What is customer education content or training content?
First, let’s have a look at what we consider a customer education and educational content. Content strategy is a complicated matter and if you want to have a strong customer education strategy, it’s crucial Customer education content is designed to help customers successfully use your product to solve their problems.
This can be done in a variety of ways, from providing quick responses to customer questions to blog posts or product manuals. It’s important to write content that shows customers how to accomplish a specific task or solves a specific problem. It can be anything: responding quickly to a customer’s question, creating a product manual, or making a quick how-to video, all of these help build a customer education program.
Start creating better content – 5 Examples of the Best Customer Education Website Content
Visual documentation
Visual documentation is a great way to show customers how to do something. It is also a great way to increase customer satisfaction by providing excellent support and documentation. Visual documentation can be anything from a quick picture guide or a video to a full-blown slideshow.
Visual documentation is great for providing customer education. It’s a perfect way to solve a customer’s problem and provide customer service by showing them how to use your product.
A great example are product manuals which offer excellent customer service. It should definitely be part of your customer education strategy. There are a lot of companies that don’t offer any form of product manuals. This is a missed opportunity.
Do you need some inspiration to get started? It can be as simple as this example persona profile.
Blog posts
Educational blog posts are a great way to help customers learn how to use your product and solve their problems. It’s a great way to get started with educational content and build up your customer education program. Blog posts are a great way to give customers a way to get support when you can’t be there. They are also a great way to offer customer education about elaborate problems because they tend to be longer and more detailed than other types of educational content.
3 things to remember when writing a blog post:
- Keep your blog posts short and to the point. Focus on addressing your customer’s pain points and satisfying their needs. Your goal is customer success.
- Make sure your blog post is clear and easy to understand and easy to read. Make sure that your blog post gives the reader a clear path to follow.
- Focus on the solution. It’s easy to get carried away in writing a blog post. It’s easy to get into details instead of focusing on the solution.
Guides and tutorials
Another great way to engage and help your customers and a great educational content are tutorials. They give customers a clear path to follow and accomplish whatever they may be struggling with. Creating tutorials is a lot of work but you can start with just a few simple short ones. Add step-by-step pictures which are easy to understand to help your customers solve their problems at no time.
Guides
Guides are similar to tutorials, but they don’t have to be as in-depth. Typically, guides are used to provide information about software features and options. This is helpful for customers who are just at the beginning of their customer journey. They are also helpful for customers who are looking for a refresher or want to learn more about the product.
How-to videos
If you want to take your tutorials to yet another level, try how-to videos. How-to videos are great for showing customers how to accomplish a specific task in a really visual way and to increase customer satisfaction. If you add them to your customer education content portfolio, they will do a lot of work for you.
If you want to start creating professional-looking tutorial and training videos, you will need a quality camera and a video production software. For starters, even a phone with a good camera should be enough if you just want to try it out, but if you really want your videos to look professional, you’ll need to upgrade later on. Or hire a team of professionals.
You are probably aware of the fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. There are a lot of people who use YouTube to find video educational content which they can easily share on social media. Customer training videos definitely should not be left out when you’re planning your customer education program.
Video production is a lot of work but it’s worth it. Videos are the most engaging training content of all. They can easily help your customers learn how to use your product and get them to the next step in their customer journey. Customer success, which leads to sales.
How-to videos can also be a great way to put a face on your company by showing customers that you are real people who care about their problems.
Live Webinars
An example of an interactive training content that you don’t need any special and expensive equipment for are live webinars. When planning your customer education content strategy, don’t leave them out from your customer education program.
How to start with webinars? Make a plan.
- Decide on the theme and topics of the webinar.
- Get your webinar content ready.
- Choose the date and time.
- Start promoting your webinar and collect the email addresses of all attendees.
- Offer an incentive for registration.
- Send out a reminder email the day before the webinar.
- Send a follow-up email to all attendees and send them the recording of the webinar.
An Online Customer Academy
If you think big, add an online customer academy to your customer education strategy. What’s a customer academy? It’s a place where your customers can go to find information and to learn everything they need to know about your product.
An online customer academy is a content hub with educational materials: tutorials, webinars, articles, videos, e-books, presentations and more. Anything they can think of. It’s a place where your customers can go to get the information they need, whenever they need it.
Creating a complex customer academy takes time. Start small, keep working and let it grow over time. Try to make your customer academy interactive. Add various types of content to cover different topics.
What else to keep in mind when planning your Customer Education Strategy?
Make sure your website is easy to navigate and that it has all the information your customers need. Your website is a great place to start when planning your customer education program. It’s where you can share everything about your company and all the content you create for your customers.
Communication is the key. You should always be ready to listen to your customers’ needs and answer their questions. If you have a customer support team, make sure they are trained and ready to help. You can also use live chat software to communicate with your customers. It’s a great way to provide instant answers to their questions.
Last but not least, don’t forget to share the content you create with your customers. The more you share it, the more customers will find it when they have a problem. All your customer education initiative will be no good if no one can see it. You can also reach out to influencers who may be interested in sharing your content with their audience.
Are you ready to start planning your customer education program?
We specialize in customer academies and we’re here to help you. Whether you want to build a customer education plan or implement your customer education strategy, we can help. If you are interested in a long-term partnership in which we manage your customer education academy and training program, we can also do that.
If you need any help getting started, don’t hesitate to contact us to learn more about our services.
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