A customer education blueprint that drives growth
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A customer education blueprint that drives growth
Marketing Powerup #57: Shannon Howard shares her customer education blueprint that drives customer success, retention, and growth.
Hello, and welcome to Marketing Powerups! 👋🏽
Today's powerups include:
Make your content more engaging with behavioral marketing.
The psychology behind highly effective landing pages.
Shannon Howard’s customer education blueprint.
Ready? Let's go! ⭐️
🎖 Build a high-efficiency growth engine
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⭐️ The customer education blueprint
Customer education is key to driving customer success, retention, and growth. But where do you start when launching a customer education program?
Today, Shannon Howard (Director of Customer and Content Marketing at Intellum) shares 5 tips for successfully launching and running a customer education program:
1. Align customer education goals to your business goals.
Tie your customer education objectives back to overarching company goals around retention, expansion, and advocacy. Education for the sake of education won't drive results.
“A thoughtful education strategy that starts with business goals, thinks about and considers the audience or audiences that you're going to be educating, and builds from there. A lot of people think content first and then kind of try to tie it to other things. It should be the other way around.”
2. Identify your customer education gaps.
Analyze support tickets, customer feedback, and usage data to pinpoint knowledge gaps. What are common issues or problems your customers face? What are their ultimate goals?
"When I'm looking at customer education programs, I first do research. What are people talking about in the company's customer slack community? What's coming up in conversations with our relationship managers? What is the sales team hearing when they're talking to people? Then, I figure out how we can answer those questions for people."
3. Create content that maps to your customer education goals.
The next step is to fill the knowledge gaps with content that helps you achieve your business goals. Focus on creating content that drives behavior change through learning. This could be training, courses, help articles etc. The goal is to get customers to adopt and properly use your product.
"Customer education professionals are looking at how do we drive behavior change through this learning. I want to make sure that the content I'm producing is useful and relevant and educational in some way."
4. Measure the ROI of your customer education programs.
One way to track the ROI of your customer education programs is to analyze engagement, retention, and expansion rates for customers who completed your customer education programs versus those who have not.
"Typically you're looking at those kind of trained versus untrained involved with education versus uninvolved in education. Are they more likely to retain? Are they more likely to expand? Are they more likely to use more of your product and even advocacy?"
5. Tap into an existing community.
Online communities provide insights into education needs and opportunities for thought leadership. Are there existing communities for your industry, product, or target audience?
"There are already communities of practice out there that have thousands of people and maybe they're not customers, but then you're getting actually this broad swath of people. What are problems they face? What questions do they have? What are some pain points in the industry?"
Free powerups cheatsheet 🔖
I’ve created a powerups cheatsheet exclusively for Marketing Powerups subscribers to apply Shannon Howard’s customer education blueprint.
→ Download and make a copy of it here (a direct link with no email required).
In the latest Marketing Powerups episode, Shannon further explains her customer education blueprint.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcast and Spotify now, or watch it on YouTube.
✨ Mini powerups
Fun-sized tools, links, and blurbs to boost your marketing.
☎️ Turn your Notion knowledge base into a smart, 24/7 customer support (tool): If you already have all of your company’s wiki and knowledge docs in Notion, HelpKit can help turn those into an AI assistant to help your customers find answers quickly. It can also gauge how satisfied your customers are with the answer it serves up! You can check it out for yourself.
🏆 Ultimate guide to product onboarding (sponsored): You can increase your signups with great marketing. But if you don’t nail your product onboarding, you might waste your marketing team’s time and resources. My friends at Inflection.io launched a massive product onboarding guide full of tips, examples, and best practices.
🏆 5 behavioral strategies to make your content more engaging (article): If you already fantastically optimized content, you can take it to the next level by tapping into behavioral marketing to take it to the next level. Becky Simms, founder of Reflect Digital, shares 5 tips to transform your content into a powerful engagement tool.
🧠 The psychology behind highly effective landing pages (visual case study): I see many websites and landing pages filled with UX challenges. From cluttered text to too many call-to-action buttons, your web design might be hindering people's ability to understand your product and why they might need it. The Growth Design team put together their best tips to improve your landing page conversion.
That’s all for now, friends!
If you enjoyed this Marketing Powerups issue, you’d love this one from the archives featuring Joel Kletkke about his bite-sized customer success story framework.
Have a powered-up day,
Ramli John
Connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter
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