How Marketing and Customer Education Can Work Together

In a recent webinar, Unlock the Power of Educational Marketing: 5 Growth Insights, we got a great question on how marketing and customer education can collaborate:

‍How can we best facilitate a continuous feedback loop in organizations where marketing and customer education are distinct teams?

Continuous Feedback Loop For Educational Marketing Success

I haven’t encountered many organizations where these functions report to the same leader, so in most cases, these teams don’t work together and probably don’t understand each other’s work/goals/needs. I use a three-step process to establish a continuous loop and better relationships:

1. Establish a Shared Goal
2. Identify Ways to Help Each Other
3. Make a Plan

Step 1 - Establish a Shared Goal

Marketing often has a poor reputation or misunderstood value when it comes to other customer-facing teams. They might think you only care about revenue or that you just make fancy PowerPoint decks. Begin by helping them understand marketing’s high-level goals, which probably include:

• Prospects and customers have a positive perception of the brand.
• The organization continuously acquires new customers.
• The organization retains existing customers.

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Your customer education team should agree that these goals matter, and they’ll see that your goals overlap with their own goals. (If they don’t, you have bigger problems.) The obvious overlap in this scenario is both teams want to retain existing customers. Bam, shared goal!

‍Step 2 - Identify Ways to Help Each Other

With your shared goal(s) in mind, talk about what “educational marketing” means and figure out where it intersects customer education. Again, here’s a chance to establish some shared ownership because good customer education (including documentation) is good marketing. In B2B tech, most prospective customers evaluate products just as much on features as on the quality of resources. Companies with good resources just win more deals. Your customer education team is doing marketing, whether they realize it or not! 

Here are some examples of how marketing and customer education can help each other while also helping themselves:

• Develop 101-level content that serves as prerequisites for training classes.
• Promote training classes via social, email, paid media, etc. (even as the next step after a lead-generating activity).
• Publish happy student testimonials on the website.
• Share surveys, chat logs, and Q&As.
• Invite teammates to observe live customer education activities (whether driven by marketing or customer education).
• Give input on popular topics or common knowledge gaps.

‍Step 3 - Make a Plan

All this great collaboration is unlikely to produce a continuous feedback loop if you don’t outline what each team will do and set up a (light) process to ensure it happens! It can be tempting to skip straight to making a plan, but don’t! Getting buy-in for a plan and making that plan sticky requires a shared goal with an understanding of how your teams share ownership of achieving that goal. 

Your plan will vary depending on how the teams decide to help each other. Here’s a sample plan using an example of a training course:

Before customer education creates a new course:

• Marketing and customer education will meet to discuss the proposed topic and identify existing materials (e.g., blogs, videos, ebooks, documentation) that could be used for prerequisites, in-class resources, or post-class continuous learning.

While a new course is being created:

• Marketing will fill any 101-level gaps with educational marketing content.
• The teams will create/execute a promotion plan for the new course.

When a training occurs:

• A marketing representative attends to observe, paying extra attention to student questions.

1x/quarter:

• Customer education provides course data (student titles/companies, survey responses, etc) to marketing.
• The teams meet to talk about insights gained from the sessions, course data, and marketing activities.
• The teams make adjustments for the coming quarter.

Break down the silos and unlock the potential of marketing and customer education collaboration

Though this article is about building a relationship between marketing and customer education, this advice can easily be adapted to a continuous feedback loop with sales, developer relations, etc. Once you’ve had some success with your first partnership, give it a try with others - good luck!

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