External stakeholders are those individuals and entities that may not be hired by your organization but are still directly affected by how your organization performs. And they have a legitimate interest in your company. External stakeholders include consumers, customers, prospects, regulators, communities and governments, investors, partners, and suppliers.
Below are a few tactics you can adopt to develop high-quality learning content for your external stakeholders.
Focus on Customer Service, Not Sales or Revenue
When you’re developing product demos, platform tutorials, or sharing original research or case studies with your external stakeholders, be sure to center the learning content on what they care about. Don’t only tout how amazing your company is and all the amazing things it’s done. And don’t include pushy sales techniques or calls to action either. Instead, focus on providing genuine value to your stakeholders and excellent customer service.
Remember that you’re developing learning content for them so that they can make better-informed decisions that will benefit their lives, professional advancement, or businesses because they’re affiliated with your organization. They don’t only want to know how much everything costs and won’t appreciate being bullied or pressured into buying or using something. They want to know how your organization, or its products and services, can make their lives easier and better.
When done properly, learning content for your external stakeholders should be engaging, informative, and valuable. And it should work toward building long-term relationships with them.
Allow Stakeholders to Co-Develop Learning Content
One of the best ways to create learning content for your external stakeholders is to develop it with them. Let them include their own logos and customize the learning content you co-develop with them for their own employees and stakeholders, too. And let them reuse all the content you create together for their own purposes, as often as they need to use it.
For example, if you work for a company that develops customized project management platforms for teams, you can work with each company to develop learning content it can share with its own and diverse internal teams that will use the customized platform. This way, all the learning content can be tailored for each team. You can ensure tutorial videos and paraphernalia have the company’s logo on them and that its management teams are as involved in the development of the tutorial videos as they want to be.
Make It Interactive and Engaging
If you want your learning content to truly resonate and be valuable for your external stakeholders, make it interactive and engaging. Encourage stakeholders to ask questions during live demo sessions or webcasts and to post questions or concerns on message boards. And allow them to use your platforms and hold your products firsthand so they can ask questions while they’re doing so. If possible, you should even consider implementing virtual reality or augmented reality simulations so that external stakeholders can gain direct experience with your products, services, facilities, etc.
(Tomorrow, watch for the continuation of this post to learn more tactics you can adopt to develop high-quality learning content for your external stakeholders.)