4 Common Mistakes Training Providers Make That Result in Less Participants

Hi there, skilled training manager or provider. You are aware that the number of registrants is absolutely crucial for how much profit the business generates. You also know how hard you work to get your participants. What you may not have thought enough about are the mistakes you are making that could cause you to lose potential participants. In this blog post, we list four common mistakes training providers make that can negatively affect the number of registrations they get. In addition, we give you advice on how to avoid making these mistakes. Do you make any of these common mistakes?

Mistake #1: You aren’t goal-oriented enough with your marketing

The mistake

You want to gain as many participants and reach the widest possible audience for your training. Even though you have been running marketing campaigns using a variety of methods and have many views on your ads, you still aren’t getting as many registrations as you would like.

How to avoid it

There are several things you can do to avoid this “largest possible audience” mistake.

First of all, you should dismiss the idea that reaching out to a mass audience will result in a corresponding mass registration on your courses. There is no benefit in thousands of people seeing your ads as long as these people are not a part of your target audience. Conduct a thorough analysis of your audience. Who are your potential participants? Which channels do they use for communication? What mode are they in when using the different channels? When are they active and what message can you convey to trigger them to act?

When you have a clear picture of your audience, you must discard all of your general campaigns and create targeted marketing campaigns tailored to this audience.

Tip: Ipsos social media tracker can give you answers to many questions related to your target audience’s preferred channels – but only when it comes to social media. Don’t forget that there are other channels that can be far more effective for marketing courses.

Kursguiden.no is Norway’s leading training portal. Here, over 2500 providers advertise their training and over one million seekers are annually in search of training and courses through the portal. No other place reaches such a large and suitable audience of people seeking training.

Read more about marketing at kursguiden.no here.

Mistake # 2: You do not stand out among your competitors

The mistake

The second common mistakes training providers make can be made both subconsciously and consciously.

The Conscious mistake: There are many training providers in the same category as you – and they deliver good quality courses. You therefore provide training that are similar to the training of the largest players in the industry, so that potential participants do not choose your competitors over you.

What you have not considered is that, in this way, you also avoid giving prospective participants a reason to choose you over your competitors.

The Subconscious mistake: You are so concerned with designing your training that you forget to investigate what your competitors are doing. Suddenly, you end up delivering similar courses to your competitors, and potential participants can’t stand out in the mass of providers.

How to avoid it

“Compassion makes you strong, caring and creative. It creates a different attitude, a level of maturity and understanding, where you do something which makes you stand out of crowd.”

― Amit Ray, Walking the Path of Compassion

To get more participants, you need to stand out. In our blog post “7 tips: How to distinguish yourself among your competitors” we go through 7 ways you can stand out amongst your competitors:

• Meet your target market’s challenges with solutions
• Find and use your USP
• Stand out visually
• Highlight good customer reviews
• Provide the best customer service
• Be innovative
• Be visible

Click on the blog entry “7 tips: This is how you stand out amongst your competitors” to read a more detailed description of these points.

Mistake # 3: You do not make it easy enough to sign up

The mistake

The third common mistakes training providers make that result in less participants is making it difficult to sign up. Imagine this: You have written about your training on your website and posted information in social media. You end up with texts like “Contact us by email or phone to sign up”.

And you’re waiting… And you’re waiting… Yet you’re still experiencing radio silence on your phone and email channels.

How to avoid it

For many registrants, having to call in or sit down to formulate an e-mail is too cumbersome. They want to fill out a simple form and receive an email confirmation immediately.

If you make it time-consuming or complicated to sign up for your training, you will lose many potential participants who would otherwise have signed up.

In order not to lose participants due to tedious processes, we recommend you acquire a registration system. Here you have 9 factors to consider when choosing a registration system.

Mistake # 4: You do not have adequate training descriptions

The mistake

The incoming traffic to your website is satisfactory and potential participants are constantly visiting the registration page for your training. In addition, you have arranged good registration forms that make it easy for participants to register for your training. However, this is not reflected though registrations and you are wondering why.

How to avoid it

Neil Patel, featured by Forbes as one of the world’s top 10 online marketers, stated: “You can’t just place a few “Buy” buttons on your website and expect your visitors to buy.”.

It does not help to increase traffic to your site or to create conversion-optimal registration forms if this is not supplemented with good training descriptions.

Good descriptions are essential for several reasons.

Well-designed descriptions help you gain ranking and increase your visibility in search results in Google and other search engines. In addition, good training descriptions are necessary to get a training applicant to want to become a participant. Few people buy a product or service that does not seem inviting and/or lacks sufficient supporting information.

Read our blog post “13 Tips: Training desriptions that lead to more participants” to get some great tips that you can use to improve your course descriptions.

Now that you are aware of the most common mistakes training providers make that lead to fewer participants, you are ready to make your own training a huge success. And you will definitely not do these mistakes yourself. Right?

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