My mom was an elementary school teacher.
As a kid, I remember incubators full of duck eggs on our kitchen counter. I remember the massive space shuttle model at school, the one you could sit in, flip the levers, and "fly." I remember holding butterflies on the trips to the science center.
The key word here is 'remember'. I remember a lot of things I probably shouldn't from those early years. The question is why?
We all learn in different ways, and one of the most common is to learn as we 'do'. According to the Fleming model of learning, there are six different styles: Hands-on learning, visual learning, auditory learning, reading and writing, and kinesthetic learning.
It's this last style I want to focus on here.
Kinesthetic learning, the learning style of 'do-ers', is what I experienced in my mom's kitchen and in her school. It's putting your hands inside an incubator to rotate a duck egg. It's landing the shuttle, or holding a Monarch. And in marketing, it's how we can make a bigger impact with our messages.
Kinesthetic learning is tactile. It's holding things and moving them around. It's uncovering a key nugget of knowledge. It's learning a message in a deeper way because that message is part of an intellectual journey.
In marketing, we know it's important to create content for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is to educate our buyers, to keep our foodservice products and solutions at top-of-mind. But what are the best ways to do this?
As we highlighted before, there's a range of ways to create content. We have blog posts and videos. We have case studies and white papers. But we also have the ability to turn our content into tactile experiences, places where our audience can uncover and discover, where they can learn and laugh, where they can gain knowledge with a much larger retention rate.
Today, we're not just looking at 500 words and a hero image at the top of the page. On our websites, we have the ability to create entire microsites that incorporate video, sound, and animation to supplement our copy and text.
Think about uncovering the ROI of your beer system in a step-by-step infographic. Or walking through a virtual buffet line to uncover the components of building a better buffet. Or walking down the Theresienwiese in Munich to experience the sites and sounds of Oktoberfest as you learn Inbound Marketing principles.