Why Companies Should Add an “Education” Tab to Their Website
Whenever companies want to sell their products or services, they need to ensure that they are understood by their target customers – at least, to an extent. People don’t have to understand exactly how a car works in order to drive one. They don’t need to know what an IP address is to use the Internet.
On the other hand, customers won’t buy products or features that they don’t understand. Why would you buy a mobile phone with HSDPA if you haven’t a clue what that means? Why would you buy a car with ABS if you have no idea what that does?
We don’t learn these things at school, unless we specialize in a certain area. So we’re either left in the dark or … we use the Internet to find out information and explanations.
Companies often rely on their sales team to explain their products to their prospects. There are some brilliant salespeople who not only describe the features of a product, but also educate you about it and help you make an informed buying decision. Such pre-sales customer education is necessary to ensure success in selling complex products or services. But it is costly, time consuming and not always effective during the sales process itself: people need time to think, digest and evaluate before they finally make the decision to buy.
As McKinsey confirmed in their research about ‘the customer decision journey’, many consumers today don’t go to a shop to buy something without being prepared. They’ll browse the web for information about products and features. They’ll Google the words they don’t understand to look for explanations. They’ll use social networks to seek recommendations, find comparisons, get feedback and read experiences.
Companies should play a more prominent role in satisfying these information needs. Company websites should have, by default, an “education” tab in their site menu. Most sites today don’t contain educational content about the complex terminology they use. So if visitors meet a difficult word or unknown abbreviation, they’ll leave the site for a search engine, a wiki, or even worse, a competitor’s website, to find out what it means. They may stay there and not return to the company website.
By providing educational information in an attractive format, companies give potential customers an additional reason to visit their site – and stay there for longer. Educational information should not be merely post-sales training, but pre-sales explanatory content as well. Not just product related, but also focusing on the complex terms used to describe its features. Most of us are specialized in one or a few areas of human life, but everyone’s a dummy in many other domains. And so are most of the visitors to company websites.
While educating their target marketplace, companies can turn this service into a real competitive advantage. After all, the company that cares enough to explain that HSDPA feature to you may convince you to actually buy that phone from them.
