The power that product education has to transform any product is indispensable for any business, whether it is a SaaS model or any other type. In the SaaS market, this marketing strategy and attracting new qualified leads is even more important because the product is often a new solution, which solves old and new problems in a different way.

Creating an extensive knowledge base is essential for users to know how they can use your tool and extract the full potential of the product you offer them. Much more than a library of tutorials, the creation of friendly, varied content and, above all, palpable customer reality, educate potential consumers to be converted into loyal buyers.

Important to warn: product education should not only be aimed at users who come from outside the company, it should also be applied as a strategy inside, teaching the teams that work in product development, marketing, and sales, so that everyone can contribute with new insights into how to improve financial performance and discover new everyday problems that your SaaS tool can solve.

Product education advantages:

Create more product value
Improves communication with customers
Builds customer loyalty
It puts the company in a prominent position next to competitors.

What is SaaS product education and why is it important?

Product education is nothing more than teaching your customer, at various levels, how your product can and should be used and what problems it solves. In content marketing, it is taught that there are three types of content that must be done at the same time: top of the funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of the funnel.

It is no different here, at the top of the funnel, you will seek your audience by attracting them closer to your product, talking about subjects that are not specific to your company, but that has some connection, broader and that can attract the largest number of possibly new users to your site.

In the middle of the funnel, product education enters, telling about the daily problems that afflict users, showing each user that that problem is also part of his life, regardless of whether he has that problem or not at the moment, putting a little information about your product in light and gradual way.

At the bottom of the funnel, your product enters the scene, it will show you how it solves this problem in an easy and quick way, if accessible even better. It teaches step-by-step how to use your product, how long it takes to solve the problem, and how to prevent this problem from happening again.

An easy-to-understand example is from a vegan restaurant, in the first part of the funnel, its content is aimed at talking about cruelty to animals, the high prices of animal meat products, and how the consumption of this food is harmful to the environment. environment. In the second stage of the funnel, he will talk about a pain people have in relation to this product: the difficulty finding completely vegan places and their prices, which are often inaccessible, teaching how to better research the options and unmasking competitors who claim to be vegan but are not.

In the final stage, at the bottom of the funnel, the teaching is to show how your dishes are made, prove that your restaurant has the best menu, and give you step-by-step instructions on how to get to the restaurant or how to order delivery through the app.

Increases customer satisfaction

Users who have more information about how a product should be used and how much it should be used are considerably more satisfied compared to those who do not have information, this is because when using the product correctly and in the right situations, the chances of the product to meet the user's demands to its fullest potential increase considerably. On the other hand, those who use SaaS tools without knowing how they work usually experience reduced satisfaction, as the product did not meet their expectations.

Improve retention

By meeting the customer's expectations, he will not look for other solutions in the competition, because the product he already uses is enough to solve his pains in a satisfactory way. Searching for other similar options spends time and sometimes money, which a user does not want to lose, increasing retention and thus allowing for an increase in your customer base.

Impact revenue

Increasing the customer base has an extremely positive impact on the company's revenue because instead of always changing buyers and stagnating in revenue, it accumulates qualified consumers who see value in the product offered.

Decrease customer support costs

By educating their users, they become more and more autonomous and need less and less help, decreasing the search for help in their customer support, requiring the hiring of fewer employees for this function, and consequently, reducing costs in this sector.

Who does product education?

Those responsible for planning and developing the product education are normally the employees who are part of the sales or marketing team, assisted by the product owner to better understand the full potential of the SaaS product.

When the team understands everything they can about the product, the most work-intensive part is creating a plan to divide the education phases (top, middle, and bottom of the funnel) and decide which channels each of these stages will be in, which channels are worth it and what is the attraction potential of each space to increase the number of users who come in contact with the content.

Education Channels

Blog

This channel is still very efficient when it comes to educating your audience, as many look for specific topics to find answers on how a product works or how they can solve a problem. Search engines such as Google are of great help in delivering your content to as many users as possible, so it is important to learn how to optimize the SEO of each post made, in addition to delivering quality content that has information valuable and with the right language according to each type of target audience.

This channel normally has the three stages of product education, making it an excellent option and indispensable in some specific areas.

Knowledge base

When it comes to SaaS products, having a knowledge base is a requirement because users using this type of product prefer to learn how to use online platforms and tools on their own, through tutorials and quick tips. This tool is powerful and needs special care, it needs to be always updated to never teach users the wrong way to use a feature, it must be easy to understand to reduce the learning curve as much as possible and it needs to be complete, avoiding searching for help in the support channels.

This channel is used for bottom-of-the-funnel content as it is extremely specific content based on tutorials and answers to frequently asked questions reported by buyers.

Social media

Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, and TikTok: all of these social media platforms have immense power to increase your user base while educating each individual to become a future buyer of your product.

Each one of the platforms has a different level of the funnel and has different content formats, here the tip is to have a professional specialized in each of these networks to be able to extract the maximum reach from each one. For example, Instagram and TikTok are usually users' gateways to a certain subject, so they are teaching means at the top and sometimes the middle of the funnel, while Youtube has become a platform focused on quality and in-depth education, top content funnels do not work very well unless the focus is pure entertainment.

Online courses

Another little-used channel, but with huge potential, is online courses, which deliver high-quality content and the highest user conversion rates, for the simple fact that the leads that come to this content are extremely qualified and have already been funneled. by the other previous stages. The investment of work and time in this channel is high, content is long and that transforms the lives of users, it is recommended to have a professional who has extensive knowledge for the creation of this type of content.

Structuring product education

Developing a product education seems to be a simple thing, and it really is, a few points should be taken into account when starting to build the plan:

Target audience profile

Is your audience mostly male or female? What age group is prevalent? Do you have high or low purchasing power? Are these users spread globally or are they concentrated in a few specific regions? It needs to build a faithful profile, and its interpretation cannot intervene, deep research must be done.

Places with the highest concentration of potential converting users

Young people tend to be on TikTok, older people focus on older social networks like Facebook and Instagram, while users looking for content focused on a specific topic and want to learn more about it usually use Alphabet platforms like Google and video lessons on Youtube.

What broad subjects they are interested in

Vegans are interested in plant-based products and documents on animal cruelty, and investors spend their days watching stock market fluctuations and which investments bring the best cost-effectiveness. Professionals who deal with teams, whether large or small, love to look for ways to improve their communication and reduce the time they spend solving problems, looking for ways to avoid interpersonal conflicts in their teams.

What are the most frequent questions?

Does your product make front-end developers easier? So what questions do they ask the most in search engines? Do they spend all day programming or do they reserve their free time to be entertained with futuristic movies and games?

If the target audience is travelers, what are the most popular places for tourists to visit? The most beautiful beaches or the most adventurous trails, research the topics that are also on the rise to always bring freshness and enjoy the hype.

What limitations or difficulties exist in this education?

Those looking for a healthier lifestyle have great difficulty finding real content, as each of the pages on the first page of Google's search says that the same food brings different benefits and harms, turning the internet into a limiting factor for knowledge. How could you solve this problem and make it easier for this audience to learn?

Define the contents that are part of each funnel stage (top, middle, and bottom)

Building a content posting schedule is important to keep constantly updating and capturing this audience, the main objective is always to educate the audience so that it can become loyal buyers of your product or brand over time.

With the points raised above, think about what language is used by users, at the bottom of the funnel the communication format is easier to understand and uses words and terms that are in evidence, in the middle of the funnel, the right terms, and a more assertive language, and at the bottom of the funnel, you can talk to the audience as if they were great experts of your product and the problems it solves.