Do you know that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their buying journey meeting with potential vendors? The majority of their time is spent researching online and offline. Therefore, your training company can't rely solely on a business development team to sell your service to get new clients. Creating a marketing plan for a training company will ensure you're answering prospective buyers' questions while they are researching on their own.
6 Elements of a Marketing Plan for Training Company
Creating a marketing plan for your training company will help you focus on determining how you stand out from competitors, who your best customers are, and where to reach them. Here are six elements to include in your marketing plan, which we'll cover in more detail as you read on:
Goals
Ideal customer profiles and personas
Value proposition and messaging
Marketing strategies
Calendar
Budget
Goals
Every marketing plan should start with goals that support your company's goals. Setting goals will help you pick the right marketing strategies and let you know if your marketing efforts were successful.
Ideal Customer Profiles and Personas
You probably have a good idea of your customer base. But, you might find new opportunities when you evaluate data.
Look at your CRM to spot similarities in companies or job titles that spend the most money with you. Also, look at industry trends to bring in new perspectives outside of what's happening in your company. Commonalities in your data and industry trends might uncover new sales and marketing opportunities.
When you clarify the types of companies that are your best customers, document their qualities into ideal customer profiles. From there, identify who is involved in the buying decision and group them into personas. Personas are categories that people have in common, like job titles—for example, personas for a CLO or L&D manager. But personas can also be organized in other ways, like characteristics of people. For example, a persona for an education enthusiast would profile people in an organization who are passionate about upskilling/reskilling. Next, create buyer profiles, which outline a buyer's journey to selecting a training company.
The ideal customer profile, buyer persona, and buyer profiles are critical for your marketing plan, so you are focused on reaching companies and people who are most likely to become your customers.
Value Proposition for Training Company
If you meet someone who fits your buyer persona, what's your elevator pitch to them? What would you tell them your training company does? Creating a one-sentence value proposition will prepare you for answering this question.
A value proposition leads with how you can help your prospective clients, not what your company does. Since buyers are researching online, your value proposition should be represented in all of your marketing communications, including your website, videos, blog posts, emails, social media.
Marketing Strategy for Training Company
Now that you know who your best customers are and what to say to them, the next section of your marketing plan should cover the marketing strategies you'll implement. For example, a marketing strategy for a training company might be to promote thought leadership because reputation and expertise are important factors for a buyer.
Here are some tactics for a marketing strategy about promoting thought leadership:
Identify experts on your team and have them contribute to developing content like blog posts, live events, or guides
Present at conferences or pitch to publications that your personas go to
Enter to win awards to highlight your work
Marketing Calendar
After you outline your marketing strategies and corresponding tactics, you'll want to lay them out in a calendar. It's best to have a steady stream of marketing activities throughout the year, with heavier activity in Q4-Q1 when companies finalize their budgets and plans for the following year. Decide on pillars for your calendar, like conferences you'll be part of or any announcements of new service offerings, and strategically plan marketing around those.
Marketing Budget
Establishing a marketing budget ahead of time will help you manage expectations for what you can cover in your marketing plan. The budget depends on your company's tolerance and margins but should be anywhere from 5-12% of your training company's revenue.
Summary
Creating a marketing plan for a training company will ensure that you reach buyers before they come to your business development team. It will help you focus on who you should be marketing to and give you consistency in your marketing efforts.
