How to Implement Customer Education as a Marketing Tool?

1. Align Your Goals

To launch any successful customer education program, you need to understand the dynamics of the business impact it has. And to figure that out, you need to align your goals on every level of your company functions.

So, what are your priorities? To generate demand for your product? Increase your product use? Increase conversion rate (Free to paid users)? Or do you want to create a talent pool of qualified people to use your product?

After establishing above mentioned priorities for your organization — align your set goals within every hierarchy level of your organization.

Business Goals: Conduct a whiteboard session with top leaders & decision-makers of your company to discuss traction metrics such as customer acquisition, lifetime value (LTV), and other metrics. Without the top-bottom sync, the customer education program won’t get very far.

Departmental Goals: The impact of customer education is felt across different degrees in different departments of your company, be it, sales, marketing, and customer success team. To acquire proven results, you need re-assure what they are using as proxies for customer success, currently. Therefore, customer education will become a helpful user-level metric for them as well.

Team Goals: Team goals are all about your sync impact. To create a win-win situation while implementing customer education, you need to convey synchronous efforts — think user-level metrics. Aligning a singular set focus & consistency will bring a great impact on your engagement rates & course completion.

2. Allocate Resources

The bluntness about customer education is you’re not going to reach your dream state, right away. Optimizing your customer education program for your unique set goals & message will take time. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take the first step. To create a solid foundation and reach an educational state like the academy, you might face hurdles like lack of resources & unsatisfied response gaps.

But focus on gains, not gaps. Avoid fixing your eye on global-class academies like Hubspot when you are just starting. Focus on your gains. Be it the smallest effort today, your needle should be moving in the right direction. Because, if you’re constantly peeking out on others’ examples, you’ll struggle on your grounds. That being said, it’s cool to have an idea of what’s going around about features and resources, it’ll help you to keep the tap on current trends.

Creating your academy doesn’t necessarily mean that the resources and tools required must come from your repository and budget. Allocate resources by borrowing useful material from other departments, that might have expandable resources, you can use. For example, for any subject matter topic, you can use your specialists to shoot a quick 5-min explanatory video session.

Communicate. Communicate. Communicate. Never underestimate the power of words. Have round-table sessions (virtual works too) with your teams weekly or monthly to discuss the progress. Host theme-based events to bring & connect different departments on the same page. Yeah, you can use event fliers & memes, and paste them around the wall to let the message roll. Eventually, the intent is to bring visibility to create momentum.

3. Create & Deliver

Now you already know what kind of goals sets and business outcomes you’re aiming to drive, so the question comes, what sort of objectives will help your customer achieve through your educational assets — that’ll eventually lead to your business outcome that you've identified?

In technical terms, this is called “Learning Objectives”. After you have nailed down your learning objectives, you can start laying out the entire journey that your customer will have to accomplish their objectives. Most importantly, when you are in this stage, consider the following:

Subject Matter: Subject Matter is perhaps the most significant decision in your customer education program, it means what you are going to educate your consumers about. As the simplest example, let’s say you wish to educate your customers about your products. But, don’t you think that’s a broad topic.

So, work with your subject matter experts to narrow down your content scope, at the start, and find priorities. Them be it in a specific feature or even a function you feel helpful.

Content Mix: In this process, you need to conduct white sessions with your instructional designer to decide the type of content (or platform) you are going to produce. Most learners don’t respond to a heap of words, including videos, infographics, and slideshows to foster the fast-learning cognitive capacity of your consumers. The purpose is to create a dynamic learning environment, so the more creatively exciting mix it gets, the more easily it is absorbed.

Content-Length: The concept of your perfect content mix works this far. The reality of consumers nowadays is that most of them don’t have time to sit back and invest hours at end to learn. This is why you need to find a short & snappy way to get into a 5-10mins window. Creating 7 short video sessions is way better than 1 long webinar session.

Delivery Process: Once you align your goals, find ways to get the resources, and create the right mix & length of your content, and its delivery time. Delivery is about enabling a system that supports scaling your mapped-out customer education program. To make use of this, you need a tech stack integration to operate your education program while deploying the resources that you've developed earlier. Don’t forget to engage with your customer in their learning stages while you reach the last step to measure their progress.

4. Measure

Feedback time. Gather both qualitative and quantitative feedback to improve your customer education program. Your efforts here are to know what your customers think about your program, so keep your doors open for any kind of suggestions or feedback. You can embed survey forms at the end of each course completion section or even mail them up.

Keep on assessing your customer education progress at deeper levels, by looking into learning proficiency, operational impact, relationship growth, and even ticket cost.

CXcherry Customer Training Platform is on a mission to redefine the way you onboard, engage and retain your customers.