Many companies, brands, and candidates are eager to recruit loyal fans, customers, or supporters. These companies might offer discounts or free stuff in exchange for an email address or to convert a prospect into a customer or supporter. This is how you grow and build a brand, but an often overlooked way to build sustained, long-term support is to provide free value via education.

Education could mean providing helpful information or expertise to make your targets more aware – of who you are, your company, and how you will improve their lives.

This article will outline how to use education and free value to create a stronger connection with your target audience.

Why Education is an Under-Used Tool

Often, you’ll see brands going straight to a discount as an effort to secure more support. Discounts can help you get your foot in the door, but they are not going to sustain your brand.

If you’re working to recruit supporters, your goal should be to make them more aware of you, your platform, your policy priorities, or why your bill or policy is the best. Making your target audience more aware via education helps them understand the problem and allows you to frame your solution.

For example, if you are working to advocate for a piece of legislation, education should be central to your strategy. You must make your targets aware of the problem and as they become more and more aware of the problem, you should work to educate them on how your solution will solve it.

How to Incorporate Education Into Your Strategy

There are several different communication tools you can use to educate your audience and make them more aware. Those strategies include:

Expertise
Data
Storytelling or anecdotes

Expertise

Use your knowledge or the knowledge of an expert to help make your audience more aware. If you’re working to pass a bill that would protect air quality, use an expert to educate people about air pollution. They can speak to the level of pollution in the region, the number of unhealthy air days, the people who are threatened by this level of pollution, and more.

This expert could be a doctor, scientist, or another specialist who has authority or gravitas. They can outline the health effects of breathing polluted air and what it will do to the long-term health of people and the community. This frames the problem as serious and legitimizes your argument.

Data

Reinforce this argument with data from your expert or from a reputable source like an air quality board that can show worsening air quality over time. Perhaps there has been an increase in the number of unhealthy air days over the past few years or perhaps more people with asthma have been admitted to the ER due to air quality issues.

You could also send people to a website where they can enter their zip code to see the air quality in their community. This personalizes the problem and makes a more direct connection with your target audience.

Find relevant data that can be used to buttress your argument. Data doesn’t lie and when you can use it as further evidence, you can continue to make your audience more aware of the problem so that they start to feel the need for a solution.

Storytelling or anecdotes

Finally, using a story from someone directly impacted by poor air quality is another way to illustrate the severity of the problem.

For example, you could use an anecdote of a child with asthma who has been forced to stay inside more frequently due to poor air quality in their neighborhood. Or perhaps a doctor who has seen a significant spike in young people in need of inhalers. Find powerful and persuasive anecdotes you can use to reiterate the health threat so your audience understands why this is such a serious problem and is compelled to act.

How to Sustain Your Momentum

Once you’ve used these tools to educate and inform your target audience, it’s important to sustain this messaging so that it sticks. If the goal is to get people to support your bill or to change their minds you’ll need to repeat your message.

Develop a communications plan that reinforces the message from your experts, incorporates your data, and makes use of your storytellers. As people become more educated about the problem, move them through the process from understanding and acknowledging the problem to being aware of a solution to seeing your legislation or candidate as the solution to the problem. To do this requires repetition and sustained messaging so a content calendar is key.

Education and value are at the root of this strategy, but your target audience should learn and evolve as they move through this educational process until the final action of voting or supporting your effort.

Conclusion

Rooting your strategy in education helps make your audience more aware so that they see your issue, legislation, or candidate as the solution.

Using education in the form of expertise, data, and storytelling helps make your target audience more aware of the problem and frames your work or your candidate as the solution. By putting education at the center of your strategy, you will develop a long-term connection with your audience. Focusing on education also makes you more trustworthy in the eyes of your audience, who will start to associate your candidate or legislation with valuable information rather than manufactured attempts to get them to do something.

The Importance of Education in Building Your Brand