“Ten years ago, we all used to deliver the exact same course to a group of 30,000 learners, all following the same path. Today or in the near future, our industry’s leaders will be delivering 30,000 different customer education pathways—each one tailored to meet the unique needs of each individual learner.”
These are the words of John Leh, CEO of research and consultancy firm Talented Learning and a session host at our Absorb 2024 Summit. He walked through an effective strategy for taking customer education from passable to strategic: segmenting content for influencers and buyers across the customer lifecycle.
Along with the founder of incentives and gamification agency Motrain, Jeff Campbell, and Absorb’s Head of Product Marketing, Vanessa Ogibowski they discussed how members of our Absorb community have been implementing this strategy for years—and with great success.
Using insights from our own community, we’ve compiled all you need to know to start segmenting your customer content:
- How to identify influencers vs. buyers
- Ideas to create super sticky content for each segment
- Signs that your segmentation strategy is making an impact
- Customer segmentation success stories
The shift to adaptive and personalized learning reshapes how we approach customer education. And the success of this transformation hinges on the capabilities of your learning management system (LMS). If your platform can’t adapt and personalize the experience for each learner, it can easily become the reason your educational program falls flat.
Why segment your customer education content?
The ROI of segmenting customer education is twofold: You’ll retain existing customers and reduce the cost of acquiring new ones. And as you study your loyal customers, the key indicators for identifying potential customers will become more refined, and your strategy will be more targeted.
When you become an expert on who your learners are, your team can:
- Strengthen brand loyalty
- Improve NPS and CSAT scores
- Uncover opportunities for upselling and cross-selling
- Start a catalyst for collaboration across customer support, events, training, marketing, and more
Ready for a deep dive? Download the customer education eBook
Segmenting your customer education content is crucial for increasing adoption and driving engagement across the customer lifecycle. Many challenges arise when companies take a grassroots, bottom-up approach to content. When you focus on building content for the masses instead of creating a top-down strategy, you’re missing opportunities to secure a long-term healthy customer base.
Your customer education would benefit from segmentation if:
- You’re losing customers
- Sales have flattened
- Customers are loyal to your product or service, but vocal about the quality of supporting training content
- Customers aren’t engaging with your learning content, or other users
- Third-party content on forums and blogs performs better than your content
Instead, think about how you can optimize the value of your customer education, create a strategic framework for your volume of content, or even upsell customers with influencers and buyers.
Understanding your audience: Influencers vs buyers
You’ve built a strong learning department, and now it’s time to build a strong revenue apparatus. Customer education is multi-disciplinary, so your relevant stakeholders must be aligned on strategy from day one. When gathering information for your influencers and buyers, this is your opportunity to flex your leadership skills with other departments. Trust us: marketing will be excited by the potential for revenue growth, your customer support team will feel more supported, and sales will be hungry for the better data a segmentation strategy will bring.
Who are influencers?
Influencers are your customers who, while they may not make the final purchasing decision, significantly impact their teams or companies' choices. They typically advocate for your solutions and help drive adoption among their peers.
Influencers are:
- Team leads and department heads
- Technical Experts and IT administrators
- Users and product specialists
- Consultants and external experts
Influencers play a pivotal role in customer education as power users and early adopters of a product. They are deeply engaged with the product, serving as internal champions who advocate for its value within their teams or organizations. Their primary goal is to enhance both their own efficiency and their colleagues, and to inspire buyers to invest time and money into the product's capabilities.
Who are buyers?
Buyers are the decision-makers responsible for the financial purchase of a product or service. They are typically managers, directors, or procurement teams who evaluate cost, ROI, and alignment with organizational goals.
Examples of buyers in action:
- An IT director logs into their vendor’s customer portal to download data compliance documentation for internal project planning.
- A marketing director enrolls in their vendor’s product knowledge certificate to understand how to leverage the platform for future campaigns.
- An HR Director captures links to microlearning modules to distribute to employees and increase adoption on their vendor’s employee engagement platform.
Buyers might not be day-to-day users of the product but require strategy-focused learning content to understand how the product will deliver value to their organization. They focus on long-term benefits, ROI, and how the product supports business goals, such as reducing costs, improving efficiency, or increasing revenue. Their priority is aligning the product's features with broader organizational strategies and assessing change management risks and opportunities for implementation planning.
Create tailored content for influencers and buyers
Now that content builders can generate courses in minutes, what should you do with the extra time on your hands? Before jumping into content creation mode, remember the goal is to add value for each influencer’s and buyer’s unique needs.
Learn how to foster loyalty and reduce churn with Absorb LMS
Pro tip: In the fireside chat at Absorb Summit 2024, John from Talented Learning cautions against creating too much content. Publishing content for content’s sake can reduce completion rates and devalue the time investment in segmenting your audience's content. Be sure to stick to content that helps you achieve key metrics for getting more budget every time.
Instead, consider the content ideas below with the knowledge that up to 80% of your content can likely stay the same. Your highest-performing content can be modified differently for each audience, and the other 20% of the content pie offers the opportunity to elevate your influencers and buyers to prime CLV status. Huzzah!
Influencers: How to turn customers into advocates
The goal for influencer audiences is to help them become internal advocates for your product. Make your influencer’s lives easier by structuring their dashboard with content for early adopters, give them tools to promote product upgrades to decision-makers, and build a community around your product to help reinforce customer learning.
Structured product knowledge
Format your content in ways that mold your users into confident and curious members of your product’s community.
- Onboarding program: Create onboarding pathways that emphasize how easy it is for influencers’ teams to adopt and use your product. Include quick-start guides, onboarding success stories, and user testimonials.
- Training and certification programs: Offer influencers access to training or certification programs on their dashboard that deepen their understanding of your product. This helps them become internal advocates who can guide implementation
- Product roadmaps and future features: Share exciting information about your product’s development roadmap, highlighting upcoming features that will address influencers’ specific needs or help them share benefits with their manager.
- Role-specific webinars: Integrate your LMS with Zoom or Webex to host webinars tailored to specific pain points influencers experience in their roles. Showcase how your product solves operational or technical challenges they face.
Personalized resources
Collaborate with customer support, sales and your LMS administrators to identify new opportunities for content creation that will support different user roles in your customer education portal.
- Role-specific sales enablement materials: Equip influencers with role-specific sales materials like presentations or data sheets that help them advocate for your product upgrades internally. Focus on how it will address operational efficiency and performance.
- Tailored product recommendations: Send personalized content that speaks directly to influencers’ interests, such as product features that will save them time or improve their department’s efficiency.
Opportunities for engagement and feedback
Have you heard of the social learning theory? It’s the idea that most learning happens informally through interactions with colleagues and industry peers. We already know engaging content is an important part of knowledge retention, but what about the role of learning from others? You can get started with content that facilitates supportive mentorship, new professional connections, and improved collaboration between colleagues.
How to create a community around your product:
- Ambassador/advocacy programs: Build programs where influencers can earn rewards or recognition for championing your solution internally. This could include incentives for bringing your product to their leadership team’s attention.
- Interactive content for problem-solving: Offer interactive quizzes, diagnostic tools, or assessments that help influencers identify challenges in their current processes and show how your product can provide a solution.
- Influencer-focused social media content: Develop social media content that speaks directly to influencers, using platforms like LinkedIn to share how your product can streamline their workflows and contribute to overall business goals.
The benefits of social learning even support your customers’ success and employee retention! Mercer reports that thriving employees are twice as likely to describe their role as “relationship-focused” and their work environment as “collaborative”.
Discover more about social learning
Buyers: How to create learning content for decision-makers
With buyers, your content will need to showcase the wider impact of your products instead of tips on how to use a product. Director-level users are more likely to purchase if they can see how the product has provided ROI for other clients. This is because buyers access your customer education when they need to create a business case for product upgrades or evaluate the value of their ongoing relationship with your brand.
You can optimize your learning content for buyers with high-level overviews, robust reporting and analytics, and even a buyer-focused onboarding program!
High-level overviews that demonstrate business value
While influencers are looking to have their pain points resolved, buyers are more likely to seek out content that adds value to their team. For buyers’ content, you’ll want to lean into your product’s strengths to promote the ways your solutions save time, generate revenue and retain customers.
High-level overview content can look like:
- Tailored product demos: Create courses with in-depth product demos and case studies that showcase how your solution addresses specific buyer needs, such as ROI, scalability, and long-term business impact.
- Case studies and whitepapers: Help customers build a business case for product upgrades with billboards right in your buyers’ learning portal. Provide data, market research, and potential cost savings to assist them in justifying the purchase internally.
- ROI-focused webinars: Integrate your LMS with Zoom to host webinars designed for buyers that focus on your product's financial and strategic advantages. Be sure to include customer success stories that illustrate clear returns on investment.
- Customized pricing, bundling, and comparison guides: Develop content that highlights pricing models, package options, and how buyers can maximize value through custom bundles tailored to their company size or industry needs. Offer side-by-side comparison guides showing how your solution stacks up against competitors, focusing on the features and benefits that matter most to buyers, such as pricing, scalability, and customer support.
Support buyers’ reporting and analytics objectives
Many buyers might be new to your industry, and your customer education is an opportunity to show them how much your product helps them achieve company objectives. To determine whether the product meets the company's long-term goals, add whitepapers, ROI case studies, and other quantifiable proof that buyers can benefit from your product. Reporting and analytics content can include:
- Guides to customer success metrics: Share detailed reports and success metrics from existing customers in the same industry or with similar business challenges. Show quantifiable outcomes like increased efficiency, cost reductions, and improved KPIs.
- Downloadable assets for internal decision-makers: Not all decision-makers (buyers) will access the customer education portal. Promote downloadable presentations or pitch decks on buyer dashboards that they can use to present to their internal stakeholders. Focus on strategic business impact, long-term value, and organizational fit.
- Strategic roadmaps: Develop content that illustrates a long-term partnership by showcasing a product roadmap and how future updates will continue to add value to the buyer’s business over time.
- Integrate your CRM with your LMS: Give buyers the power to integrate sales insights with customer education insights. This gives buyers a clear view of the financial impact and reduces time navigating between platforms.
- Industry reports: Offer industry-specific research or reports that highlight trends, challenges, and solutions that your product addresses, positioning it as a crucial investment for buyers in that market.
Onboarding and success programs
It’s true that buyers may access your customer education less frequently than influencers, however, you can turn buyers from adopters to brand advocates by creating exciting onboarding and success programs.
Consider these customer success ideas for buyers:
- Solution-based training programs: Offer training content that shows buyers how your product can solve their specific business problems, enhance efficiency, or improve profitability. Include data-driven insights and outcomes.
- Post-purchase support content: Develop content that reassures buyers about your post-purchase support, including warranties, training, onboarding, and customer success resources to ensure their investment is maximized.
- Targeted email campaigns: Develop email sequences that highlight high-level benefits, cost savings, and long-term value for buyers. Include clear calls to action like scheduling a consultation or requesting a quote.
- Referral and loyalty program for buyers: Encourage buyers to stay engaged with referral programs or loyalty benefits, offering rewards for bringing in new business or expanding their usage of your product.
B2B case study: Customer segmentation with Absorb LMS
Meet Aaliyah. She’s a Director of Content at a global technology company. In recent years, she’s transformed their family of tech accessory and infrastructure brands with Absorb LMS. Aaliyah is a pseudonym, and we’ll call the company NexWave.
Aaliyah’s challenge
NexWave lacked a formal customer education program across its family of brands.
Their outdated LMS couldn’t handle personalization, and many brands didn’t have an education strategy at all. They aimed to create an omni-channel training solution to address this gap.
The goal and concept
Aaliyah needed to build a business case involving customer education, content development, and administrative automation to support future growth.
The goal was to create training bundles for sectors like EV charging, HVAC, and renewables, reducing direct customer management and clarifying training options.
How Aaliyah did it
For energy storage training, Aaliyah led the project, working closely with Absorb LMS to develop e-learning content from scratch.
For EV charging infrastructure, the focus was on transitioning from a self-developed LMS to Absorb, expanding into new markets while future-proofing the customer experience and managing content for various customer segments.
The results
In energy storage, the shift to eLearning reduced instructor-led training from 3 days to under 1 day, increasing annual training capacity from 20 sessions to 300 participants.
Internally, onboarding became more efficient. In EV charging, sales interactions are expected to decrease by 20-30% once development is complete, with future sales growth projected through new training markets.
See more Absorb customer success stories
How to get C-suite on board
Seeing is believing! Here are 3 ways the Absorb community has turned customer education into a revenue and retention engine:
Dura-Line supercharged customer training adoption:
“Absorb has been an amazing tool to provide custom training experiences and add value for our customers. We have over 3600 accounts that have completed over 13000 mini courses and we're excited to continue for that to grow." – Madison Carroll, Global Program Manager, Dura-Line
Addigy created a self-sufficient customer engagement engine:
“With Absorb we are able to let customers purchase training on their own and for others. Previously we had to go through salesforce and create opportunities and complete a deal. This has made training much more accessible.” – Andrew Porzio, Business Operations Manager, Addigy
Improved adoption for OneCause:
“Thanks to Absorb, OneCause's Customer Education department is taken seriously & given the respect it deserves. Since we made the transition to Absorb from our previous LMS - we have experienced 100%+ increases in the size of our content catalog, the number of active users, and the number of course completions. We have also eliminated redundant learning systems we were previously using and have unified all internal & external learning in a single place." – Brandon Celentano, Senior Customer Education Specialist, OneCause
Hey ChatGPT, what’s next for customer segmentation?
If there’s one topic that came up the most at the Absorb Summit, it’s how AI is making optimizing customer education across the lifecycle much easier. As John Leh said, it’s both here and coming at the same time. Features like personalization and generated content are helping customers work faster to better segment and communicate with buyers and influencers.
If you take away one lesson from the importance of segmentation, it should be to take a multi-departmental approach to your customer education. This means proving that customer education works at every stage of the customer lifecycle, starting small, demonstrating ROI, and then scaling the segmented content with our tips and tricks. By showing that education delivers measurable results, such as increased customer loyalty or enhanced product adoption, securing your future budget becomes easier.
Download the fostering customer success eBook
