Think Your Training Organization Doesn't Need Branding, Think Again

Budgeting meetings, strategy meetings, sales meetings, management meetings: branding keeps getting put on the table as “something we’ve got to start doing.”  There’s a sense that its an important thing for your training business but it keeps getting put back on the shelf in favour of more critical items.  Your company may experienced something along these lines and its not an uncommon situation.

Truth is that branding is sometimes a hard thing for a management team to get its head wrapped around, so it get sidelined by things that are easier to get moving.  Branding is one of those things that some professional “experts” will make out to be a very mysterious and “art” like thing (sometimes to allow for bigger fees to be charged).  But in reality, while there is a part that takes a more subtle marketing skill, a lot of your branding strategies are logical and business oriented decisions to support your sales efforts in new ways.

Example: Training Company Fighting A Bigger Competitor

In a recent discussion with a training program manager, the challenge of fighting a bigger company with a recognized brand in training came up as a big problem for his company.  The issue was at the top of his mind and he was tiring of always having to compete on price because of a lack of brand.  We always treat these situations as an opportunity to unmask the “unmarketed” strengths of a company and then bring a focused approach to answering the question of branding strategy.

Better Use What You’ve Got
Ultimately, there are three levels at which a training organization can compete: brand, product, price.   Most sales cycles begin with a comparison of courses offered, benefits and value for the attendees/students.  But the moment a bigger competitor comes in the game switching to the other two and course / class benefits get sidelined.
When is “small” good? When its a brand.

Smaller training programs have some key advantages over larger organizations.  In the case of the training company mentioned above, there was ability to adapt more quickly to releases of new software editions.   Unlike, its more large scale competitors, this training school’s clients were more agile small to medium size businesses.  We were able identify that this segment adopted new software faster and so courses could be upgraded to focus on new release more quickly.

Building A Tactical Advantage With Branding
Our recommendation (which was implemented quickly) was to create a niche brand around the whole issue of training on the most recent software.   This included a new tagline, leading with some company background information in sales calls and sending out marketing emails built around the concept of an “agile brand”.   The recent feedback we have from the client is that two things have happened:

1. His company is no longer seen as the “little player” but rather the “agile training school”.
2. His discounting activity has dropped significantly because more attention is paid to the unique ability of the organization to deliver up to date training

There Are A Lot Of Angles On Tactical Branding

You can create, build and use brand is lot of different ways to help your training business driving towards its goals.  Our study of more than 1000 training companies and their online efforts has shown that there are three keys:

1. Know what your options
2. Understand how each tactic will impact key success measures of your business (such as Sales Results, Competitiveness or Saving Resources)
3. Have an expertise in how to determine the right options for your business based on its unique characteristics and the market environment it operates in.

Through years of bringing these three things to clients and our own businesses, we’ve seen and experienced visible benefits both in the smoothness of web operations and in the business results generated.