Continued from yesterday’s post, here are a few additional tactics you can adopt to develop high-quality learning content for your external stakeholders.
Curate Content
To remain a valued and chief learning resource to your external stakeholders, curate content from multiple sources that they’ll find useful, interesting, and informative. This way, when they want to learn more about anything that’s related to your business or their industry, they’ll come to you first and rely on the learning content you can offer instead of consulting others.
For example, if your company develops containers from recycled material and your stakeholders rely on your containers to package their own products, you can curate learning content with topics from reputable resources about the recycling industry, the retail industry, etc.
Encourage Social Learning
When you encourage your external stakeholders to engage with you and one another via social platforms, everyone involved is much more likely to develop a significantly better understanding of your business and what it offers. And it will also promote more innovative ways for external stakeholders to invest in or rely on your organization and will promote many more opportunities for partnerships, product development, industry research, etc.
Use the Right Learning Management System (LMS)
Use an LMS that can be integrated with your customer relationship management (CRM) platform so that you can create seamless learning experiences for your external stakeholders and so that it’s easy for them to access learning content you’ve developed, curated content, and social and messaging dashboards. Also, ensure that your LMS, or any other learning platform you use, is easily accessible from mobile devices.
Offer On-Demand Learning and Certifications
If you really want your external stakeholders to stay engaged with your organization and learn how to use its products and services well, consider designing learning incentive programs, badges, or certifications that they can earn to really make it worth their while. Two well-known examples of this are Google’s Partner program and Facebook’s Blueprint Certification.
Review Metrics and Solicit Feedback Often
The best way to learn more about what type of learning content or experiences your external stakeholders crave is to ask them directly. Send them surveys and polls often asking them what existing learning content is valuable to them, superfluous, or incomplete. You can also review how many external stakeholders attend your online events and who accesses and downloads your learning content, as well as how often.
If you truly want to offer high-quality learning content and experiences for your external stakeholders, always make it about them and what’s important to them and make it about building lasting professional relationships with them. And be sure to keep the ideas above and those mentioned in yesterday’s post in mind, too.