How do you create content to educate your customers?
In episode #12 of The Product Marketing Show, Carly Kroll and Rishabh discuss lead generation strategies and understanding content marketing, product marketing, leadership pieces, webinars and more.
One of the key issues that a lot of customer success leaders have told me is that having poor product usage and trial user churn problem, how is your experience?
So currently we have a great user adoption at our company. We do software for field service management and we work with energy, utilities, oil and gas transportation and manufacturing. In these industries, they are familiar with using some sort of process in order to do scheduling of their field technicians but one of our software’s is AR software.
So this helps with digital work instructions, with remote calls and things like that and it takes a little bit longer to have the technology to act with such innovative tools. The best way to get people on board is through proper training and education.
When each worker feels the benefit themselves and they know that they are using it not just because it’s cool or because my boss told me to but it’s actually going to help me. The second piece is that it’s easy to use. So the usefulness and ease of use are the two things that we really want to communicate to them.
It is a little bit on the marketing side in terms of post-sale. Doing post-sale marketing to our customers is because even though they’ve already bought the product,we have to continue keeping them engaged, willing to continue using it so that the onboarding is smooth.
I saw on your website, you guys also do a lot with training and content creation, around onboarding. So I think we’re on the same page.
So there’s a few different things we do, each use case is a little different. So we could have product marketing that focuses on the features of the product that says ”Here’s why the product is helpful, here’s how it will help you.”
There’s thought leadership pieces talking about how using innovative technology is changing the industry or making a difference in the industry. We do videos, webinars and have a digital portal that our customers use where they’re able to download assets or watch training videos to understand how to do it.
How do you make sure that your training content catches up with your product because of UI/UX changes?
Yeah, we have to ensure that. It’s not just the marketing team, it’s between multiple team members, between engineering and marketing to determine what are the key messages that we need to have.
Each month we meet with a check-in about what are the upcoming features that we’re planning to have from the engineering team and we start preparing content based on what they share with us so that the moment a new feature is out, we already have content set to go so as to keep the customers up to date.
So, currently what obstacles are you battling with?
I would say for our company, in particular, we are headquartered in Italy. Recently we have expanded into America and brand awareness is a challenge even though we have 20+ years of experience in the field and have a very mature product which is used by many large companies in Europe.
I think we have the most deployed licences versus any of our competitors but when you come to the US, if people don’t know your name, they’re less likely to take a meeting with you, they’re less likely to even consider your product even if you have the best product or the most effective product.
So brand awareness is our biggest challenge, we’re trying to position ourselves as thought leaders, find different outlets in order to get our messages so that people begin to recognise our name.
So, what would be your advice to new SaaS to get into new territory?
I think it is important to utilise niche media groups, whether that is a website or something else. For example, we do sponsorships with field technologies online, which is a site that a lot of field service companies go to in order to get newsletters and information.
They are respected groups or associations, so creating those connections or doing sponsorships with those groups can help open doors and introduce you to this specific market that you’re trying to reach faster than just reaching out into space and hoping that someone sees you. But I think video is also very important, video is king and having clear video examples of use cases helps you connect better.
One of our clients who are into real estate and had lots of features had their users who were mostly non-techies and they had not used computers for data analytics.
They had like 15 features and then we created stories around each of these features. We picked up one use case and put that feature on each product demo.
A story problem, how this product solves it and what benefits, just to show how easy it is to solve the problem in the product.
Right and definitely, customer use cases or customer success stories are one of the strongest features that we have for so many customers in Europe. We have those stories to say that this was the problem they were facing and here’s how our software helped to address that andshare the benefits they found but having more visuals around that would be helpful.
Another challenge we have is that all of our original videos are all in Italian, so we have to do subtitles.
