If you’ve been relying on “word of mouth” as your primary marketing strategy, partnering with external marketers in learning and development (L&D) can be a great choice for scaling your training company. External marketing partners, such as Training Industry, Inc., already have a well-defined, specialized audience. If this audience matches your target demographic, you can leverage the partner’s strong brand to enhance your own brand’s visibility and credibility.

But how do you determine the right time to partner with an external marketer for your training company?

This article will evaluate three simple questions to ask when determining whether you’re ready to partner with an external marketing company to promote your corporate training solution.

What to Prepare Before Partnering with a Marketing Agency

When connecting with an external marketing partner to help market your training company, the initial conversations will most likely center around three things: your target audience, content and budget.

1.   Who is my target audience?

Knowing your target audience is key, not only to make sure you choose the right marketing partner, but to make sure that your content aligns with that target audience for the best quality lead acquisition. To truly know your audience, you should have buyer personas created that highlight your specific buyers based on your specific products, services and company identity.

If you don’t have buyer personas already created, the right marketing company can help you create them, so your collaboration with your ideal marketing partner could start with the creation of those buyer personas so that your future marketing campaigns collect the right types of leads for the best quality opportunities.

2.   Do I have the right content?

After you’ve checked off the “target audience” box, the next box to check is “content.” The foundation of every successful marketing campaign is quality content that your target audience will engage with. Different types of content will satisfy different marketing goals at different stages of the marketing funnel.

If you don’t have content, the right marketing partner will not only help you to create quality content, but they would also have assets you can sponsor to be your content strategy, so your collaboration with your ideal marketing partner could start with creating or sponsoring quality content.

3.   What is my budget?

The last box you need to check is the “budget” box. While some higher-funnel marketing activities may be free, creating a consistent marketing engine that converts leads will require a dedicated budget.

While there is no perfect number, L&D companies are typically going to budget 10-15% of their operating expenses for marketing, on average. Keep in mind that 10-15% is the average to stay competitive in the L&D market, so a budget of 20% could be necessary to steal your audience’s attention from your competitors.

Budget is the one limitation a marketing partner can’t help you with, but they should be able to align your campaign expectations with your anticipated budget.

Am I Ready to Use a Partner?

Once you’ve identified your audience, content and budget, you are ready to set up your campaign. However, before launching your L&D marketing campaign, you need to prepare your team for managing an influx of leads.

When a marketing agency is helping L&D organizations strategize their marketing activities, they will ask you this important question: If you were to get 1,000 leads today, what would you do with them? If you don’t have an answer, any marketing budget spent with a partner will be wasted money.

To make sure you maximize on the value of the leads, ensure your team has lead nurture campaigns at the ready. You must periodically connect with leads over time to continue to warm them up for your sales team.

L&D solutions purchases are seldom made after one interaction, especially a marketing interaction, so you must have a strategy for those leads in place. If you don’t have a strategy for engaging hundreds or thousands of leads, or you aren’t completely confident in your strategy, then you aren’t ready to work with a marketing partner.

How do I Pick the Right Marketing Partner?

After you’ve checked those boxes and prepared your lead conversion strategy, it’s time to research your ideal marketing partner! Here are three questions to ask the potential agency you’ll partner with:

• Do they have the right audience? Every marketing company will have their unique audience with unique demographics and personas. Make sure their audience closely aligns with your ideal audience and your buyer personas. Also, ensure they have the right audience volume and reach to help you meet your marketing goals.
• Do they have the right expertise? Ask your potential marketing partner for examples of how they’ve helped companies like yours in the past to make sure they can help your business grow. If they don’t have work examples or case studies from companies like yours, they might not be ideal for you.
• What marketing products do they offer? Request a media kit or list of the services your potential marketing partner provides to make sure they can help you build a well-rounded campaign. For example, if your goal is to grow through content marketing, but your potential marketing partner doesn’t have a large email subscriber base, they might not be ideal for you.

Partnering with a complementary marketing agency for your training solution can be a game-changer for your organization. By identifying your audience, content and budget, as well as what you will do with the leads they provide and the questions you should ask a potential agency, you have all the tools you’ll need to make an informed decision.

If you need help marketing your training company, let us help connect you with over 250,000 learning and development professionals.

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