The Curse of Know-how: What You Know May Be Hurting Your Marketing
You've probably heard, over and over that the way to success is through your website content.
Blog posts or in your emails on social media, in your online courses ... content Content, contents.
The term has become its own buzzword: Content marketing.
According to an experienced expert, you may think that your ability to drive sales from your course is directly tied to the quality of your content is good or not.
However, did you know your knowledge could hurt your company as well as your marketing strategies, even greater than it benefits?
Let me explain.
Experts, beware! in danger of being smacked
In 1999, a team of Stanford researchers carried out an study. Their goal was to figure out how successful experts are in their prediction of how long it will take novices to master a new skill.
I won't bore you with details. Here's an overview:
Experts are poor at forecasting how long it's going to take for a newbie to master "simple" tasks. Actually, they discovered that the more expert you are, the more you will underestimate how long it will take.
The researchers named this process it the Curse of Expertise. Simply put, the Curse is that when you become more skilled and experience, you are so unconscious of your abilities in that are unable to the ability to accurately make predictions about how long it will take to teach the subject to an uninitiated.
The Curse Extends Beyond the Obvious
However, perhaps even more sinisterly it is that the Curse of Expertise doesn't just hinder your ability to teach at your school. It affects everything in your organization, which includes your marketing.
Take a moment to think about the idea.
No matter what kind of information you provide Your goal should be to educate your audience in some way. In this case, for example, you would like people to understand:
- You're a trusted and credible professional.
- The benefits of what you can offer.
- What they need to know about why they should or should not from you.
- Engage, taking part and engaging with your work.
Potential customers don't enter this world with an idea of what we can do to help them. We are there to meet them wherever they are, and then guide them to be ready to buy.
On the internet, on blog messages, emails or any other format of marketing we choose to use We're taking readers through a trip; each encounter is a part of a greater story we're telling with the intention of moving the reader from where they're at, to where we (and we) want to be.
The Issue of Hidden Learning
What's fascinating in what's interesting about the Stanford study is that the experts were not able to explain their understanding. In fact, they broke the process into the same number of steps as people who are new to the process. They weren't hindered from being capable of describe what they needed to do however it didn't keep them from intuiting the extent of challenging each step would be.
This is not common. If we consider dissolving something it is often about the actions to be taken.
Read this. Click here. Buy this. Make it happen.
What we don'tdo is consider the journey of learning must be taken to be able to complete those actions.
Take, for example, the question of saving one's voicemail -- which is the exact test that the researchers in the study used.
At first glance, this is a simple multi-step process:
- Enter your voicemail
- Hit the key to retrieve the voicemail
- Listen to the message
- Keep it in mind
Theoretical analysis of education However, it tells us there's more to understanding this procedure than just doing the four steps. In order for a beginner to implement the process the first step is to remember and be able to comprehend the entire process.
For example, they have to recall what menus on the phone operate and comprehend each prompt. Remembering that the play button plays the message is only one of the pieces. Realizing that it makes extra menu options accessible (including the save option -- is another. The list goes on and on down the line.
It's this "hidden process of learning" within each step that makes"the Curse of Expertise so nefarious.
There's More To Expertise Beyond a Start and an end
In addition, this secret understanding is a fact that even experts are unable to dispel.
The Stanford research team attempted (and failed, and tried!) to help their experts make more accurate predictions. They advised that they should "think back" to when they were first learning. This didn't work. The group provided a list with typical pitfalls and blocks. But there isn't any improvement.
In the end, the researchers were completely unable to come up with accurate estimates from experts. It's a fact that we just cannot ignore the things we know regardless of how much we try to put ourselves in beginners' shoes.
In fairness it's true that novices weren't able forecast accurately, too. In fact, the most accurate peoplewho could make accurate predictions were the ones at the beginning of learning.
And that's the key.
It's easy to fixate on where someone is right now and what we'd like to see them at some point in the near future. What does Curse of Expertise tells us is that it's in the middle of the journey in which magic occurs.
Stop The Curse One Time And For All
People who are currently in the process of learning are placed to supply us with all the necessary information due to their appropriate level of expertise to do so. Don't be too small, and but not excessive. It's enough to be negatively affected from the Curse.
If we apply this lesson to marketing and sales, we see that there can be the only reliable method to deal with the Curse of Expertise. We need to stop predicting and pay attention to what actually happens when we travel From A to B.
For example:
- When you announce your idea in a fresh method, look for signs (comments or tweets, responses to emails, etc.) of the impact the idea is having in the same way it's having.
- Create real-life sales pages to put that are in front of potential customers, and think about A/B-testing parts in your funnel so that you can determine the success of your process for educating customers.
- Conduct pilots for your courses and programs while being open to your customers' experience and without putting the pressure on yourself to develop your perfect course in advance.
- Keep track of the engagement levels across your social channels on a campaign stage to ensure you're looking at the big overall picture instead of focussing on specific posts, pins, comments or Tweets.
When you base your decisions using data from the middle of the procedure, not just the end-points or start points then you'll have the ability to break the Curse of Expertise.
It's how you can make your knowledge help your marketing and also your business instead of hindering it.
Breanne Dyck is founder and chief consultant of MNIB Consulting. She assists online-based training companies increase their effectiveness as well as their staff and income by mixing the management of operations, learning, product strategy, and business design.