Nailing jelly to a wall and increasing attendance at internal training.
Why you need to promote your in house training programs
You do not have to be a fortune teller, to know, that data from your latest employee engagement survey will indicate that ongoing training and development is important to your employees. However, have you ever noticed getting the same employees to attend in house training is as easy as nailing jelly to a wall?
Marketing is a word not frequently used in conversations among those who conduct training. It should be. Sending out a random email or link to a calendar is not enough to engage your audience. Most of the data that you need to create a targeted marketing campaign is already available to most teams in learning and development.
- Have you recently completed a training needs analysis for your organisation?
- Do you have access to employee engagement survey data results?
The data from both sources can be used to help target both the audience for your training and their managers. This data can be used to make attending training both necessary and compelling; after all, you are using data directly from the source.
The skills used by marketers to increase sales of products such can also be used to help trainers “sell” their in-house training programs. In both cases, a comprehensive marketing plan is essential to success.
Are you actively marketing to your audience, or scheduling and hoping for employees to attend?
Advertising is probably the most familiar part of marketing, but ads are only one small part of an overall marketing plan.
- Package design (has your training courseware been created by a professional instructional designer?)
- Brand recognition (what is the reputation of the training team in your organisation?),
- Physical placement in a store or other outlet (do you have access to an appropriate training environment?), are just a few of the tools used by marketers.
All these elements will impact the success and attendance of your scheduled training.
Promoting your in-house training
A decision to actively market in house training programs is a logical step to demonstrate and provide value to your company. It will help to establish value to brand and reputation.
A product such as a training program can have excellent content and exceptional trainers who take pride in their work. However, like any great product, great training sessions can easily get lost among the competition. If you want to be truly successful, you need to build a positive image and position your training programs for success.
So, what you can do? When you apply marketing principles to an internal training program, you will most likely increase enrolment, and generate positive attitudes toward training and professional development.
Examine the situation
Before you place the key principles into action, though, answer some specific questions about our product, our market, and our competition in your workplace.
Then goals for what you want to achieve through your marketing efforts.
- What is our product?
- What exactly are we marketing?
For example, it could be: Providing training, support, and project development assistance – this is too broad, so narrow your focus further. Target and promote interpersonal skills and business skills training.
- What is your market?
- What are their characteristics?
Create a customer profile. This is also known as a customer avatar. Populate information from data from your training needs analysis, employee data, or engagement survey results
- Are they older age workers?
- Are they computer literate?
- Are they enthusiastic about learning new skills?
- Is the training optional or part of a larger program that they are required to attend?
- When is the most suitable time to deliver training? What is the benefit to them attending?
What is your competition
- What else is scheduled in the business at the same time?
- What is the company culture like when it comes to training?
- What festivals, long weekends or other project deliverables are scheduled?
- Should you avoid scheduling training at the end of month, or peak periods?
What does success look like?
- Is it attendance?
- Is it word of mouth feedback?
- Is it applicable to skills back in the workplace?
- Is it feedback from evaluation sheets?
- Does it need to be formal evaluation such as using the Philips or Kirkpatrick model of training evaluation?
Focus your marketing and planning focus on what factors you have determined to be measures of success.
Considering attitude and perception.
Once you identify your product, your market, and your competition, use the key marketing principles of attitude and perception to achieve your defined goals.
What is it about attitude and perception that is so important?
As learning professionals, we’re aware of the power of attitude in the classroom. One student with a negative attitude can bring down the whole class, including the facilitator. Attitude is contagious. The good news is that a positive, enthusiastic attitude can be just as contagious. Another property of attitude is that it is pervasive. Marketers know that attitude is apparent and can be spread from every single contact with the target market. Our attitude is reflected in everything we do, everything we say, and everything we publish.
Perception is a more subtle, but perhaps more powerful, concept. Marketing experts know that the perception of value is key to getting consumers to buy a product or service. Notice it is the perception of value, not necessarily the true value, that marketers are interested in. Perception is reality.
Why you need to “create DESIRE” for your courses
Employees choose to attend training courses based on the results that expect to get. If they don’t know, understand or believe the results that your training courses will deliver, they are unlikely to register and even less likely to attend. So, if you are going to improve attendance on your training courses, you’ll need to create a desire in your employees. One way to do this is to ‘create urgency’.
Why you should create urgency
This is something that tends to be done badly within organizations and done well outside of organisations – because within organizations we want to be nice! We want to say to people: “We get that you’re busy, but there’s a course that would be helpful for you… there’s no urgency.” It’s not true. There isn’t an infinite budget. You have limited resources. You do have to plan these things.
How to create urgency
If you’re providing a course that’s going to help people hit their sales targets, why should they wait? Why should we say it’s fine if they attended in three months time?
Emphasize why they should attend the course NOW
Instead, Learning & Development should be saying: “Come on! If you’re not hitting your sales targets, you should be on this course. It’s in two weeks and you should make time for it because the end benefit is hitting your sales targets. We’ve run this course before, and other people have hit their sales targets as a result. If you want to do that you need to sign up now.” You should communicate this to managers too, so they can help you create this urgency with their employees.
Highlight where there is limited availability
When we say urgency, it’s not just creating urgency about attending the course on a particular day, but actually creating urgency around registering as well. So, let people know how many slots are remaining on a course. Highlight that spaces are limited, that they’ll go quickly and encourage people to register as soon as they can.
Provide bonuses for early registration
In the external world of training, (companies who provide training to other companies or individuals), they can do things like discounts or bonus products for people that respond earlier and sign up earlier.
You might think this isn’t possible internally, but you can! For example, if we use the course mentioned earlier, before hitting your sales target, you might say: “For the first ten people that register, we’ll arrange 1-2-1 time with the top sales person, to discuss what you learned after the course and how to put it into practice to achieve great results.”
Now, of course, in theory, the employee could contact the individual and arrange it. However, there’s something very valuable about having it done for them, so it works as an incentive to register early. The key is to identify something of value to the employee that you can provide to them (often for free, and very little effort). Then you can create urgency by creating scarcity (limiting how many you will provide).
For example: “Register 7 days from now if you want XYZ” or
“Be one of the first 10 people to register and you’ll get XYZ.”
You’ll find that when you create that urgency, you’ll massively increase your registrations.
Creating ‘DESIRE’ generates impressive results
When urgency is combined with ‘selling the end benefit’, and ‘using social proof’, (utilise positive feedback on posters and emails you’ll find that employees greatly desire your courses and other development resources – valuing them highly. As a result, they’ll be keen to register and attend ASAP.
Those fliers, posters and promo e-mails do count
It is important to enhance learning and encourage real changes in behaviour as a result of training. Consider using catch phrases or slogans to promote your programs. For example: “For every action there is an equal reaction” and “Perception Is Reality.” Even better if you can use quotes from your learners. One way to do this, that will also help with embedding learning is to schedule a meeting with each participant a week or so after the training has occurred. This will assist with holding the learner accountable to apply the learning and be a fantastic source of promotional material.
How does packaging relate to marketing training?
Be mindful when Package training when we design schedules, announcements, newsletters, handouts, and certificates.
Price training when we decide what it will cost learners to enrol. If we want learners to see our training as valuable, we must create the perception of value through a comprehensive marketing plan. For those that don’t charge for training conducted, this may be part of the issue – if it is for free, thus not valued in the business.
To know what creates the perception of value, look again at your brand as a learning or training team. Your brand should be, well designed, and has a distinctive, easily recognized logo and name.
The package design is consistent—the box isn’t blue one month and orange the next. Fonts don’t change depending on who has written the training materials. Company brand guidelines have been considered. One way to achieve this, is to purchase pre packaged learning materials, so you know that you are getting quality materials and professional design. Another alternative is to engage a graphic designer to enhance the look and feel of your training materials post learning materials being developed inhouse.
Keep all this in mind when you’re planning training programs and put yourself in a learner’s shoes.
- How does your training materials look to an outsider?
- Are you enthusiastic about the program?
- Are your training materials relevant and error-free?
- If you create a perception of value around your instruction, you will attract more learners and raise the training department’s profile within the company.
In summary- create a brand for your training that is marketable.
- Consider using incentives for attending schedule training
- Use positive feedback from training evaluations and follow up meetings to influence others in attending in the future.
- Link promotions back to data from recent training needs analysis conducted, and employee engagement surveys where possible.
- Ensure that your marketing materials sell the benefits of attending the training – “What this means for you is…”
- Spend time and effort, making sure that your training materials are professionally presented.
- Ask for feedback – and demonstrate that you are listening to feedback. You asked for, we did…”
- It takes time to build a brand that is positive and creates value to the business; it requires ongoing effort and linking to all internal communication channels. To keep you and your team motivated, track your progress against what you have identified success looks like.
Add this to the engagement of your key stakeholders, and ongoing internal marketing, your internal brand will improve, as will the numbers of attendees attending your scheduled training.
Targeted, professional development courses enable you to deliver effective training sessions that get the key message across and retain participant involvement.
- Save hours of research and development time. We have done all the hard work so you can focus on the training delivery.
- Own complete rights to edit, copy, and reuse the training materials. You can even brand it with your business logo and name.
- Download all training courses and courseware packages immediately in their source files.
Each training course includes:
- Detailed Trainers / Facilitator Guide
- Targeted explainer video
- Learner Workbooks
- Adult centred training activities
- A self-paced learning plan for learning application back in the workplace
- Learner Attendance Certificate
- Attendance record
- Training evaluation sheet
Facilitated Training has the solution that you need. Editable training materials that can be used again and again. Insert your company logo, add in case studies or examples from your workplace, or train using the quality training materials, as is.
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