How to Build an Education-Based Marketing Program

This article is part of a series on leveraging education as a marketing tactic:

• 5 Tips for Successful Educational Marketing
• Education: The Most Powerful Tool in a Marketer’s Kit (this blog)
• How to Build an Education-Based Marketing Program (this post)

You made the decision to incorporate education into your marketing strategy. Now, what's next? To create effective education that enhances your brand and guides your customer base towards generating revenue, you will combine marketing techniques with best practices from the learning and development (L&D) field. These techniques and processes can be used for simple (e.g. a short video series) and complex (e.g. a month-long workshop series) programs.

What is “learning and development”?

L&D is a discipline that implements programs and initiatives to enhance the knowledge, skills, and abilities of individuals, whether within an organization or externally (including customers). These activities, such as training programs, workshops, and educational resources, primarily focus on increasing the skills and knowledge required for the success of individuals and organizations. Job titles and categories in this field can include trainers, instructional designers, L&D managers, sales enablement, and more. The goals of L&D efforts often revolve around engagement (the number of people attending a class) or impact (evidence of students' learning).

In the field of L&D, programs are designed following a straightforward process that I will adapt in this article for marketing purposes:

1. Form the team
2. Know your audience
3. Identify gaps and overlap
4. Select a topic
5. Identify outcomes
6. Pick modalities
7. Select metrics

Step 1 — Form the Team

Education programs provide an excellent opportunity for cross-functional collaboration. By involving stakeholders in the creative process, you are more likely to achieve a higher overall program quality and gain their support. Consider including the following teams as equal partners or consultants throughout the process:

• Product management
• Engineering
• Sales
• Community relations
• Customer success
• Customer training

Step 2 — Know Your Audience

Before designing any educational activities, you need a good understanding of your customer base. As marketers, you probably already have this captured in your persona documents or marketing plans. Begin by making sure you can answer three questions:

• Who are they?
• What do they care about?
• What gets in the way?

For example

Step 3 — Identify Gaps and Overlap

Within “what gets in the way?”, there will be a spectrum of skills and knowledge needed by your customer base to overcome their barriers. In this step, you will decide which of those items should be prioritized via three sub-steps.

1. Generate a list of knowledge or skill “gaps” that would help your audience overcome their barriers.
2. Find the overlap with your organization’s product(s) and eliminate items that aren’t relevant. ?
3. Prioritize the remaining “gaps” based on what will make the biggest impact for your audience (using brand relevant as a second factor). This is a great place to leverage data and anecdotes from other marketing activities and sales engagements.

For example

• Cloud architect can have gaps related to AI, Kubernetes , microservices architectures, DevOps practices, modern security practices, and much more.
• Your organization doesn’t do anything with AI (yet!) so you strike it from the list. It’s an interesting topic that might merit a thought leadership blog (“How to incorporate AI into your Kubernetes management processes”) but if it’s not core to your business, then it’s not worth significant investment.
• Comments and questions from recent webinars and sales engagements indicate a persistent knowledge gap amongst your core audience, that they don’t know what an “Ingress controller ” is used for. That’s a problem because that kind of technology is one of your products, NGINX Ingress Controller ! You decide this is a top priority.

Step 4 — Select a Topic

Based on your audience and the most important skills or knowledge they need, choose a topic for your program.

It could be as simple as creating some educational assets around the gap (“what is an Ingress controller”). But you run the risk of limiting your potential audience to people who think “gosh, I should learn what an Ingress controller is.” You should consider taking the altitude a click higher, to cover a topic that’s a big broader and might catch more of your customer base. To get there, build out the stages of knowledge that get progressively broader until you find the right altitude for your program. The sweet spot is a topic that’s broadly appealing to the majority of your audience (without being so broad that you won’t be able to create a quality program) and is an in-demand topic.

For example

Using the B2B example, it's smart to focus on Stage 2 (knowledge of Kubernetes networking) because it’s a hot topic that many cloud architects are studying. You're less likely to have to convince people they need to learn about it, but it's still focused enough for a good program.

Did I lose people who aren’t technical marketers? That’s ok! This method also applies to non-technical products.

For example

I’ve never worked on a fitness app (though I use a bunch), but I’d probably choose to try an education program on “free indoor winter activities”, with the Minneapolis Skyway System as a featured component. The broader topic should be appealing to transplants who aren’t ready to embrace snowy Midwest winters.

Step 5 — Identify Outcomes

Being intentional about your desired outcomes is crucial for program success and getting support from stakeholders. It can be hard to separate outcomes from the metrics you’ll use to measure success. But trust me, these need to be separate steps. Think of outcomes and metrics like this:

Outcome = What will be different if your program is a success

Metric = How you'll measure outcome achievement

Let’s start with outcomes, which should get stakeholders excited and help them see the potential of your program. Here are some outcomes from our “Kubernetes networking” program:

• Outcome #1 (awareness): Increase community awareness that NGINX is a leader in the microservices space
• Outcome #2: Provide the community with valuable education that will help their microservices adoption journey

Outcome #3: Introduce the community to relevant and open source NGINX tools for delivering and understanding microservices

Step 6 — Pick Your Modalities

With your outcomes firmly in mind, you’re ready to start designing your program! But don’t just start by picking your favorite content type. Begin by deciding how and when you want people to engage with your program. You can choose for your program to be synchronous, asynchronous, or both!

Synchronous Programs

Synchronous means people engage at a specific time and work through the program in a way that’s dictated by the host. It can be in-person or virtual, and common modalities are webinars, livestreams, meetups, and workshops.

• Pros: Can be more engaging because of the excitement of everything happening live, and you can set it up to allow interaction with and between participants.
• Cons: Your audience is limited to the people who are available at the time (and possibly place) of the program, and these kinds of programs have the potential to be very expensive if you’re renting space or providing food.

Asynchronous Programs

Asynchronous happens on your own time (though it can still be time-bound), typically in a self-serve manner. Many synchronous activities can be made to be asynchronous (think on-demand webinars or self-serve labs). Asynchronous programs can also include videos, blogs, infographics, ebooks, Slack communities, and more.

• Pros: Often are infinitely scalable, time-zone friendly, and most likely to offer digital tracking.
• Cons: It is hard to measure true engagement, even with digital tracking, and participants can get confused about how the program works.

Appropriate Activity Selection

Once you’ve decided on the mix of synchronous vs. asynchronous, you can start picking the types of activities to include in the program. Consider three dimensions when selecting activities:

• Best conveys the information/knowledge
• Most engaging for the audience
• Aligns to your resources (time, money, people)

Step 7 — Select Metrics

Now for the metrics, which is often the easiest part of the whole process. But first a warning straight from the trainer’s handbook: Beware of “butts in seats” (attendance) and “smile sheet” (reviews) metrics. Decades of research indicates that these kinds of metrics make us feel good but are poor indicators of success. Not to say you shouldn’t use these metrics – I think they’re useful and relevant to lead gen – but they shouldn’t be your only metrics.

To get smarter with metrics, consider The Kirkpatrick Model , a standard for measuring the impact of L&D activities:

• Level 1: Reaction — The degree to which participants find the training favorable, engaging, and relevant to their jobs
• Level 2: Learning — The degree to which participants acquire the intended knowledge, skills, attitude, confidence, and commitment based on their participation in the training
• Level 3: Behavior — The degree to which participants apply what they learned during training when they are back on the job
• Level 4: Results — The degree to which targeted outcomes occur as a result of the training and the support and accountability package

With this in mind, I divide education metrics into two categories:

Program Awareness = Did your customer base learn about the program and receive some key messages?

Program Engagement = How many people interacted with your program?

Awareness metrics are Level 1 indicators, meaning they’re not useful for measuring true impact. But when simple awareness is what you care about, it’s a good category. And you may need these metrics to measure whether you’re going to hit your engagement goals. Here are some sample indicators of awareness:

• Total Registration: 10k (20% of registrants from enterprise companies)
• Webpage views: 60k
• Social media likes & shares: 2k
• Email invitation click-to-open rate: 25%

Engagement metrics tend to be a combination of Level 1 and Level 2. And they’re good for marketers because engaged people can make good candidates for future lead gen activities (nurture emails, etc). Sample metrics include:

• Webinar attendance: 30% of registrants
• Hands-on lab completions: 30% of registrants
• Badge attainments: 10% of registrants
• New Slack members: 1.5k

You’re Ready, Now Develop the Content!

Now for the fun! Depending on how you’ve structured the program, your marketing team might own content generation or continue collaborating with cross-functional teams.