3 Things You Must Know About Your Audience Before Building a Customer Education Program

As a customer success leader, founder, or education specialist, you're always looking for ways to enhance your customer education program's impact.

But let's face it: throwing a bunch of info at your customers and hoping it sticks is so last season. People aren’t in the mindset to be educated in this distracted age.? If you want to create a customer education program that works (and trust me, you do), you've got to nail these three key things about your audience.

1) Segmentation: Know Your Audience Inside Out

Imagine trying to teach a room full of people without knowing who they are. Spoiler alert: It doesn't work. Customer education is kinda the same deal. You can't use the same approach for everyone and expect magic to happen.

The fix: start by identifying your key customer groups. Are you dealing with agency professionals or small business owners who barely have time to breathe? Students or seasoned experts? Each segment has unique needs and expectations.

Some ways to nail segmentation:

• Conduct targeted surveys to understand your customers' relationships with your company
• Analyze user data to identify distinct groups based on behaviour and needs
• Create personas for each segment to guide your content creation

Remember, when it comes to education, one size fits none.

2) Motivation: Uncover the 'Why' Behind Their Desire to Learn

Here's a truth bomb: Your customers aren't sitting around waiting for your next webinar. They've got a million things on their plate, and learning your product might not be top of the list. Unless...you make it irresistible. You can make it irresistible only when you understand what makes your learners motivated.

People learn for various reasons:

• Necessity: Some need to master your product to keep their job
• Achievement: Others are driven by certifications or badges
• Functionality: Many simply want to use your product effectively

Your job is to align your education program with these motivations. How? By clearly communicating the value proposition of your training.

Show them how your training will make them the office hero, score that promotion, make their lives easier, or finally get their side hustle off the ground.

3) Experience: Meet Them Where They Are

Last but not least, gauge your audience's prior experience. This step prevents you from boring experts with basics or overwhelming novices with advanced concepts.

Think about these factors:

• Industry knowledge: Do they know your industry inside out, or are they fresh off the boat?
• Product familiarity: Have they used your product before, or is this their first time using it?
• Learning preferences: Are they "read the manual" types, or more "let me push all the buttons" learners?

Use this information to create a choose-your-type-of-content education program. Let learners pick their path and skip the stuff they already know. Trust me, they'll thank you for it.

Remember, the goal isn't just to educate – it's to empower. By understanding these three core elements, you're not just building a customer education program; you're cultivating a community of confident, successful users who will champion your product.

The Customer Educated episode with Vicky Kennedy covers the key customer insights that might make or break your customer education program. Vicky also talks about building attribution models for Customer Education programs to prove ROI.

?? Watch or listen to the full episode here. Spotify | Apple

Trainn is a Customer Education platform built for B2B SaaS companies of all sizes to onboard, train, and educate their customers, at scale.