Many training providers offer training that are aimed at the corporate market. Nonetheless, most providers do not spend much time on marketing aimed at their potential business customers. By ignoring this, one loses potentially long-lasting and profitable customer relationships, which, in the long-term can become the business’ most important source of income.
In this blog post, we will provide you with an introduction of how to customize your marketing to reach potential business customers.
Create personas and familiarize yourself with their travel experience
The first thing to do is to understand who your potential customers are and what their customer journeys look like. Remember that even if you want to obtain business customers, it’s still people making the purchasing decisions and that you are trying to reach out to.
Develop your B2B personas
We advise you to prepare your personas to get a clearer picture of who your prospects are and how to reach them. Personas are partially fictitious, generalised characters that describe different needs, goals and observed patterns of both existing and potential customers.
The way in which the profile of your personas looks, of course, depends very much on the business and on the industry.
A survey from 2015 showed that there has been a shift in who it is that, prior to the purchase, conducts research on behalf of the company. In more than half of these cases, the individuals were between 18-34 years. There is no reason to believe that this figure has declined in recent years (there is rather, reason to believe that the number has increased further).
Although it is not always the people in this age group making the decision 100% on their own, this group has a high impact on the final decision. Colleagues and own network are among the three most important sources of information managers use when making decisions about purchasing.
When purchasing training for employees, it is natural to assume that the manager consults someone who is in the HR department, a personnel manager, a training officer and/or an intermediate manager. Maybe your personas have one or more of these roles?
Idium has written a blog post about how you can map your personas here, if you are interested in further information about creating personas.
Map your personas’ customer journey
Once you have mapped your personas, you should also map out their customer journeys. Use what you know about your personas to find their customer journey, from start to finish. By doing so, it will be easier to know which platforms you meet your potential customers at and what message you should convey to them, how to communicate and when to convey it. In fact, different types of communication are suitable for reaching out to your personas at different places in the purchasing journey.
Optimize you website for B2B
About 89% of those who want to buy something in the B2B segment use the internet as part of their research. Internet search is also provided in Leadify’s survey as the most important source of information for managers with purchasing responsibilities. Therefore, you should definitely invest time to increase your visibility online and to create an informative and user-friendly website.
SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)is a technique for making a website more visible in the search engines. The purpose of search engine optimization is to get the website at the top or among the top search results when your personas conduct a search on relevant keywords in a search engine.
There are many different techniques when it comes to search engine optimization. Proper use of relevant keywords is an important part of SEO. Learn how to use keywords to get better visibility in Google here.
Optimize your website for your personas
It does not help with good visibility in Google if your personas do not find what they are looking for on your website.
To make your website user-friendly for those looking for courses for their business, you should create different pages for the different courses your business offers. Make sure each course page has good descriptions and sales arguments related to the specific training. Make it clear that the training is suitable for companies specifically. Learn how you can write good training descriptions here.
If your training business offers internal training,you should create a separate page on your website about company-internal courses. If your training business offers all its courses as company-internal courses, write this on each page and link directly to the page about company-internal courses. This makes it not only easy for your readers to navigate, but it is also good for your SEO.
Do you need some good sales arguments that you can use on the site for your company-internal training? Sign up for our blog mailing list, and you are assured to be notified when we post our blog post with “Company-internal training sales arguments”!
Optimize for mobile-use
The global statistics show that 52% of people use their mobile phone to search for information online. In other words, it is very important that you have a mobile-friendly website. This is not only beneficial to your prospects, but it also increases your ranking in the search results.
Choose the right platforms
In Leadify’s survey it comes to light that that social media is one of the three most important sources of information when managers make decisions about B2B procurement. Be present on the platforms where you meet your personas in the right mode. To promote your business training, you may want to be visible on the following platforms:
LinkedIn is the most important social media in B2B marketing. This is not without reason. LinkedIn has a number of benefits for players who want to reach out to businesses. The platform is professional and trustworthy, as well as low noise. In addition, LinkedIn is used primarily in a business context. Here you meet your personas in the right mode. This means that LinkedIn is particularly ideal for promoting a B2B service as a company-internal training.
Another advantage of LinkedIn is that you can easily segment and reach out to companies and people you choose. For example, you can choose to segment an ad towards a particular business, industry, and job title. Read more about targeted marketing on LinkedIn here.
Although Facebook is basically a social network that is used in a private context, many people use Facebook in the business context. Also, almost everyone is present on this platform. Additionally, on Facebook there are a number of segmentation options and ways to advertise. You can read more about marketing on Facebook here.
If Norway is your market: Kursguiden.no
If you really want to meet your personas in the right setting, you can advertise your training at Kursguiden.no. This is not a social medium, but a platform where training providers meet seekers and vice versa. In other words, you meet people who are in search of courses. Two other benefits of Kursguiden.no are:
- Kursguiden.no annually has over 1 million applicants, many of whom are people looking for training for their employees.
- Many people conduct their searches for training directly in Kursguiden.no, but the portal also ranks highly in the search results in the vast majority of categories.
Tips for those of you offering company-internal training: When you post your training on the portal, select “Company-internal” under “Teaching Form”. This means that your training will be displayed with a “Company-internal” tag in the overview, so that it will be easy for those who looking for company-internal training to find yours.
Do you not market your courses on Kursguiden.no? Read more about marketing at Kursguiden.no here.
Think long-term and build relationships
Keep in mind that many companies regularly purchase training for their employees. Whether it involves training new employees, statutory training, routine training or competence development of employees and managers. In other words, it can pay off to spend time building up a long-term customer relationship with your existing and future business customers.
Loyal business customers will not only be able to spend a lot of money on your training activities, but can also become good ambassadors for your training activities.
Are you ready to bring in more business customers? Get started now!
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Author: Eline Hagene
Inbound Marketing Manager
Eline produces content to help training providers achieve a more efficient and profitable 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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