Marketing Training Services
Guy Flouch explores some of the basic concepts of marketing and demonstrates how they could usefully apply to marketing your own training programmes
A thankless task that faces many trainers is the marketing of programmes that they have on offer. They may be marketing these to public audiences, as a commercial trainer, or to internal markets, as an in-company training specialist or manager. Often, excellent trainers though they may be, they might not currently have the skills sets required to be successful marketers. In addition to this, they might face a mindset where other members of the organisation think marketing is all about adverts and brochures. This mindset tends to support attitudes along the lines of ‘if a course is full, it’s because it’s a good course but, if it’s empty, it’s bad marketing’.
Where an organisation sees marketing as simply being about publicity, the organisation tends to be one that is product oriented rather than marketing-oriented, It is the organisation, and not the prospective customer, that drives such a strategy, as it merely attempt to sell courses, rather than sell ‘benefits’ and develop a client base.
Certainly, courses can be empty, even in marketing-oriented organisations. Successful filling a course is about the total experience that a prospective customer has, after their initial interest.
Buying Benefits
The old marketing adage is ‘that customers are not buying a drill, they are buying the hole that the drill will make’. In other words, when they are looking at a product, they are looking at the end result, or benefit, that product will bring them. In our world, they are buying the benefits that the course will bring them [e.g. increased promotion prospects, increased employability, more efficient way of doing their job, increased revenue in their own business].
Of course, training is not a simple product, like a drill, it is a service. In terms of building beyond the first sale, service providers are judged also on delivering on their promise, levels of customer support and after-sales service.
It’s important to note that, when the word ‘customers’ is used in this article, it can apply just as much to ‘internal customers’ as those in the more traditional sense.
Marketing Mix
Most non-marketing people are aware, if only vaguely, of some of the jargon that marketers surround themselves with. One of these is the ‘marketing mix’, those critical elements that should be paid attention to, in the marketing of any product or service. The traditional marketing mix of any product, that needs to be tweaked to assure success, has been referred to as the ‘Four P’s’: Product, Promotions, Placement/Distribution and Price.
In the marketing of services, more and more marketers are paying attention to an extended mix, comprising the ‘Seven P’s’. In the marketing of training, a classic service sector offering, you need to pay particular attention to People, Processes and Physical Evidence.
