Train to Retain: How Jamf Leverages Short-form Content to Amplify Their GTM Strategy [Webinar Recap]

In our recent webinar, Skilljar’s Director of Customer Marketing, Jen Raphael, hosted a conversation with Randon Ruggles, Director of Customer Education, to learn how Jamf uses short-form video content to amplify their go-to-market strategy.

Jamf helps businesses, schools, and hospitals manage their Apple devices, connect users, and protect data. In this webinar, Randon shared insights into the development and impact of Jamf’s training program, including how they use short-form content to drive retention and engagement through a “whole product experience” approach.

At Jamf, we believe that customers don’t succeed if they don’t learn. If a customer knows how to use a product, they’re more likely to come back and continue to use that product more.
— Randon Ruggles

Customer Education as part of the whole product experience

As Jamf’s solution evolved from on-premise to SaaS, their education program evolved from high-stakes certification courses and exams in 2006 to online training and onboarding courses built out in a catalog in 2018. At that time, their Customer Education department became its own function. With a current team of 23, they put out their first piece of short-form content in 2022.

The evolution of Customer Education at Jamf. 2018 marks the launch of their instance of Skilljar for their online training catalog.

Why short-form content?

In these tough economic times, many leaders are asking, How can you do more with the same or less, but be more impactful? Jamf’s answer to this question involved the creation of “Jamf Shorts” – bite-sized training and support videos explaining common workflows, product updates, and new releases within the Jamf platform. For Jamf, it was important to meet their customers where they are, but in a shorter format.

Introducing Jamf Shorts!

Before they landed on the solution of short-form video content, they had to consider their initial goals for new online content, which included:

• Consider the learner experience as a whole. Where are they accessing content? What barriers exist? How do you create the best possible experience? (Jamf leaned into engaging, short-in-time content, based on a variety of amazing examples from other Skilljar customers.)
• Create a separate YouTube channel or playlist for the content so they may be easily embedded into their Training Hub – called the Jamf Learning Hub (Jamf created a new section for “Shorts.”)
• Match the experience (look and feel) of the new content to their existing products so customers understand that it’s part of the whole training experience.
• Create a templated format and style that can easily be repeated. Product features change often so the process has to be efficient and move quickly.
• Experiment by trying something out short term, get feedback, and iterate. They didn’t want to invest a lot of time and effort into something that might not be fruitful.

Jamf Shorts are separated out by product: Jamf Pro, Jamf School, Jamf Now, Jamf Connect, and Jamf Protect Support. They leverage data from various internal teams (Product, Customer Success, Support) and customer feedback queues to come up with ideas for topics. Then stakeholders decide which “shorts” it makes sense to create based on customer needs.

Is it worth considering short-form video content for customer education? Here is what Randon found to be the difference between their trained vs. untrained customers.

Jamf’s customer education program creates’ real business impact when you measure trained vs. untrained customers

Randon shared these tips for creating short-form video content.

Guidelines for creating Jamf Shorts

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Extending short-form content to multiple channels

Jamf’s Training Catalog includes a rotating carousel with different featured courses and product tiles for each Jamf product. Their Training Catalog is part of the overall Jamf Learning Hub.

Jamf’s definition of success for their short videos is not only that people are watching them, but that they are also driving people to the Jamf Online Training Catalog (powered by Skilljar), to get deeper knowledge and information in the moment. This measure of engagement is just as important as the consumption of the video content.

Jamf’s Training Catalog is featured in the Jamf Learning Hub

Skilljar helped us step back and improve the whole overall product experience. We take all of the content that’s in our Training Catalog, powered by Skilljar, and leverage Skilljar APIs to ingest that content into the Jamf Learning Hub.— Randon Ruggles

Here is an example of a Jamf Short accessible from the Jamf Learning Hub.

Jamf ensures users can access its short-form video content in multiple locations, including YouTube, the Jamf Training Catalog, and Jamf Learning Hub.

The impact of a ‘whole product experience’ training approach

Trained users have a positive net promoter score, CSAT score, health score, and retention rate. We’re retaining them with greater impact because they’re learning about our products, they’re using our products, which has a negative impact on our churn rate.— Randon Ruggles

All of Jamf’s content feeds into and out of the Jamf Learning Hub – including their support portal, the Training Catalog, YouTube (Jamf Shorts), and their community site of more than 10,000 users, Jamf Nation – to create a whole product experience.

Jamf customers can come from any of these entry points into the Jamf Learning Hub and to continue to learn and grow.

Using their component content management system (CCMS), Jamf can create Jamf Shorts for YouTube and then have them appear in the Learning Hub. It’s important to make them accessible in many places to reach users with different needs and questions.

Users who discover Jamf through YouTube can easily find their way to the Learning Hub and become further engaged in Jamf’s offerings or continue their education in the Training Catalog if they are existing customers. This is what Jamf means by “meeting customers where they are.”

Jamf improved the product experience by not only putting Jamf Shorts where their customers were, but also by making sure their Skilljar-powered content was there and accessible too. For Jamf, the ideal workflow from a Customer Education standpoint – whether on YouTube, their Training Catalog, or inside their Learning Hub – is anything that gets users engaged with the whole product experience.

Connecting multiple content sources to the Jamf Learning Hub

From Skilljar, we get more data and analytics about usage – what our customers are doing to get ahead and deepen their knowledge.— Randon Ruggles

Customers who search for content in the Learning Hub can click a link and be taken directly to their Training Catalog. Jamf has seen increases in engagement with their Training Catalog, no doubt due in part to people actually seeing some of their other content.

Jamf saw a 51% increase in active users for their online training catalog for second quarter, year over year.

It’s absolutely amazing; our customers are loving the content they can find in our Learning Hub. We’ve made it so they can continue to learn in the best platform and experience that works for them.— Randon Ruggles

Short-form content for release notes

Do your customers regularly read the release notes for your product? This is important information that every learning professional should be thinking about.

Randon had a brainstorm at one of their Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meetings in which he asked, Is there anything we could do from a Customer Education training enablement perspective that would make your life easier as a customer?

And the response he received led to a new innovation for Jamf:

Could you make a video or a podcast showcasing the new features from a release and why it matters to me?— Jamf CAB Customer

Since they already had the process for creating Jamf Shorts down, it was an easy lift to leverage it – with a few minor changes – for creating online videos that explained everything a customer had to know about new product releases.

Jamf’s goals for Release Notes short videos

Many of Jamf’s products update very frequently. They started out with three releases for their flagship product, Jamf Pro, as an experiment. After reviewing the data, and talking to stakeholders and the Jamf Nation community, they learned that some users wanted to be quizzed about the content in the videos.

Release Notes videos serve as an opportunity to provide a real test of knowledge, as opposed to relying on documentation that may or may not be read. They matched the style of the Release Notes videos to the Jamf Shorts and added a link back to the Jamf Learning Hub (where the documentation was there for those users who might prefer that), as well as making them available in-app.

Coming soon!: Jamf Release Notes videos will be accessible from the Jamf Learning Hub.

Jamf Shorts adapted for Release Notes videos will soon be featured in the Jamf Learning Hub

The impact of Release Notes videos on user engagement

Since their inception of Release Notes videos, Jamf has doubled their engagement, now hovering at about 2,400 views per video, and this continues to increase with each new iteration.

Views for Jamf Release Notes Videos are on the rise!

Not only are more customers watching their Release Notes videos, but more time is spent engaging in the Release Note documentation. They are exceeding retention benchmarks for viewing of at least 30 seconds with each new release – users are engaged!

Just as important as driving user engagement is saving internal employees time which can be better spent on more strategic customer tasks.

A Jamf employee in Partner Enablement was able to save valuable time by steering customers to Jamf’s Release Notes videos.

Some of the immediate impacts Jamf has seen from their short-form content include an increase in their whole product adoption, including engagement and community-driven activities.

We’re helping to close the internal knowledge gap. We are educating our internal audience as well. We are seeing this drive adoption of new features and an increase in use of the content in our Training Catalog too.— Randon Ruggles

Jamf reaches an important milestone with Skilljar!

Congratulations to Jamf for reaching 10,000 individuals certified through their Jamf 100 Course for Jamf Certified Associates. Users take this exam inside of the Skilljar-powered training catalog.

We’re really proud of this accomplishment which we couldn’t have reached without Skilljar and look forward to continuing to drive adoption of our certifications through a whole product approach to customer education.— Randon Ruggles

Randon concluded with these thoughts for anyone considering using short-form content to “do more with less” for their training program.