How enterprises can leverage their products to appeal to multiple audiences

Most startups enter into business to solve a very specific problem for a very specific audience. But more often than not, as these organizations scale and mature, the ways in which their products can be used expands, too. With this expansion comes a broader roster of user types, roles, and use cases—which also means a larger total addressable market and more complex audiences to market and sell to.

For enterprises and large businesses, marketing campaigns, sales processes, onboarding motions, and support programs must all appeal to a broad array of stakeholders across varied roles and business functions. So, it’s important for product and portfolio leaders to think strategically about how they target and engage each of these audiences at every stage of the product journey to encourage the right behaviors and help customers maximize the return on their investments.

The same principle applies to the tools a company leverages internally. With organizational growth comes an influx of new and specialized roles, filled by employees who need equally specialized software to do their work. This creates a diverse array of internal personas the IT team must cater to, all with varying degrees of technical proficiency.

So how can companies cater to all these different audiences at scale, without adding operational complexity or headcount? By using their products.

Enterprises can use segmentation to personalize the customer or employee experience

With a product analytics tool like Pendo, product and IT teams can use segments to filter and target users based on specific usage patterns or behaviors. This granular sorting and segmentation allows teams across the business to identify how different groups of interest are engaging with the product, and allows them to compare that usage against other cohorts of users. This insight gives teams like customer success, learning and development, and product insight into potential enablement gaps which may need to be filled at the segment level—and also allows product and IT leaders to evaluate user engagement based on criteria like proficiency, roles, plan levels, time in the product, or satisfaction.

Segmentation is also a powerful way for teams across the business to personalize their messaging. For example, if a customer success manager (CSM) notices that new admin-level users aren’t taking advantage of a key feature in the product, they can add a step in their onboarding flow to proactively enable incoming users with similar titles on the functionality. And in the more immediate future, they can send a targeted in-app guide to users who haven’t yet used the feature to inform them of its benefits and teach them how to use it.

Internal IT teams similarly benefit from using segmentation. IT leaders can use metadata to target support guides for users who are struggling with a particular workflow—while leaving their successful, well-established users to work without interruption. Segmentation can also be used to deliver personalized onboarding based on roles or titles—which sets the tone for a great employee experience from day one (more on that below).

Enterprises can use their products to allow buyers to experience value for themselves

Product-led tactics like freemium plans, free trials, and product tours allow prospects and customers to experience the value of the products they’re looking to buy or expand into, first-hand.

• Freemium products give users access to part of the product with limited features and functionality for an unlimited amount of time—demonstrating value while still leaving the user wanting more.
• Free trials let users experience a product’s entire functionality for free, but for a limited period of time—creating a sense of urgency and subtly encouraging users to convert.
• Product tours offer prospective customers a guided walkthrough of your product, accessible at any time—exposing people to your product without requiring any sort of commitment.

These approaches are particularly valuable at enterprise scale because they’re low-risk for buyers, while being highly scalable and efficient for the business. Plus, since these immersive, product-led tactics allow prospects to experience the product’s value for themselves, they’re more resonant and persuasive than traditional marketing pitches alone.

Enterprises can use product analytics and in-app communication to improve internal efficiency

As companies grow, IT teams must tailor their onboarding and support programs for a slew of new roles and levels of technical proficiency. By bringing routine onboarding and support motions inside the products users are actively learning to use, IT teams not only ensure a better (and more contextual) enablement experience for new users, but also free up their own time which would have otherwise been spent repeatedly delivering training to every new employee class.

Finally, using product analytics helps IT teams identify super users and adoption champions, so they can dig into these users’ common attributes and identify the workflows that helped contribute to their success. IT leaders can then replicate these activities across other user groups or product lines to help even more employees increase productivity, more quickly.

Want to learn more about how enterprise organizations can leverage their products to appeal to a broad array of customer and employee types? Access the full white paper here.