The training industry will never get out of trend. In 2019 alone, companies around the globe spent $370.3 billion on employee training.

If you are a certified trainer who wants to make the most of this trend, then as much as you spend a considerable amount of time in developing your vision, and creating the program, you must also spend a great deal of time promoting it. Successfully marketing your training business is a necessary step and could be very beneficial to you especially in getting your ROI (return on investment) and reaching your income goals. It is, without a doubt, one of the chief reasons why entrepreneurs exist. 

However, still, a lot of training businesses don’t like to spend time on marketing and understand its importance. Marketing should not be complicated especially if you understand that it’s basically placing your offers the right way before the right individual and from there, you develop a strategic plan. But before diving into it, here are some important reminders when marketing your training business

Knowing Your Audience

By now, you should have narrowed down the profile of your audience. You can’t please everyone and your training program can’t be valuable to all kinds of people. Individuals have different goals in life. Take this into consideration when creating your vision and mission statement.

The key here is knowing more about your target audience. Why? Knowing your target audience is very essential in the marketing of training business for the following reasons: 

• customize solutions to their problems gain insight into their needs
• negotiate with your prospects effectively.
• know where your prospects would usually hang-out 
• provide relevant support with a personal touch
• gain their trust by making an effort

Make a profile of your target audience and study how you can better help them. Gather specific data about their demographics (age bracket and gender), location, occupation, financial status, description of their attributes, daily routines, and interests, goals, and motivation, or pain-points. 

You must study which social media platforms do they usually spend a significant amount of their time on and where you can also find them offline.

All of this information should be gathered by aiming at how to connect with your audience or learners.

Determining Your Selling Points

In entrepreneurship, it is indeed a struggle to stand out among the crowd especially online. This is the very reason you should determine your unique selling points.

So what is a selling point? As defined by the Cambridge dictionary, it is a characteristic of a product or service that will persuade people to buy it. And a unique selling point is a segment where your best service meets the desire or needs of your clients. 

It’s very challenging to determine your unique selling points especially if you are into a lot of training niches or specialties to offer. But knowing your selling points will absolutely help you compose your value proposition and achieve your marketing goals. This is because you can articulate your value, you will be widely known for it, referrals will not be difficult, and most of all, people will be more willing to pay more than you ask of them.

If you are still confused in determining your selling points, then here are a couple of guidelines to follow:

• Try to enumerate all the selling points you know and your clients’ benefits
• Think about the need it will address
• Identify what is unique in your training that competitors cannot copy or imitate
• And lastly, create your value proposition out of this.

Using the Right Marketing Tools

An ideal marketing strategy is nothing without the usage of the right marketing tools. Indeed, it is really important to use the appropriate tools in selling your training business. It gears the overall marketing process from assessment, implementation, to evaluation. 

These are the types of marketing tools that would be useful to promote your training business:

• Project management
• Team communications and collaboration tools
• Customer Relation Management 
• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media and Social Media Planner
• Lead Capture and Conversion
• Graphic design tools or content creation
• Video marketing tools
• Lead nurturing and email marketing tools 
• Event marketing tools
• CRO and Web optimization
• Lead generation
• Lead capture and conversion
• Data Reporting and Analytics
• Marketing Automation
• Digital Asset Management tools

With the right marketing tools and tactics for promoting your business, you will be able to grow your business. You will be able to engage with your target clients successfully and measure your metrics. It will also save you time and money.  

Developing Website Content

Since your industry is service-oriented, you should try to visualize it by developing content that is related to your training business. It will serve as your online portfolio and even earn the trust of your target audience. 

Remember, the internet is very challenging and it’s a noisy arena to market your service. However, if you are wise enough to use it to your advantage by adding valuable content and visuals to your page, then you can leverage it by captivating their attention and eventually winning their hearts in the process. 

Thus, you must know what content to invest in to attract your ideal clients, ensure an impact in their lives, and try your training business. So carefully tailor your content with your target client’s interest and solution to their pain points. 

Marketing through Social Media

Also, never forget social media platforms. You can boost your training business by going on social media marketing. This marketing approach offers a lot of practical features that are almost free like the following:

• Ideal client insights that you will gain
• Building an online community 
• Establish a business reputation and authority
• Direct customer service
• KPI (key performance indicator) analytic tools like on Facebook.
• Paid Ads (direct response ad, big brand ad, and the hybrid of the two)
• Boost your website SEO

With these features, you are now ready to design, develop, position, measure the metrics, and evaluate social media marketing programs. You can use data from this advanced social monitoring system to analyze your market. You can identify the goals and needs of the market. Then you will design an engaging program to captivate the hearts of your desired target audience. 

In boosting your engagement, you are expected to build a life-long database-driven real-time relationship with your community members. You must plan to allot a budget and the KPI you need to grow your conversion rates and be profitable. 

As long as you don’t focus on vanity metrics but instead making sure that your followers are highly engaged then, certainly your training business will surely succeed even with social media platforms alone and your engaging posts.

Widening Your Network

Finally, you should widen your network for your training business. This factor is very helpful in promoting your business. Bear in mind that in entrepreneurship, having the right relationships with the right people comes very handy. 

As you share your common interest and goals in your business with other companies, you will eventually gain mutual respect and relationships, may it be online or in social gatherings or events. And you will then give value to each other. So don’t hesitate to network: a network for your passion or interest, a network for your future goals, and a network within your industry.

According to The ClearCompany, the majority of the employees at 68% would assert that executing training and development should be the most vital policy in any organization. So grab the opportunity. Network with those companies that need your service. Remind them of the importance of investing in the personal and professional development of their organization and their employees.