How Do You Make the Most Out of Your Marketing Bucks This Fall?
Do you have a tight marketing budget? If so, it can be a challenge to achieve successful marketing of training. But even the smallest marketing budget can be stretched just enough to give it a significant impact.
Want to get the most out of your marketing money this fall? Here are 7 tips on how to maximize the impact of the money you spend on marketing your training.
7 tips: Get the most out of the marketing of your training
Do you already have both budget and marketing strategy in place? Then you can click here to skip the first two tips . Or you can read them anyway and get a reminder of why what you do is so important!
Create a realistic marketing budget
This may seem obvious, but there are surprisingly many businesses that do not have a marketing budget. And it’s hard to get the most out of a budget that doesn’t exist.
Many businesses hope that it is enough to focus on free, organic marketing and very cheap marketing efforts.
Although one can achieve good effect from this type of marketing, it has its limitations. Especially when it comes to social platforms. Today it is much more difficult than before to achieve a good effect on social media without paying a single cent. The algorithms are not as good with free content from business pages as they were before. Additionally, in the search engines, competition is sky high for the top spots. Digital platforms now have to pay to play.
These are often the businesses that are unwilling to spend money on ads and campaigns that are not performing well. For your business to grow and registrations to increase, marketing must be one of the areas where your business invests money.
And remember: To achieve success, your marketing budget must match your ambitions.
Get a well-developed marketing strategy and marketing plan in place
Don’t already have a marketing strategy with an associated marketing plan in place? Well, then you have a job to do before you can feel confident that your marketing budget is being used properly.
The key to getting the most out of your marketing budget is to have a clear strategy and a detailed plan for how your budget will be spent. Without this, you will wander around in the dark and waste money on marketing efforts that will not bring you closer to your goals.
Not sure what a marketing strategy and marketing plan really is? Well, Michael from BrandUniq has created a table explaining the differences.
| Marketing strategy | Marketing plan |
| – A collection of long-term methods for achieving the company’s goals. | – A list of measures to be implemented in the short term, usually within a year. |
| – Will not change annually, only when there is a major change affecting the business as a whole, such as the entry of a new strong competitor, the implementation of new legislation that greatly affects the business, or a sudden change in consumer needs. | – Change annually based on competition and short-term opportunities and threats |
| – Supports business goals | – Supports market strategy |
| – Generic with loosely defined budgets and deadlines | – “the to-do list”, which includes well-defined responsibilities, budgets and deadlines. |
If you google the terms you will find many great articles and templates that can help you put in place a proper marketing strategy and a clear marketing plan.
Focus on fewer platforms
One of my guilty pleasures is watching the reality series on Love Island UK. If you do not know the series from before, I can summarize the concept as a bunch of young people trying to find a mate on almost live TV.
In the series, there is one phrase that the contestants keep repeating: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. By this they mean that you should not concentrate all efforts and resources on one person, because then you risk ending up without anyone.
This is an attitude many also have when it comes to the use of marketing platforms. They spread their efforts on a number of platforms in the hope of securing a portion of the cake from all the platforms. They are afraid of losing all the marketing bucks if they bet on only one or two platforms.
The problem is that it is rarely neither time, nor cost-effective to do so. Usually, it pays to invest in a limited number of platforms and really invest in these platforms. Just make sure you put your eggs in the baskets that are most effective at reaching your target audience. What curves are these can be found by following these tips.
Don’t be afraid to experiment
Set aside a portion of your marketing budget to experiment. It is through experimentation that you find out exactly what works best for your training activities. You will probably also find some tactics and strategies that do not work as well, but then you also know what not to spend time and money on in the future.
Try A/B testing things like campaign content, headlines, button colors, CTAs, email topics, and landing pages. With training marketing you can be creative. Test the same ad on different platforms to the same audience to see which platform performs best. This is how you find out which basket you should put your eggs in.
And by all means, don’t bother with the experimentation just because you find something that provides high returns. It is actually possible that further testing will result in an even better return.
Remember to make a review after your experiments. What experiments became a success, and what became a failure? What did you do right and what did you do wrong? What adjustments can you make to make the experiment a success next time? What should you continue with and what should you cut out?
The result of all your testing will help you get a significantly better basis for deciding how to spend your marketing money.
Reuse your goodies
Producing content and marketing materials requires both time and money. The companies that think they have to reinvent the wheel every time they create content or run new campaigns are probably spending a lot of money.
Do you have photos, graphics, video posters, leaflets or other material from previous campaigns that you might be able to use again?
What about content such as blog posts, social media posts, news articles or other content that can be renewed or used to create new campaigns or new content?
Don’t waste your creativity, time and money on coming up with new messages and designs for each and every platform and campaign. Stick to what represents your brand and build on the brand’s message.
If you make sure that a certain percentage of your content production is evergreen content, reusing will be a simple matter!
Be visible when people are looking for training in your category
You probably already know how important it is to be visible when your prospects are searching for training in your category in search engines like Google.
If you are not already visible among the top 5 on the first page of organic search results, you should definitely prioritize using a portion of your budget to achieve this.
Fortunately, there are many roads to Rome. If you do not have the skills to increase your visibility in the search engines on your own, there are many providers that can help you with this.
One option is to pay an SEO specialist to optimize your search engine website. This could make your own website more visible in the search engines.
Another option is to be visible on the search results that are already in the top tier of your potential customers’ Google Search. This could be, for example, a training portal that specializes in performing well in search engines and that has high traffic from your potential customers. If you want to get your share of these applicants, you should definitely be visible on such portals.
Close all money-consuming holes
If you want to get the most out of your marketing dollars, make sure your money doesn’t run out.You simply need to avoid waste.
Waste can take so many forms. To continue with measures that have little to no effect, possibly the wrong effect, is definitely a waste.
Wasting is also spending a lot of money on marketing efforts without taking advantage of the effects of the measures. All too often I come across very good ads that lack a clear CTA, button and/or a conversion optimized landing page.
If you create a Facebook ad with the goal of getting people to register for your training, be sure to encourage them to sign up and attach a direct link to the sign up form. If you do not make it easy for your target audience to do what you want them to do, you throw money out the window.
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And by all means; Don’t spend your budget promoting your training to the wrong audience.Rather work on developing good buyer personas and produce targeted marketing tailored to these – that‘s what will yield returns.
Marketing of tight budget training
Even with a tight marketing budget, it is possible to achieve good results with course marketing. It’s just about spending the right money. I hope you have got some new ideas after reading this blog post. If not, then I hope you have been reminded of something you may already knew, but have not been practicing lately. If you want to be visible where over 1 million training seekers are looking for training, you can read more about marketing on Kursguiden.no here.
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About FrontCore
Over 2600 training providers use solutions from FrontCore – and that’s not without reason. FrontCore is one of Norway’s leading competence environments within training web marketing and cloud systems for training management. With over 18 years of experience from the training industry and our finger on the market pulse continuously, we help training providers achieve more efficient operations and higher revenue.
Get your tasks out of the way with the Checklist template for training
Get your tasks out of the way with the Checklist template for training
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At Kursguiden.no, more than 1 million potential training applicants are looking for training every year. Make sure they find your course when looking in your training category.
Author: Eline Hagene
Inbound Marketing Manager
Eline produces content to help training providers achieve a more efficient and profitable training day. She is certified in the Inbound methodology through Hubspot and has completed a Bachelor of Marketing management at BI Norwegian School of Management. Visit Eline’s LinkedIn profile here.
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