by Venchito Tampon | Last Updated on February 25, 2024
One of the significant challenges of freelance L&D practitioners and corporate trainers is learning how to market corporate training programs.
No matter how effective these programs are in changing other people’s lives, you will find missed opportunities if no one provides the training service.
In this guide, I’ll show you five core pillars that are more than just the “publish content and leads will come” mentality.
1. Invest in Networking
This is obvious, but most L&D and training professionals use this to initiate hard selling with others during networking events.
Start by building relationships and offering value as much as possible without expecting anything in return.
Instead of instantly hard-selling your training services without value in return. Essentially, you want others to replicate your value by asking you to join their in-house events and train their employees.
In the Philippines, PTSD offers public events where the best trainers and L&D practitioners gather to attend, listen, and learn from top-caliber speakers. This is also a way for networking and learning from others in the community.
Networking is like planting seeds and reaping the rewards for months, years, or even decades.
It is one of the underutilized tools in marketing corporate training programs.
If done effectively and ethically, it could result in multiple buy-in to your training programs (without actively selling services in events itself).
2. Build An Online Personal Brand
Personal branding is more profound than just posting social updates of influencers.
For the learning and development industry, personal branding is more of an educational, providing valuable information that addresses the particular needs of your target audiences.
Consider giving previews of your talks and training sessions, where a 2-minute video discussing a single topic intently could help potential clients (internal HR teams) see the value of your content and how you deliver it to your participants.
Identify topics that address your audience’s challenges, pain points, and problems.
For example, if you’re targeting employees, you can repurpose your talks on workplace ethics and excellence. Or, if you’re speaking about leadership and management for C-Suite and senior leaders, you can repurpose your videos on Five Levels of Leadership.
Hire a copywriter or do the caption writing yourself to contextualize every content you publish.
The key here is repurposing your existing resources while not overspending time marketing your training programs. All the while giving value through your repurposed videos and written content assets.
Consider recordings of training sessions as content assets. Aside from repurposing it, you can utilize it as a portfolio whenever potential clients ask for work samples.
Repurpose video or audio assets into written blog posts to maximize their value and get organic traffic via ranking for target keywords using search engine optimization (SEO).
Utilize social media platforms to its fullest to increase personal brand reach.
Organic marketing is free and can help you build a strong brand for your training company by consistently posting social media content.
This requires a full-week content plan in your social media calendar. You can invest one to three hours a week to create and schedule across different social media platforms – Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Linkedin.
3. Create Your Website and Use SEO To Get Organic Leads
Most training companies, L&D practitioners, and consultants use websites as calling cards – underutilizing their impact to drive potential clients to your business.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ranks websites in Google’s SERPs for specific commercial and informational keywords that the target audience is searching for.
By ranking for the most important keywords your training or consulting business wants to dominate in the market, you’ll have an immense advantage over other competitors who don’t have the resources and team to utilize SEO as a marketing channel.
Let’s use this corporate training blog as an example.
Our training company, Rainmakers, currently ranks number 1 for the target keyword, “corporate training Philippines”.
It drives tens of organic leads from clients doing Google searches for the term or its relevant keywords.
We also rank for other corporate program-specific keywords like “personality development training Philippines” and “cross-cultural communication training” .
Create dedicated landing pages for each keyword.
So, if you target clients within a specific country, region, or local area, you can include it alongside your target keyword (e.g., corporate training services in Brisbane).
Then, include the keyword in your page’s most essential optimization places, including meta title, URL, first sentence, H1, H2, and image alt tags. This would signal to Google and other search engines what you are referencing – given the keyword of your choice.
This approach enables my corporate training company to dominate most of the keywords related to corporate training in just 8 months.
You can use SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush or look at the autosuggest completion feature of Google to find specific corporate training programs people are looking for in your target country or local area.
This helps you identify the most searched keywords, optimizing your pages accordingly.
4. Deliver The Highest Value In Corporate Training
This element won’t be categorized as just “purely marketing”, but as an essential part of delivering the best client service to corporate clients, which can lead to multiple referrals and positive word-of-mouth about your brand.
Aim to excel in all phases of the corporate training process, from training needs analysis to training delivery up to the evaluation part.
The perceived value in corporate training programs includes the quality of transference of learning from the trainers and facilitators to participants and its post-training impact on the dedicated team or organization (based on levels of evaluation).
If you do great work, you’ll obviously acquire repeat training schedules from highly satisfied clients.
5. Joint Venture With Other Training and Consulting Companies
Building and strengthening relationships with like-minded, even competing companies enables both parties to acquire new clients in a mutually beneficial manner.
Not only do they offer similar services, but each of the training companies has strengths that others can complement.
Partnering with other training companies to transfer any inquiries for which your team doesn’t have in-depth expertise is imperative. At the same time, they can share new businesses with your team that has experience delivering training.
At Rainmakers, we partner with AIB Training and MSS Biz Solutions for specific corporate training programs, including team building, customer service, sales accounts management, and English fluency.
This approach enables us to focus on what we’re experts in and craft better transformative corporate training programs for our clients.
Marketing is Building Your Brand
Learning how to market corporate training programs is more than checking off “to-do list tasks” of posting social media content. It has a deep core focal point to build a brand that will last, and clients in the learning and development industry will recognize it as valuable to the industry.
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