Aligning Customer Education to Business Goals
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Considerations for Aligning Content to Success
Without alignment between your customer education programs and the current business goals, it’s nearly impossible to move the business forward and show success (the right kinds of success) in your training programs.
This article highlights the ways to align Customer Education activities and output so that you can move the business toward its goal without wasting tons of time and energy on content.
To explore HOW to create this alignment between the goals of the business and the goals of the education team, we’ll explore the following in this article:
- Goal Setting With Leadership
- Customer Education’s Impact on the Customer Journey
- Aligning Content, Customer Journey, & Business Goals
- Planning Your Educational Content and Formats
But first a story - imagine this…
You’re walking into your quarterly review with leadership and have prepared a few slides highlighting how many new courses your team has produced, the number of hours of content created, and the total growth of your training catalog.
You’ve also pulled the learning data that shows how many people are enrolled in programs year-to-date and have even grabbed some screenshots from LinkedIn where peers and learners have shared great feedback after participating in one of your courses.
BUT…
When you sit down with leadership, they applaud your efforts and the quality of the craftsmanship of the materials - however, it hasn’t “done much to improve the business” and “shown the results they were hoping for…”
This scenario (while exaggerated) highlights a very real problem that teams launching customer education experience, which is - tons of energy and output, but very few results. Not from a lack of consistency or effort, but from a lack of ALIGNMENT.
The Core Problem is that education and content teams weren’t aligned with leadership goals. Content is created, distributed, and repurposed across every imaginable channel, but leaders don’t see the meaningful results they’re looking for from the investment in content.
Only when the team responsible for content creation is brought in and shown how their efforts haven’t produced “X or Y results” do they then realize they’ve been working in the wrong direction.
Goal Setting with Leadership
The example story highlights how important Goal Setting and regular communication with your leadership teams are throughout every stage of building a Customer Education program.
All of the activities of a customer education program fit closely together with other departments. For example, educational resources may also be great candidates for marketing assets, videos and tutorials may be extremely beneficial for customer support, and technologies used may integrate with product teams.
Defining the relationships between these teams, understanding what each team is working towards, and then looking for opportunities to share and collaborate can reduce the overall operational drag of development - and increase efficiencies in all areas of content development.
So it’s important to understand what the overall goals or themes for the month, quarter, or year will be.
For example,
- Is the sales team pushing for enterprise accounts instead of mid-market? What support assets will they need to onboard or engage organizations with that many potential users?
- Or, is there a big push to extend renewals? Maybe retention is the primary goal to build a safety net for the business’ ARR.
- Perhaps product has a series of major developments for a platform that really needs to see adoption for the company to remain competitive. This could introduce new use cases that need to be thought of and explained to a new audience.
Customer education is a perfect vehicle to support all of these goals, but it takes an understanding of what the business is trying to achieve and then building towards that goal. Determine what the focus for the year or the quarter is, put a plan in place, and schedule check-ins.
Customer Education’s Impact on the Customer Journey
The possibilities of “what Customer Education is used for in your organization” are limited only by your imagination and resources.
But to maximize the effectiveness of Customer Education for your business (and revenue), it’s important to explore the Customer Journey, their process of Discovery, and the Obstacles that exist in their world.
What is the Customer Journey?
According to the definition used by Hubspot:
"The customer journey is the series of interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or business as they become aware of a pain point and make a purchase decision. While the buyer's journey refers to the general process of arriving at a purchase, the customer journey refers to a buyer's purchasing experience with a specific company or service."
Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-journey-map
By designing these customer interactions or “touchpoints,” you can choreograph the experience that potential customers have with the business and achieve more intentional results with new customers.
The general model for a Customer Journey involves 5 key stages: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Loyalty.
- Awareness - In the Awareness stage, customers realize they have a problem. At this point, they may not know that they need a product or service, but they will begin doing research either way.
- Considerations - In the consideration stage, customers have done enough research to realize that they need a product or service. At this point, they begin to compare brands and offerings.
- Decision - In the decision stage, customers have chosen a solution and are ready to buy.
- Retention - In the retention stage, customers have now purchased a solution and stay with the company they purchased from, as opposed to leaving for another provider."
- Loyalty - In the loyalty stage, customers not only choose to stay with a company — they actively promote it to family, friends, and colleagues. The loyalty stage can also be called the advocacy stage.
Aligning Content, Customer Journey, & Business Goals
Now that we’ve outlined the stages of the Customer Journey, it’s possible to map the business goals and objectives to the Stages most closely associated with those goals and focus our content efforts on those stages.
So first, identify the goals of the business in practical terms - get specific.
- Is the goal focused on “new business”?
For example, “ increase new customer signups, plan upgrades, a particular service package, etc.?” - Is it related to retention or incremental growth?
For example, creating predictable monthly/annual revenues and reducing churn?
- Are the goals related to a particular point in the buyer’s experience?
For example, Increase conversions of free trials to a paid plan by 20%?
Getting specific with the desired outcome can help identify where you need to leverage customer education, content development, and other tools to achieve those goals.
So identify where in the customer journey, you will be focused for some time.
Examples of Aligning Business Goals to the Customer Journey stages and content -
If the goal is Awareness:
You’ll be speaking to the key problems that individuals face, which ultimately your product is a solution for.
Your content may be written, video or audio content that’s distributed across external channels and pages on your website so that they are easily discovered and consumed by potential customers.
If the goal is Consideration:
You’ll be supporting potential customers with resources and toolkits to help guide their evaluation process. This often looks like workflow guides and tutorials, solution comparisons, expert sessions and case studies, and more.
If you’re focused on Retention:
You’ll want to create content that’s tailored and nuanced to the obstacles that your current customers, partners, or resellers face. This could be onboarding and setup support, knowledge base content, templates and tools that make adoption easier, in product tooltips or guides, and regular email communication and support.
If you’re focused on Loyalty:
you’ll want to align customer education and possibly other incentives that help foster a strong sense of “advocacy” for your products and services. This may include partner programs, reseller /affiliate programs, product communities, live events, and more.
While all stages of the Customer Journey are important, the movement of the last thirty years away from the ownership model towards the subscription and consumption models has made the last two stages, Retention, and Loyalty, the areas in need of the highest amount of focus and attention for many organizations.
Planning Your Educational Content and Formats
Now that we understand our business goals and the stage(s) of the customer journey we’ll be focused on, we can start to plan content that helps customers move from one stage of their journey to the next with our product.
Content planning is one of the more overlooked steps in many projects, as once the initial brainstorming sessions happen around Customer Education, it’s a race to see how quickly content can go live. But, understanding what formats you have at your disposal to accomplish your goals is critical. And, knowing “why certain formats are being used” for these particular education goals is the starting point.
Planning Content Types & Purpose
Content planning begins with defining the purpose for the pieces of content, or identifying why you are selecting certain formats over others.
For example -
Do you need certification courses or do you need short-form written content with screenshots?
Both can meet the need and help your MVA reach success, but they have different levels of complexity and output.
Here’s a quick matrix that can help you identify possible content types for your needs and common delivery methods.
Content Matrix
Summary
Back to our story at the beginning of this article, it all starts with knowing “where the business is focused” and “why customer education programs or projects are needed.” Instead of conversations about “volume of content” or “number of enrollments”, you should be having meaningful conversations about the goals of the business & the impact of your programs.
Customer education programs can collect all sorts of helpful data and insights related to customer challenges, opportunities to develop or test new ideas in products, and even assist in “upselling” or “cross-selling” opportunities by presenting clients with new capabilities and features that deliver even more value.
In your next meeting with leadership, understanding these goals will allow you to speak “their language” and articulate your plans in a way that highlights the alignment of education content, the business goals, and how success can be measured.
To recap:
- Customer education can support many of the goals of the business - customer acquisition, retention, and market awareness.
- Educational content should be crafted based on the stage of the customer.
- Use a matrix or guide to help determine the types of content you’ll create, based on the specific purpose of each type of content.
In our next guide, Identifying Your Minimum Viable Audience (MVA), we’ll explore the process of designing and testing customer education materials with a targeted audience before scaling production efforts.
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