How to use your blog and inbound marketing in Customer Education
We've talked a lot about Customer Education here, but there's always more to say! Customer Education can take many forms and happen on many platforms, because it's a way to create value for a product by showing everything it can do. In this article I'll show you how to use your blog and inbound marketing to get the most out of customer education. Not sure how to get started with customer education? Click here to find out! Even better: by the end, you'll have your own guide to implementing inbound marketing in your company, plus a step-by-step way to measure whether your strategies are working. Okay, enough talk, let's get to it!
What is inbound marketing?
First, you need to understand what inbound marketing is. The name gives you some clues, doesn't it? As the name says, inbound marketing is a marketing strategy focused on attracting customers, that is, on bringing customers in to your services and products. In 2018 alone, Google ran a study showing that 60% of shoppers start their search online, which shows how powerful online marketing can be. With that in mind, inbound marketing can and should reach these consumers who are looking for products online, because they're looking for solutions and products that can improve their quality of life. When you present your product or service online as a solution and try to project the best possible image, consumers with a problem find what you're offering and are drawn to your brand. The way you attract them can vary a lot and should fit your company. It can be through blogs, videos, webinars. It all depends on the audience you want to reach as a company. This marketing strategy has many benefits for your company, since it's less intrusive than other forms of advertising. Your customers won't be bombarded with ads for your products. Because they're the ones looking for information, they come looking for your company. Another important point is how it helps with customer education, but we'll get into that in detail later. In short, inbound marketing is a marketing strategy where the customer seeks out your company across different platforms. In the next section, I'll walk you through the tools within this strategy.
What are the tools used in inbound marketing?
There are a few tools that can help your company with inbound marketing. Here I'll list some that will give you more confidence when implementing it and support you throughout the process. The content here will mix marketing techniques with customer education, which is inevitable. Blogs are great for anyone implementing inbound marketing. The texts you publish stay on the platform no matter how long ago they were posted, and if there's demand, that content will be shown to the potential customer. A blog is also much less formal than a website, which can make it easier to connect with readers. A good way to boost your blog posts is to tie them to your social networks. That gives you more reach and sparks the curiosity of people who want to know more. A well-educated prospect will be a better customer once they sign the contract. Another useful tool is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. It helps you manage your customer relationships better, since it holds important information about your customers. If it's configured well, you can see which content a customer has already consumed, which streamlines the onboarding process. Emails are also great for inbound marketing. They're best used to build a relationship with people who have already shown some interest and signed up, for example, for your blog's newsletter. It's also worth using different platforms for keyword optimization. After all, if you want to be found in search engines, you need to use the right keywords. It's also useful to analyze the metrics of your social networks and blogs, besides traffic. There are several analytics tools that can help with this part of inbound marketing. Each of these tool categories has specific software, and each one has its own quirks. To choose the best fit for your company, try to understand what you're looking for and which ones work best with the tools you already use day to day.
How can inbound marketing help in Customer Education?
As you've probably noticed, inbound marketing is closely tied to customer education, and each one ends up supporting the other. When you think about customer education to convey the real value of your products to customers, you can also think about inbound marketing strategies. Attracting different customers to your blog with content built around your products is the foundation of inbound marketing. The foundation of customer education is teaching customers to use the product in the best possible way. Combine the two and your company has a wide range of customer education content it can publish on blogs and social networks. Because this content is so relevant to your audience, it serves as the first stage of inbound marketing, which is attracting customers. When you hire an instructional designer with marketing knowledge, you get the best of both worlds: content that educates your customer base while generating leads for your business. See how they connect? With the right planning it becomes a cycle that takes much less energy across both strategies, because they work so well together. This matters because your marketing team should work with the team responsible for customer education and customer experience. All of these areas converge on the same goal: creating content that attracts customers and generates leads.
How to plan and build your inbound marketing process
To plan and build the inbound marketing process in your company, you need to understand that inbound marketing has three phases: attraction, engagement and satisfaction. All of them focus on customers. The first phase works like "bait" for the customers who are online. You should have relevant content on different media so customers can find you. Next comes the engagement phase, where those customers are "hooked". Leads are generated here, and everyone who showed interest in the previous phase is shown different content, much more focused on the value of your product. Finally, there's the last phase, when the customer has already bought your product or service. Here you must make sure their experience is the best it can be, without major difficulties, so that they can recommend you to people they know.
Planning the process
Now that you have all the stages clear, planning the whole process is much easier. As we showed, the first stage is having good "bait". To do that, think about which content would be interesting to pair with the products you sell. Say you have an English course platform. How about creating posts about the different uses of the verb to be, or tips for traveling to countries where English is the native language? Everything you come up with should spark curiosity about your English course. In this first stage it's also important to decide which platform you'll post this content on. Also consider how much time you'll have to write and publish. It may not seem like it, but it takes time and dedication. After all, you need to present yourself as an authority on the subject, and if you produce poor content with structures that aren't visually pleasant, you won't attract customers. In the engagement stage, if you made good content tied to your product, generating leads will be easy. Your future customers will already be closer to your brand, and when they interact with you, it's easier to build that connection and send links to convert them. At this stage, think about how you'll communicate with them. Through social media messages? By email? Over WhatsApp, where all questions are answered directly by a salesperson or a bot? Think about the different options and see which your customers respond to best, so you can convert interested people into leads. And in the last stage, your company must focus heavily on delivering a perfect customer experience. We've covered this stage in earlier posts, but remember the key points: give all the help necessary and anticipate possible difficulties. With these steps well structured, you probably already have a clear direction to follow in your company. It isn't fixed, but it's important to keep your goals and a well-structured plan in mind. The way your company implements inbound marketing may differ from your competitors', but what matters is that it works for you.
What are the inbound marketing metrics?
In the earlier sections, we talked a lot about inbound marketing "working". But how do you see whether it's really working? That's why we've put together some metrics you can track to shape your strategies. Each of the stages we covered has a specific metric to tell you whether it's working. For the first stage, attraction, track the number of people reached. How many people have read your posts recently? How much has it grown? How much has it dropped? This data is important to learn what your potential customers are searching for and which areas interest them most. Then, in the engagement stage, the metric is the lead conversion rate. If this stage is going well, the conversion rate will be high. Remember, it's closely tied to the first stage. If one part of the process isn't delivering good results, everything else will be affected too.
Closing the inbound marketing cycle in customer education
Finally, to track customer satisfaction, use forms. These can live inside your platform, asking whether the answers provided were helpful, or be sent by email after purchase to learn about each customer's experience. This varies a lot depending on how you've been communicating with customers since the first moment. The great thing about inbound marketing is that success is easier to measure, since social networks already provide data that helps a lot with your marketing strategy.
