You’re likely familiar with designing courses, training, or certifications focused on product features or key skills your customers need.

When designing these programs and content, most customer education teams think about the roles or "personas" that customers have as they use a product, which can impact what they'll want or need to learn. (think admin, user, project manager, etc.)

BUT...

As the role of customer education expands, and the channels through which content must be repurposed, I’ve began to add the stages of the customer journey into the mix - since more and more of our content is being used to educate potential customers and partners (who aren’t yet a daily user of our clients' products.)

So in addition to traditional role based or task based breakdowns, we’ve started aligning content (or planning content) by the stage of the customer journey the targeted learners are in.

In this issue, I’ll briefly outline the 5 stages of customer awareness and look at the opportunities this creates for our customer education content.

The 5 Stages of Customer Awareness

There are generally 5 Stages of awareness that your customers will go through. Each of these levels requires a different level of information, education, and support.

What This Means for Customer Education Content

Each one of these stages requires a different perspective on the educational materials we develop for our clients (also of course depending on the goals of your program and/or business needs.) So, in addition to trying to understand what skills our customers need, or what product features they need to be able to use...
‍

We should also ask where are they in their journey with our product or service?

Adding this approach to your “tool belt” gives you so many new ways to evaluate and develop your course catalogs and programming.

Instead of “teach this topic” you can slice that individual concept through the 5 stages of the journey.

‍

Watch this video on our YouTube channel about how you can use these 5 stages of the customer journey to generate over 75 pieces of education content.

Takeaways

There's a lot to "unpack" with the 5 Stages of Customer Awareness, but here's some practical actions that you can take this week:

1. Outline the 5 Stages for your customers today. Understand what the problems, challenges, and solutions are for each of the 5 stages.
2. Inventory your training content and curriculum. See if you can identify where your content "fits" in the customers' awareness levels.
3. Close gaps that exist. You may find that all of your content is focused on "Most Aware" customers, and you have virtually zero content supporting other stages of the journey.  Use this opportunity to plan potential new content or reframe existing content for those new stages or opportunities.