First things first… in order to educate customers, it’s helpful to understand who you are educating and what challenges they’re trying to solve. Having a good understanding of your audience & their struggles will definitely help to design effective educational programs that will be invaluable to them.
The following approaches are helpful in delivering useful training to customers:
1. Leverage Tools to Deliver Content
When making use of tools to deliver training content it makes it easier for the user to get the right information at the right time. They may be assigned the information given their role or possibly be able to search on their own. Using tools such as an LMS, CRM, or Knowledge Management system puts learning at the user's fingertips.
Often times, these tools have mobile interfaces that make the training even more accessible for people no matter where or when they need to access the content. Increasing the accessibility of the content not only improves customer education but builds trust in the product.
2. Reuse Content for Marketing & Customer Education
Make your content work for you. When creating content, keep in mind all the channels of communication. Not only will you want to be sure the content is created in short bites but also that it’s created with different delivery venues in mind. While re-using content is great — it’s important to tweak it when necessary for the various channels in order to engage more of your audience. Many channels of communication offer a good opportunity to show your audience visually.
3. Engage Rather than Explain
In the online world, we live in, videos have become king and peaked thanks to so many of us being visual learners. Seeing something in action is more powerful for understanding a concept than reading about it. For this reason, consider practical relatable processes that can be demonstrated. However, video content often isn’t searchable. Keep this in mind and use tools that visually show your audience but remember people will need to search the content at a later time.
4. Offer Educational Webinars
While videos or interactive content become a great resource, offering an interactive webinar experience that’s customizable to features, use cases, and attendees increases product engagement. These webinars will bring active involvement & collaboration aspect to your training strategy. When there is a new feature or way to use your product — webinars are a great way to showcase those capabilities live. Not to mention it’s a good chance to advertise an education opportunity to your audience on social media platforms as well.
5. Utilize Practical Product Scenarios
Providing your users & audience scenarios in which your product is typically used is very beneficial. They are able to quickly relate to ways in which they can translate it to their needs. It will also help your users to get more out of the product as they may have only been using it in one way. However, when exposed to other uses, they could find many other scenarios in which they can utilize it. For any potential customers, these scenarios help them see the value right away which puts their mind at ease to make the purchase.
It important however while selecting scenarios, it’s best to choose ones that will impact the majority of your audience and target market. Focusing on too many scenarios can actually distract & confuse customers. It’s key to just pinpoint a few situations that will bring the most value.
Take-Aways
Selecting the proper tools to distribute content as well as where to reuse it is critical. Not to mention, the way you engage & interact with your audience is also plays an important role. Making use of webinars is a great way to interact, engage, and provide relatable help in using your product.
