Marketing Training Courses Effectively

Knowing how to market training courses may be critical to making any one of them a success story. Even though only 8% of learning and development professionals have a marketing background, this must not stop the rest from doing it. So how can you make your courses a huge success despite the lack of those nice-to-have marketing skills?

The key is to close the gap between your perception and the key concerns of your audience. Your potential attendees are going to be as concerned about what a course will be like as what they are going to learn. This means your course marketing needs to cover the experience in that learning journey as thoroughly as the content for the course. Prospective attendees might worry that training will be too basic and boring, or that it will make them look silly, or that they will be forced to listen all the time or even to do activities or exercises that make them uncomfortable. So make sure you address concerns like these.

However, the easiest way to convince someone that something is valuable is to show him that other people think so. This is called in today’s social media “rating and reviews”. Therefore, you can use anything from a brief quote from a colleague to testimonials or videos, or by asking the right questions to generate the most compelling social media proof. Try questions like, “How this learning experience changed the way you do your job?”, “Which new skills will be most valuable to you and why?” or, “What does the company’s investment in your development mean to you?” Remember that genuine testimonials can be really convincing. Even the most basic recommendations can have an enormous effect on course attendance.

For example, one of my clients informed me that the employees were lining up for our courses because they believe in training now. “I was surprised”, he said. After a small investigation, it turns out that most of them saw a colleague expressing how much he/she enjoyed the training, and how practical and beneficial it was. The same client told me that while they didn’t expect they could benefit from training, they are now racing each other for it. In a similar case, this happened when a valued employee posted a testimonial on the company’s intranet unfolding his positive experience after attending one of our courses. Attendance flowed as a result and our courses have been consistently very popular ever since.

For larger initiatives, you can go as far as posting some videos from engaged attendees. This level of support will be much more influential than just describing the training course as ”great” or “informative”, which will ultimately mean very little to prospective delegates.

When you take all the previous into consideration, take advantage of all your organization’s communications channels:

• articles, case studies, videos and other testimonials on your intranet pages and social media platforms
• banner ads on your intranet home page
• posts to Facebook groups and instant messaging channels used by specific teams
• posters on noticeboards
• leaflets in payslips, on desks or in reception/kitchen areas
• articles in staff newsletters
• presentations to management and team meetings
• drop-in sessions during lunch breaks
• bite-size learning to give your staff a feel for the training.

By expanding beyond simply emailing people and using channels that are much less crowded, you will increase your chances of reaching potential audiences. That being said, the process of marketing training courses should cover the 4 following points:

• Identifying the targeted audience
• Establishing clear training goals/objectives
• Determining how to measure the success
• Defining the purpose, the methodology and the time frame

Effectively marketing your courses whether internal or externally is essential if you want them to make an impact. But if you rely only on communicating and marketing do not expect miracles. One part of the puzzle is to understand how to market training courses; the other is to learn how to make those courses relevant to an individual’s day-to-day work, figuring out how to successfully overcome the concerns of possible delegates, and making training fit into the wider learning strategy all make a big difference to whether a course fills like a blaze or is desperately searching for any attendees to get started.