Virtual training
How HubSpot Uses Education to Attract, Engage and Delight Customers – with Courtney Sembler
If you’ve been around customer education for any length of time, you’ve undoubtedly heard a thing or two about the HubSpot Academy. It’s achieved legendary status as a pioneer in what many call “knowledge-led growth.”
Courtney Sembler is the director and long-time manager of the HubSpot Academy. We asked her to share some knowledge with us and are delighted that she agreed.
First, she offered a little HubSpot Academy history (and philosophy)…
Courtney: When I first started with the academy, I was developing educational content as an inbound professor (that’s HubSpot for “curriculum developer”). The academy once sat in marketing, and we focused on using educational content to support marketing goals.
Today, we’re a part of the customer success department but maintain a very close relationship with the HubSpot marketing team and focus on how we use education to spin HubSpot’s flywheel.
I asked Courtney, “What would you tell customer education leaders that need to get more eyeballs on their programs?”
Courtney: I’d say relationship building can’t be overlooked. I think oftentimes we fall short because we go to the marketing team and say, “I need this, I need more eyeballs, I need blah, blah, blah.” And it becomes very transactional. If you start with building a relationship and understanding their KPIs and what campaigns they’re running, you can start from a place of understanding. You build a relationship before you have an ask.
Next, I asked whether the customer education leader should make the case to marketing that they share goals.
Courtney: Yes. That’s how we’ve approached it in the past. And when discussing KPIs, the customer education team should introduce a new one that’s connected to marketing, or content marketing. We call them “academy leads.” (We agreed such a thing is often referred to as education-qualified leads, or EQLs.)
I continued our discussion about goals by asking if you should expect to sell marketing on the idea of KPIs such as retention, adoption, and advocacy.
Courtney: You definitely can. The way we’ve positioned it is that those are going to be things that our educational programs do regardless of whether or not marketing accepts them.
When we start working with them, we make it known we’re not just an acquisition channel. Academy is a full flywheel team. We attract, engage, and delight. Attract is the acquisition piece we focus on with marketing. The engage piece is what we focus on with sales. Delight is what we focus on with customer success.
What marketing channels have you used to promote the academy and which ones are most effective?
Courtney: We’ve used so many different tools and channels, so it’s evolved.
LinkedIn works well for us. This is where professionals are hanging out and want to learn. We do a lot of promotion there.
Something that has worked well for us is getting short-form content out on social platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Getting that 30-second recap of what a course is about has worked well to pique interest.
We do a lot of organic search as well. We work closely with our internal SEO team to make sure the academy website is driving traffic organically.
Email is an “always on channel” for us. We do a lot of email nurturing, but also, the academy is also well-represented in the newsletters HubSpot sends.
So, there’s an ongoing effort to place mentions of the academy in the existing campaigns. Consistently, when you hear from HubSpot, you also hear about the academy and make the connection.
I was curious to know who writes the email.
Courtney: It depends on the campaign. Sometimes we have the professors, the ones who are creating the content, do a first draft. Then we work with our internal communications team that runs all of our email.
In the early days, if we wanted to send an email, we’d have to supply the copy, the images, the links, everything. Now they’ll ask us, “Hey, here are all the different places we want to mention academy. Does that resonate with you? Would you want us to change anything?”
It’s become much more of a two-way street.
Next, we discussed diversifying the training portfolio.
Courtney: I think to make yourself marketable, you’re going to diversify. A great example is if you have a course, you’re probably going to cut it into shorter videos to put on LinkedIn, in emails, etcetera. A reuse/repurpose strategy can be really beneficial for your teams.
We’ve used this a lot. We’ve run a blog. We’ve had consistent webinars. We used to run a show on Facebook Live. We’ve done boot camps… on-demand content… and that diversity allows us to go really wide. And then we do have a lot of pillar content.
Our approach is if we have the breadth, we also want the depth, but the depth isn’t going to be for everything.
Is there a process at HubSpot where you “place your order” with marketing and then paperwork ensues?
Courtney: We’ve developed two main processes: a yearly planning process where we go super wide with all of our stakeholders internally—not just marketing—and we decide what are the basic, non-negotiable pieces of content we need for the following year.
We follow that up with a quarterly planning process that gets more specific. And that’s where we may change plans based on different strategies, and maybe, evolving technology. AI was a great example last year. We pivoted a lot to make sure we had coverage.
Depending on the type of work we’re doing, it may trigger different creative briefs or creative processes. We use project management tools to do that and briefs that are shared between the stakeholders.
The second main process that we run with the team is around YouTube. The academy has started to trickle out onto some of the HubSpot YouTube channels. We write creative briefs that usually go to the professor and the YouTube channel creator and they’ll create five to ten videos based on those briefs.
What about special offers? Are they a part of the marketing mix for HubSpot Academy?
Courtney: Yeah, one of the main offers we have is if you are actively certified prior to purchasing HubSpot, we waive the onboarding cost. So, when you’re talking with the sales rep, if you are going to buy sales hub and you are certified with the academy, your cost for onboarding is waived. That has been a huge driver for us because we’re essentially giving folks credit for the fact that they’re already knowledgeable in these things.
Do you create success stories specifically about the academy?
Courtney: Yes. The success stories we do around the academy fall into two camps. The first is how our partners, the folks that are reselling HubSpot in the market through their agency models, use the academy to become credentialed and attract clients. We have a program where we accredit partners to sell and service on behalf of HubSpot.
Those partners then get more business. They bring more HubSpot customers in. It spins both flywheels. And so, we do a lot of success stories on how partners have been able to grow their businesses using HubSpot Academy.
The other camp of success stories we run is how HubSpot customers use the academy to keep on top of all the products and find new ways to grow their business.
Do you offer a user community or a learning community?
Courtney: We have two flavors of community. Both have elements of learner and user.
Our HubSpot community is focused on making sure you have forums to get support. We run study groups there, which is for learners, or people studying for a certification.
And we have connect.com, which is much more of an acquisition play. It’s for those who don’t yet use HubSpot but want to connect with folks in the market.
To close, I asked our remarkably helpful guest about HubSpot Academy’s approach to internal marketing.
Courtney: Again, a lot of internal marketing has come from building relationships. So, we’re making sure our sales, customer success, and marketing leaders know about the academy.
We run strategic internal campaigns too. We just had our world certification week. We ran a lot of internal promotions around that to try to get everyone excited to share it with customers and also to use it themselves.
It’s more powerful if they’re also using it. So, we encourage folks internally to get certified. If they use the academy, and like it, they’re going to be more likely to communicate its merits to customers and partners.
This interview is the third in a four-part series exploring the critical collaboration between customer education and marketing. If you missed the first part, click here to catch up.
Courtney joins a cast of industry experts in our insightful eBook, “The Customer Education Elevator: Take Your Programs to New Heights with Strategic Marketing”.
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