Marketing Team Training

Marketers have a vast supply of information and resources at their disposal to tackle any project. One often overlooked tool is online training for marketing teams to grow their strategies. Whether you’re an agency or in-house wanting to deliver industry knowledge or educating customers on your product, online training for marketing initiatives just makes sense.

Marketing teams in SaaS companies and marketing agencies both benefit from online training platforms. Being able to deliver content in a variety of media formats with built-in tracking is a marketer’s dream. Below are four examples to increase revenue with online training for marketing strategies and make dreams a reality.

Marketing with customer training content

Marketing can be broken down into education and storytelling. If you think of marketers’ offerings in that way, training your customers makes perfect sense. This is especially true for SaaS and technology organizations where a PDF manual just doesn’t cut it.

Training customers on how to maximize the value they get from your offering strengthens their relationship with your organization. Customer training also builds powerful brand awareness. Think of HubSpot or IBM and how they offer public training for anyone interested in using their platforms or practices.

Employee experience states that training your staff builds engagement. Combing that model with Customer Experience creates a powerful customer training program. Let’s see how that can be built out below.

A how-to guide on creating a customer training program

First thing’s first—you’ll want to gather everything you have that you deliver to your customers. This type of content might include:

• Help articles

• FAQ pages

• eBooks and guides

• Instructional videos or infographics

Once you have the content, you’ll want to fill in gaps. A great way to find knowledge gaps are on customer review sites. Also looking through help center messages and commonly asked questions your sales and service team receives. Knowing what your customers ask about most can help you pinpoint pain points to provide training on.

World Financial Review makes a great point in this article that customer training can be another space to hype your offering’s value. Use cases with proven statistics can lay out a path for success with your business in your customer training.

After you’ve compiled all of your content, you’ll want to create an experience. This can be a series of newsletters, a few courses in an online training platform, or a video series. Think about bite-sized chunks for customer training on a focus topic.

With a format in place, you’ll want to create and deliver your training in a structure like the ones below.

Customer training can be a bit of work. But once you’ve built out the basics, you’ll be able to use them to build customer engagement. Updating this process is easier with an online training platform because you can simply revise in-app as needed. If you’re delivering customer training without a dedicated platform, consider making a mix of evergreen and topical content.

One last word on customer training is the importance of split-testing. Our Learner-First Model discusses why measuring different versions of training content can help you understand what works best. Your customers may prefer videos for instructional training over PDF’s, or may prefer a little gamification. Split-tested training enables you to do this while getting insight on what your customers prefer.

Marketing eCommerce with online training

External marketers in agencies or in consulting benefit from marketing eCommerce training offerings. These can be great forms of passive revenue that leverage existing content or an offering that’s complimentary with your current services. With an online training platform, leveraging training content for marketing eCommerce is a snap.

Marketing eCommerce with an online training platform

Both Marketing consultants and agencies typically replace or supplement an in-house marketing team. Though not as common, external marketers can offer training as a secondary service to their clients. With online training, clients can learn how to execute basic marketing tasks or take on more advanced projects. Some great examples would be:

• Basic online training for marketing 101

• Content marketing

• In-house marketer development

• SEO/SEM Certification

These can be a great secondary offering if your focus is developing marketing strategies for clients. External training can also be a main service for clients building their in-house team skills. You can also automate most of this process with an online training platform integrated with eCommerce.

A great way to find areas you can deliver marketing eCommerce is by doing market research. Understanding what needs customers might have helps you locate a market niche to create and sell training. Once you create the training content, create a checkout process that sends login details to the purchaser. Boom! Passive marketing eCommerce revenue.

Online training for content marketing

At their core, online training platforms are really just tools to share and measure content. By applying this idea to content, you can use online training for marketing strategies to grow your audience insights.

Some great ways to use online training for marketing content strategies are:

• Social media—sharing fun quizzes like Buzzfeed that relate to your industry or offering.

• Best practices in a video course on a subject related to your industry or offering.

• High-level training on your business offering via podcast series.

• Multimedia training programs that teach customers how to increase the value of your offering for their businesses.

Sharing content via online training is so powerful because of the data insight you can access. Marketers can track traffic and intent data, but some of these metrics are still considered vanity. Measuring content performance in online training shows you exactly how content performs and how people are interacting with it.

Similar to customer training, you can also split test the content in online training to see what resonates with your audience. And using an online training platform allows marketers to rapidly revise and adapt content to improve performance.

Marketing enablement training

Enablement training isn’t just exclusive to sales teams—marketers also benefit from online training platforms for upskilling. By creating standards based on high-performer employees, you can share this knowledge with the marketing team. This accelerates the time new team members take to produce at a higher level and ensures continuity across the organization.

Marketing enablement training sits within three key areas of your team’s training process:

• Onboarding—Rapidly trained marketers can produce more effective work more efficiently with enablement training.

• Continuous learning—As teams grow, members need to grow their knowledge and skills to continue to succeed. Enablement training means continuously passive learning such as conferences and upskilling to help employees grow. There’s tons of free resources available from major tech firms like the ones listed here

• Individual growth and advancement—just like with sales enablement, marketing enablement training also helps create high-performer employees. These individuals are your staff that become leaders and ultimately set your organization’s best practices.

Online training for marketing can be a powerful route to expand business growth opportunities. Whether you're trying to scale in-house marketing growth or want to increase consulting revenue opportunities, we're sure the practices above can help. For even more ideas on how to leverage online training with your team, chat with us! Our experts have developed hundreds of solutions to create scalable growth for businesses like your own.