A training company providing a range of specialist training courses to business people in multiple locations. They had been established for 18 months, were doing well and had ambitious growth targets. They offered lots of different training courses in wide range of geographical regions, some of which were doing better than others.
Search engine optimisation was working well for them, but it was expensive and they were concerned about putting all their eggs in one basket. Working with their current supplier also meant they had no money left to test other marketing options. They wanted to explore other marketing options but weren’t sure which marketing channels to use.
On the day
Google searches showed that the investment in Search Engine Optimisation was working as the organisation was performing well for most of its training courses. However given that they only offered occasional courses in very specific geographical locations they were effectively investing money attracting lots of interest in geographcial areas where they didn’t provide courses. Additionally, many of their key search terms were not particularly competitive. Paying such high ongoing monthly fees to an SEO agency to achieve national coverage for courses they ran in very specific locations was unnecessary.
It soon became clear that they had been focusing on promoting all their courses equally but that some were very niche and would require little marketing to still remain visible on Google. Others had much bigger potential customer numbers than others. After a discussion and some quick online research it was also clear that their prices were lower than many of their competitors and that their courses were aimed at very different audiences. The organisation also wasn’t doing much to encourage repeat business and the website was failing to capture the details of many of its visitors.
I felt they needed to think about each training course separately – What is the potential market size for each course? Who would attend each course? How will they reach these people?
There were also some things they could do at an organisational level to increase their database of prospects and improve the number of people that became customers and repeat customers.
They also needed to be much more agile in how they promoted individual courses as the first few people covered the costs and the real financial benefits came from filling the last few spaces on the course. They therefore needed promotional activity that could be turned on and off for specific courses in specific locations.
The recommendations
I suggested the organisation scale back their investment in SEO and reinvested the money in the following areas:
Use market intelligence to be more strategic about which course to run in which locations
- Carry out a more detailed review of competitors to see what courses they were providing in what locations and where the gaps were.
- At the same time look at the number of people in any given area that might travel to a location for training.
More enquiries & repeat business
- Recognising that people will often land on specific course pages rather than the home page of their website, it was important to ensure that their key selling points are included on every page of the website and in every specific course video. I suggested some minor, but easily implementable template changes to their website.
- Improving the user journeys on the website to signpost in-house training courses and encourage people interested in their courses to get in touch even if they couldn’t attend on the specific dates advertised.
- Add more course dates – and then if necessary, cancel the course and ask people to move to another course
- Using their website to capture email addresses of their key target market, thus creating an email database. Giving these people access to “premium” video / written content on their website
Do more with the contacts they had
- Investing in a customer relationship management system with marketing automation so that different people can be targeted with different messages
- Map out the user journey for every training course – from when someone shows interest on the website, to post-course communications. Identify what emails and phone calls need to be made when to maximise the number or prospects that become customers, the number of repeat customers and encourage referrals from colleagues and people in their network.
Testing new marketing activities
- Test Pay Per Click advertising of highly targeted search terms specifically targeted around specific training courses in specific locations. These campaigns could be turned on and off as needed.
- Being more pro-active on social media – sharing expertise, testimonials, stories and specific course dates
- Investing time to build relationships in the geographical areas where they run their specific courses and encouraging these people to share course information with their members and local companies
- Incentivising trainers to capture contact details and cross-sell other courses to attendees
Change the pricing structure
- Given that their pricing was lower it was possible to increase the base price of courses and use discounts for multiple bookings and to encourage individuals, trainers and third parties to fill last minute places