Don’t let the title “customer education” fool you—customer education can be used for future customers as well!
Companies like HubSpot, with their legendary HubSpot Academy, have proven how education can be used as an effective tool for marketing and sales.
Here are five ways you can pull customer education forward in the customer lifecycle:
1. Establish a category or framework.
Many companies have established a framework that ties to their product—like HubSpot Academy did with inbound marketing.
Others have established new categories, such as Drift with Conversational Marketing and Gong with Revenue Intelligence.
If you’re establishing a category or framework, education is a necessity. People are used to thinking a certain way, and education can be used to help them think differently (and see how your product can help solve their problems!).
2. Differentiate your company.
What your company sells is more than just the product itself. This is called a “whole product concept” and includes education, services, and customer success.
A company with dedicated education can be the deciding factor for some prospects.
Check out more on how your marketing and education teams can share your education content in this blog.
3. Generate leads.
Ever been asked to provide your email for access to an ebook or webinar? We have. That’s a marketing practice for capturing contact info (i.e., generating leads).
Education can do this job, too. In fact, education can probably do a better job at lead generation because the content is often more valuable than your average ebook or webinar.
The key to using your learning management system (LMS) for marketing is flexible gating options. Typically, everything in an LMS is behind a login. If you’re using education for marketing, you’ll want to make sure you can partially gate content (i.e., make some content visible and the rest behind a sign up form).
See how Partnerships Experience Academy does this with their content catalog:
4. Educate leads.
On an episode of the Marketing Powerups podcast, Chris LoDolce, one of the founding team members at HubSpot Academy, shared that people who were certified prior to buying experienced faster time to value, and were more likely to retain.
The HubSpot team even offered discounts on software to people who were already certified because they knew they would recoup that investment quickly. Imagine what education could do for your own prospects (and for your business goals)!
5. Nurture prospects.
Education can be used to nurture prospects who aren’t ready to buy today, but could be in the future. In that same podcast episode, Chris shared that HubSpot sales people referred prospects who weren’t quite ready to buy to HubSpot Academy. The goal: they’d learn until they were ready to purchase.
In marketing, we want our companies to be top of mind. Education can be a way to stay top of mind while providing value to the prospect—making you top of their list when they’re in-market for your product!
Get more insights from Chris in this on-demand webinar.
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