When Content Collides: Content Marketing and Customer Education Can Be a Powerful Duo
Marketers, sales professionals, and account managers have a common problem: their product needs to be well understood before the prospect or customer can see value and take action. That action may be registering, renewing, or simply signing up to learn more. It’s easier, of course, when the product is simple enough that a high-level sales pitch or a few short tutorials gets the value across. But, what about complex products and solutions?
Content for complex products
In the tech industry, especially SaaS companies, new products are continually disrupting the market and changing the way things are done, which often means a simple overview on how things work isn’t sufficient. Instead, these products call for a more robust strategy that provides personalized, timely material aimed to enable the prospect or customer to maximize the value they receive from the solution.
Some may think of this as content marketing. Content marketing is a specific strategy aimed to attract, engage, and retain an audience. It often includes some level of education-based marketing material, typically easy-to-digest tutorials or infographics that serve to inform the audience. An example may be a SaaS sales product releasing a video that demonstrates “5 proven ways to grow your business.”
Content marketing is ideal for improving authority and becoming a thought leader in your industry. Not only does content help you build trust, but it can position your brand as the most authoritative on a particular topic. - MailChimp
Content marketing can be a fantastic way to drive awareness of the product’s value and contribute to closing deals, but it doesn’t replace real education for those products that require industry knowledge and in-depth training to best prove value. Think of a financial app that helps customers budget and invest their money. Content marketing may help drive awareness of the benefits of budgeting and investing overall - perhaps an article, “Why invest before age 25?” - but it falls short of truly teaching individuals how to manage their money.
Enter Customer Education
Customer education, as this type of teaching is often called, can work well alongside content marketing to create educated, qualified customers who will be able to do more with the product.
Customer education is the process of developing a formalized education initiative to help customers realize the true value of a product or service. It refers to the process of teaching an individual customer how to achieve a specific outcome. - Intellum
Continuing the financial app example, an education strategy may involve workshops, on demand courses, and certifications that attract potential and current customers. A course titled “Learn how to invest with $100” will likely be valuable to many customers. Upon completion of the course, customers will not only understand the terminology and offerings in the app to a greater degree, but they’ll find more enjoyment leveraging the investment possibilities.
The best of both content worlds
When content marketing focuses on building trust, driving loyalty, and proving value with content delivered throughout the sales cycle, customer education can complement it well by building an informed and educated customer-base. And an educated customer tends to be a devoted customer. In fact, a Forrester report showed that devoted customers can lead to an additional 165% in profit contribution compared to average customers!
Content marketing at its core is about getting the right customers in the door at the right time, while customer education is about ensuring they get maximum value once they’re in.
Are you ready to expand your education strategy?
Echtus can help. We offer a full range of professional services geared to help companies see real revenue and growth from education initiatives. Contact us for a free evaluation of your business needs.