By the time you’ve finished organizing your new educational training course, you now realize that your target audience don’t just show up because you say it’s in their best interest.
You now have to use one of the world’s many effective marketing strategies to ensure your wonderful course is truly appreciated, fully booked and profitable.
So, what’s your marketing plan? What are your objectives?
There are so many marketing consultants that say they can deliver the results you need. However, you don’t have an unlimited budget or the world’s best marketing team.
To make sure your course goes well, there are a few things that need to be done. Rest assured that they’re effective, easy to implement and within budget.
Here are 5 great marketing tips that will enable you to market training courses to increase success.
1. Know exactly what it is that you want to achieve
Sounds simple doesn’t it? That’s because it is. It’s straightforward, but in order to reach your goals and be a success, you have to have something to measure this by.
So write down the goals of your training course, as well as your marketing objectives e.g. I need a minimum of 10 attendees, each of whom pay $___ to attend. I want each of them to achieve at least 75% in the assessment test.
Once you have your goals and marketing objectives sorted out you can move on to the rest of your marketing plan.
2. Use social media for the effective marketing channel it is
In the 20th century, we all know the importance of social media. It has the ability to reach people and effectively communicate without overtly selling.
It works because it allows you to cost-effectively communicate your key messages to a highly-targeted audience. Their guard is down and they’re usually happy to listen to you, provided your messages are relevant.
Using social media can be simple, but you have to know your target audience and understand the social media platform you’re using.
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube are all popular and bring together different attributes. All social media platforms offer an opportunity to be highly targeted with your messages, through sponsored posts that you pay for.
Since studies show that social media is booming among marketers and consumers and for good reason. So do your research on which platform suits your audience and see the results.
Social media is two-way communication, so communicate with your audience, follow relevant businesses, cross-pollinate with guest speakers/writers, provide useful announcements of events and news, and create an event hashtag that’s relevant to your course.
Just remember that with social, it’s all about being visible, so post and promote frequently, without over-selling!
3. Reach out to industry leaders, businesses or industry groups
Every industry has some kind of group or club which is used by the more active participants within the industry. Since these groups are usually more than happy to have visitors and guest speakers, they’ll probably be happy to have you attend or even speak at their event. You may even be able to offer their members a discount on your course to gain access to their membership and give them another benefit they can provide their members.
Many of the groups have social media pages on LinkedIn or Facebook, which you can join and contribute to with useful information and the odd post about your upcoming courses (a good ratio is 5 news articles to 1 sales post).
This lets you access a very large database of potential attendees for your future classes and market training courses to increase success.
4. Embrace email marketing
Email marketing is still one of the most effective marketing strategies to cost-effectively communicate with a group of people who want to listen.
Collect details of potential attendees from businesses and industry groups you interact with (ensuring you comply with spam laws of course).
If you have a database already, you could send out either a quick invite or maybe a newsletter. Both work and both can be done easily through email marketing software like MailChimp, which blasts your message to either your entire database or a subset thereof.
5. Use social proof
If you’ve run your training course before, make sure you include past attendees’ testimonials. You can do this on your website, social media or in an email to show your potential attendees that your course actually works and that it will help them.
Using testimonials is a way of showing that your service works, without being too “salesy”. This is because it isn’t written in the voice of the brand, but instead written by someone that a potential attendee can relate to. It helps build trust in a way that also promotes the business.
Another obvious benefit of testimonials is that it allows you to see how your course actually resonated with the attendees.
Summary
Using the tips above, it’s easy to keep things simple when marketing your course to your target audience.
Best wishes with your marketing. We wish you every success when you market training courses to increase success!
And of course, when you run your training courses, make sure you use the Prezentt training delivery platform to maximize your success in the classroom!
Let us know how you go and any tips you’ve found that have helped you!