B2B buyers prefer to self-educate instead of spammy reach outs!

So, should you prioritise on your content plan?

“This isn’t limited to the Business to Consumer (B2C) space. Three out of every four Business to Business (B2B) buyers would rather self-educate than learn about a product from a sales representative, according to Forrester.”

- Wes Bush (Product-Led Growth)

At SplashLearn, we were working on a product that was helping schools (Teachers) to assist in kid’s learning. It created personalized learning paths for each student. It had tremendous potential for the users, however, users lacked the initial understanding of the product. Our acquisition numbers were good, however, the activation was not happening.

Hence, for district administration (B2B buyers/decision-makers) to adopt SplashLearn at their school, they needed more validation. And, without regular usage of the product by the teachers, the district administration wouldn’t have enough evidence to make a decision favouring SplashLearn. We wanted to gain the attention of our B2b buyers.

This could have been achieved in two ways:

i) Make our case public by showing, how teachers are using and helping their students.

ii) Increase the number of “SplashLearn-activated teachers” from a particular district.

To further breakdown our approach on point (ii), we started focussing on the following things-

1. Increase the visits to sign-up ratio, from our landing pages. (CRO project)

2. Make sure all educators (teachers and admins) can understand the product before starting to use it.

3. This was also followed by a referral campaign and free PD sessions to increase the w.o.m of the product.
   

We decided to make all videos public: https://www.splashlearn.com/how-to-videos-for-teachers

It educates teachers and admins on what SplashLearn is and helps them understand each feature in a byte-sized video content format. We also included some of these videos directly inside the product to make sure the onboarding is smooth, and PLG motion is driven.

We partnered with teachers, to create videos on how they use SplashLearn in their classrooms and started publishing on our Youtube handle and in the teacher communities.

YouTube videos: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLirk1GQvGcL-gi1A6MdFf21xfpiryVxul&si=jbI5aCheM5xjnW8o

Admin dashboard walkthrough:

How-to videos as playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLirk1GQvGcL8voFb_yecotq5ICtuYEN2H&si=bOAf1sqliSziuJyY

Also, we maintained a page for the success stories of all of our teachers here:

https://www.splashlearn.com/success-stories

The Conclusion

The next step was to measure the effectiveness of all of the content that was made public.

We were capturing page views, session lengths, and conversions on the new Admin page. Our benchmark here was to have 50 leads per month. Fun fact- we crossed it in our 3rd month 😉

For teachers, we were capturing whether 30-day retention was increasing or not.

And, we started getting more interest organically from our B2B audience i.e, District Administration. This was never achieved with the out reaches done by the sales team, even if you provide them with a lot of relevant content pieces in the sales reach outs.

Thus, I can conclude: “B2B buyers prefer to self-educate instead of spammy reach outs!“