Whether you are a startup or have already established your voice in the training industry, a strategic and well-executed marketing plan is crucial for the success of your training company. Marketing is increasingly complex as most business-to-business (B2B) buyers do the majority of their research online or through networking and are highly educated before reaching your sales team. Considering the competitive corporate training landscape, it’s essential for learning providers to know their target audience and what makes their products or services stand out among the rest.

How Do You Market Your Training Company?

To effectively market your training company, you will need an in-depth understanding of your ideal buyer, a strong value proposition, content pieces that attract your ideal buyer and a plan to deliver that content through multiple channels. Let’s examine each step of the process so your training company can generate a steady stream of new customers through optimized marketing campaigns.  

Who is Your Target Audience? 

Before you can begin creating your marketing plan, you need a solid understanding of who will buy your product or service. Your target audience will influence every decision you make in your marketing campaigns. You will want your brand to show up where they browse online, and you will want the messaging you create to capture their attention. Developing buyer personas for the customer groups you want to attract can help you identify your target audience by answering questions like:

• What kind of company does your buyer work at and what position do they hold?
• What are their day-to-day challenges?
• What are their goals for the year?
• What is their budget for new products and services?
• What is their firmographic, demographic and technographic information?

If you don’t have the answers to these questions right away, don’t worry! There are many ways to collect data about your ideal buyer, and it’s well worth the effort. You can start by:

• Conducting research through surveys and focus groups.
• Analyzing historical metrics in your customer relationship management (CRM) system for valuable insights.
• Turning to industry associations or publications like Training Industry that might already publish free resources to help you gain key insights about your buyers.

Developing your buyer persona(s) will enable you to take the next step in marketing your training company, which is all about crafting a message that will resonate and capture the attention of your target audience.

What is Your Value Proposition? 

Your value proposition is a statement that clearly explains why your target audience should buy your product or service. You will use the buyer persona data to develop a statement that clearly tells your prospect how your learning solution is going to solve their challenges. What is the benefit that the customer will receive? What problem does your product or service solve?

To write a strong value proposition, first consider the challenges you discovered during the buyer persona creation. Then, write down all the benefits your product or service offers. Debate the strongest connection between buyer challenge and benefit offered. Once you’ve settled the debate with your key stakeholders, you are ready to craft your value proposition and use it to drive the messaging on your website and the content you create. 

How to Develop Useful Marketing Content

Armed with insights about who your buyer is and a clear direction for your messaging, it’s time for you to create content that can be used to develop and deliver marketing campaigns.

Just like the value proposition, you will want to consider common challenges your target audience might encounter or questions they will have before they are ready to purchase your training solution.

Some great content pieces might include blog posts, infographics, white papers or e-books that are designed to capture the attention of your target audience and convert them to email subscribers. Once you have their contact information, you can begin nurturing them through the buying cycle until they become a marketing qualified lead for your sales team.

It is important to consider every stage of the buying journey when developing content pieces and delivery methods. For example, an infographic about the top 10 features of an LMS is a great top of funnel marketing piece that will help grow your email list. A case study about how one customer has had success after purchasing your learning management system (LMS) can be used to capture buyers who are now interested and engaged with your product or service.

By taking the time to develop useful marketing content, you will take steps to establish your company as an industry thought leader, building trust with your target audience.

How to Pick the Right Channels to Deliver Content Marketing

After you have done the thorough work to clearly define who your buyer is, how you can help them and you have some rock-solid content, you can focus on delivering this content to your target audience. You need to know where they seek information on the business of learning, where they find new resources and where they shop for new corporate training providers.

Some of the best channels for training companies to begin marketing their solutions include:

• Search engines: Search engines like Google offer huge opportunity for training companies to show up where buyers are searching. To rank on the first page of search engines, you will need to invest in search engine optimization, or SEO. There are many free resources available for marketers to begin their SEO journey. Publishing blogs or articles that answer your buyer’s top questions is a great place to start. When a user is searching for the answer to their question, they will find your website and you have established credibility and trust with this potential customer.

• Industry publications: Industry specific websites have a vast network of professionals who fit your buyer persona, giving you the ability to expand beyond the reach of your website and email list to build awareness with a new audience. Reach out to these publications to publish articles or send a sponsored email promoting your content to reach their email subscribers.

• Events and conferences: Find the conferences and events your target audience attends to have valuable face-to-face connection with potential buyers. Consider the top L&D conferences and how you can participate as either a speaker, sponsor or attendee. 

How to Evaluate Your Marketing Campaigns 

After you have tested a few marketing channels, you will want to evaluate the results of your marketing campaign. A few key metrics to consider include:

• Website traffic: The number of visitors and sessions as well as the source of the traffic (e.g., organic search, social media, email, referral, etc.).
• Email metrics: How many people opened and clicked on your emails.
• Conversion metrics: How many visitors to your website filled out a form or made a purchase?
• Cost per lead (CPL): Determine the total number of leads generated during the campaign and the cost associated with acquiring each new lead.

There are many other metrics you can use to determine the success of your marketing campaign, but the above list will give you a good indication of what channels and content are producing the best results.

Once you know what marketing tactics are working well for your training company, you can continue to optimize the performance by investing in the campaigns that are generating the highest quality leads.

By following the steps outlined above, you will be well on your way to establishing awareness of your brand in the training market and building the credibility you need to convert more leads into customers. 

If you need help marketing your training company, let us help connect you with over 250,000 learning and development professionals.