There are many companies that can thrive following the tried and true methods of traditional marketing initiatives. If you are one of those companies, it makes sense to place yourself in the most familiar arenas, where potential customers expect to see you. That is, if your intention is to compete with Coca-Cola for mindshare, it is probably in your best interest to utilize bold advertisements in print and television media.

But many other companies are learning that traditional approaches are no longer sufficient to convey their message and effectively convert the casual shopper into a paying customer or even better, a brand evangelist. It used to be that you could distinguish your company through lowest prices or a sparkling slogan. Now, however, these old silver bullets will barely leave a dent in the mind of the modern consumer. What can your company do today to stand out above the noise and clutter?

Enter: Educational Marketing

Education-Based marketing is the act of creating marketing materials and executing on strategies that distinguish your company as a knowledgeable authority and resource in your area of expertise. Notice the inclusion of "resource", as it is uncharacteristic to antiquated marketing approaches. It follows the revised premise that to be an active and valuable participant in the information age, one must become an information center.

With multiple, seemingly identical solutions popping up everyday in various industries, those that will shine are those that can lend a hand to their audience, rather than using that same hand to bludgeon their audience with an exhausted sales pitch.

Author David Frey has outlined not only how the average customer has become numb to the sales pitch, but also the underlying goals and burgeoning techniques of Educational Marketing. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to flip the script, and focus on the questions of customers rather than the sensational hype associated with a typical sales pitch.

Say you were the owner of an oil change store. A standard approach to market your business would be to place ads that say:

“Get Your Oil Changed Here for Just $14.95!”

By integrating educational marketing into your marketing arsenal, you might instead try:

“A new study finds that changing your oil every three months adds $1,437.81 to the resale value of your automobile. Come in to find out the effect of oil changes on the resale value of YOUR automobile.”

The information and help you can provide your customer is the new hype. The emphasis of such techniques revolves around the establishment of trust. By assisting in the open sharing of information, you become an ally to your consumer, rather than the oft-avoided vacuum cleaner salesman.

One main concern that can come with Educational Marketing initiatives is "How do I monetize these new informed shoppers?" Frey goes on to map out the packaging of one's educational message through multimedia options such as video tapes, email courses, and seminars which can extend the dialogue and thus your marketing window of opportunity. Such long-term, or “drip” campaigns can have a tremendous impact on the duration of your trust-based relationship and the lifetime value of your prospective customers.

What is your educational message?

Over the past few weeks, I've spent a lot of time studying a field called Landing Page Optimization. It's a fascinating field that deals with improving landing pages, which are the pages of your website that visitors come to either organically or through paid marketing initiatives. The goal of Landing Page Optimization is to maximize conversions (e.g., sales, newsletter signups, etc.) of these visitors.

One of the guiding principles of landing page optimization is that landing pages need to be simple. If there is too much information on the page, the reader gets confused and either clicks the back button or closes the browser.

This principle is the same as a guiding principle of business plan development; mainly that the plan, and particularly the executive summary, needs to present the business concept concisely so that the audience quickly understands it. If not, they will simply discard the business plan.

Interestingly a concise message might not only improve your business plan and your landing page, but your entire business’ success. Consider the case of Google. The Google homepage has always had very little text on it. In fact, if you go to it, it doesn’t even say that it is a search engine. But, by having a big empty box in the middle and having a button underneath it that says “Google Search”, it is pretty intuitive that Google is a search engine.

Now, when someone was referred for the first time to Google over the past few years and came to Google.com, what do you think they did? Well, due to its simplicity, I think we can assume that nearly all people who came to Google.com typed in a search term and hit the search button. Then, they instantly saw high quality search results and were sold on the fact that Google is a great search engine.

So, by keeping their landing page and business concept/proposition extremely simple, Google was able to get people to try its product. Because the product is high quality, those trials resulted in loyal users.

While there are many examples out there, one interesting company that I think could really improve its business plan, landing page, and thus chance of success is SpinVox. I first read about SpinVox in this Guy Kawasaki post in which he says, “This service translates voicemail to text and then sends a text message to your phone and/or an email to your computer.”

While Guy Kawasaki does a great job clearly explaining SpinVox in this 22 word sentence, I don’t think SpinVox does. On its homepage, SpinVox has the following text:

"SpinVox captures spoken messages and cleverly converts them into text. It then delivers your message to a destination of your choice – inbox, blog, wall or space. Right in the moment. Giving you the power to Speak Freely... Simply put, we do one thing – turn voice into text. But it's one thing that can be applied to the many ways you communicate, from your Voicemail to your Blog. Use the finder below to find the right one for you."

If I were to come to this page without Guy Kawasaki’s clear explanation, I would most likely leave without trying the service. It neither clearly explains the most common use nor the value proposition of the service.

To sum up, KEEP IT SIMPLE. Use simplicity to hook the investor, the customer, the partner, or whoever else you are trying to influence. Once hooked, over time (which could be as little as 2 minutes later), you can tell the full story.