The Education Phase
As mentioned previously, everything referenced in this training will fit squarely into the Education Phase of the Buddy System.
If this is your first time hearing of the Buddy System, I want you to stop right now and head over to that training to get caught up on precisely what that means.
...Ya back? Ya did it? Awesome.
Now I wanted to take a magnifying glass to the Education Phase in order to highlight what it is, why it’s important, and how it relates to the methods and philosophies of this training.
In order to best explain this phase, I want to start by explaining the phases that bookend it.
The Introduction Phase, where fans first come into contact with us in some low-level manner, precedes the Education phase. The fans in this phase have likely seen one of our initial Fan Finder ads or wandered to our website or socials after having been recommended to us by a friend or other website/streaming service.
The Permission Phase comes after the Education phase, and is the moment where the fan gives us their ‘permission’ to email or text them on a regular basis for more content and offers.
As you can see, the Education phase is actually a very crucial area of the buddy system. It is the place where we take initial fans and convert them into eventual subscribers.
The Education phase is characterized as the part of the fan relationship where they get a better sense of who we are, an understanding of our voice and motives, and a grasp on the true span of our art and capabilities. In the midst of all of that, this phase is about building rapport.
With this in mind, it’s useful to view the education phase as one that is dynamic. It may shrink or expand based on the fan you are attempting to win over. This is unlike a phase such as Permission, where it is more binary (they’re either a subscriber, or they’re not).
Taking some fans from Intro to Permission through the Education phase could take countless touchpoints over the course of several months before someone is ready to give you their email address or phone number. For other fans, it might be just a few. It is important that we prepare for both kinds of people.
Additionally, because the education phase is one of the earlier impressions we give to fans, the work we do here acts as a crucial precedent for how the fan will continue to interact with us henceforth.
If we play our cards right and delight our audience within the fluctuating dynamic of the Education Phase, we can create a lot of potential subscribers for the Permission phase.
This training will be all about setting up opportunities for engagement, analyzing qualitative data, and setting up marketing systems that allow us to create a dynamic Education phase that we can feel confident putting any newly introduced fan into.
Now that we have an understanding of the specific nature of the Education system, you are free to move onto the next video where we’ll talk about how we measure the success of this effort.