personal way — whether it’s through an in-person presentation, a live webinar, or a video tutorial — it builds a connection that lives on long after the class ends.

Teaching helps you be seen as an expert in a very crowded marketplace, and expands your reach and your revenue. Your students remember you as the person who has the answers.

Best of all, you get to share what you know with your audience, which empowers and inspires them.

You’ve got to be well-prepared

Want to run an excellent class to use as a marketing tool — one that students talk about and share with their friends and colleagues?

Start with a brilliant (and strategic!)class design.

Not only will you cover amazingly helpful content, but you’ll be more relaxed and teach it better if you have a plan.

Here are the six steps to designing a class to use as a marketing tool:

1. Start with what the audience wants to learn. Students don’t care about what you want to teach. They only care about what they want to learn. Do your market research and ask your audience what challenges they have, then design a class around solving those problems.
2. Keep it simple. Most free classes and webinars are about an hour or less, so keep your focus to just three or four key ideas. (The tricky part is you have a huge amount of knowledge in your head, so capturing all that and organizing your ideas is crucial for both free classes and paid classes you’re designing. Plus, organizing your knowledge makes it easy for your participants to follow what you’re saying and how it all fits together.)
3. Write a sizzling lesson plan. Map out which topics you’ll cover, in a logical order that simplifies the information. Take the information that’s overloading your audience, and sift it into what’s most important, with usable action steps. The key to a good free class is to give them value, which builds trust between you and your student. Don’t waste their time with fluff.
4. Take content to the next level. If you simply repeat content that all your competitors are already sharing, you won’t stand out in the marketplace. What new idea can you share that helps participants understand what they don’t know about the topic? In Step 1 above, you’ll research what they tell you they want to learn about. But they don’t know what they don’t know — and you can uncover hidden pitfalls and solutions that will be true eye-openers!
5. Design a red-hot opening. You’ve been in those “salesinars” where the teacher spends the first 20 minutes talking about themselves. Your eyes roll back in your head and you mumble, “When will this teacher ever get to the important content?” Don’t do that to your students — they deserve better for committing their time to attend your class. Start with a big bang: huge, useful content in the first 5 minutes. Then they’ll be saying, “Oh, I can’t wait to hear what comes next!”
6. Make it interactive. Design interactive discussion questions, tell stories and create exercises so your students don’t fall asleep halfway through. Adult students need you to change the pace of the class every 10 minutes or so. There are dozens of teaching strategies that put some jazz into your class design. Remember that there’s a high ratio of “lurkers” to active participants, so learn how to reach both introverts and extroverts and learn how to engage them in the learning conversation.
7. Set your marketing goals. How can you know if your free classes are working as a marketing method if you can’t measure what success looks like? Whether you’re offering a free class to build your mailing list or introducing your audience to a new product or service, have specific marketing goals for your class so you can measure what works and what doesn’t.
8. Have a plan for what you’ll do, after the class, to continue the conversation. Your class isn’t a one-off marketing technique, it’s part of a bigger marketing plan. Decide how you’ll follow-up with the participants. Consider a post-class email marketing campaign that provides them with recordings, handouts, and resources to cement what they’ve learned and remind them of the products or services you offer.

Choose a teaching method – pros and cons

Once you’ve designed your class, it’s time to decide which delivery method to use.

There are several effective teaching methods, so let’s look at the pros and cons of each:

1. Live in-person workshop – There’s nothing better than meeting your audience face-to-face. Doing a live, in-person workshop gives your audience the ultimate experience of learning deeply from you. This is best if you’re trying to attract local clients. Your local workshop could be anywhere from 2 hours to a full day.  One possible problem: it might limit your audience to those who have the time and money to leave their office and home for the day. If you know your audience is busy, think about doing a half-day or evening workshop instead.
2. Webinar – A webinar is a live, virtual event where you show slides as you teach. A big problem with webinars is that most of the time the audience is looking at a slide, not you. There are ways to juggle back and forth between face-time and slide-time to mitigate this problem. When your audience can see your bright, shining face on their computer screen, it’s the next best thing to a live event. Plus, you can reach a wider audience than you can with an in-person event, and it’s certainly more convenient for your participants. Consider adding some audience engagement exercises/methods to a webinar to spice it up a bit.
3. Self-Study – Teaching via self-study format, from pre-recorded video tutorials to ebooks, has been around for decades and it’s an established way to deliver training material. It allows your audience to learn when it’s convenient for them. However, it negates two of the principles of “Education As Marketing”: they don’t get to experience you directly in a live environment, and you can’t be sure they’ll consume the material, even if they download it. Yes, pre-created content is easier for you as a business owner and allows you to avoid live teaching if you’re shy. But as a marketing vehicle, it’s simply not as powerful as teaching in real-time to a live audience and having discussions with them.

Afraid of speaking? Don’t be! Just Teach

Start with a smart plan and remember: you were put on this planet to help other people, and there’s no better way to help than to teach.

You’ll be surprised how much you love it!

Remember:

• Capture your audience’s attention, and gain their trust and loyalty.
• Deliver usable content in a logical way they can use immediately.
• Teach them what you know in a free class and create passionate paying customers.