Marketing Your Upcoming Event

Putting together an informative yet captivating continuing education training is no easy task - it takes time and effort! After you’ve spent all those hours crafting your presentation, now it’s time to get the word out. You may be asking yourself “What’s the best way to market this CE training?” That’s why we’ve put together some tips to get you started.

What to Consider Before You Begin Marketing

Advertising takes time and resources, so you’ll want to make sure you get the most return on your efforts. Before you get started, you’ll want to consider the following:

1. Who is your target audience; who do you picture attending your CE training?
2. What is the best way to reach this audience; what’s the most effective way of informing your audience of the training? 

Answering these two questions before you begin advertising your continuing education training will help you increase the number of attendees and ensure they get the most out of the training.

Identifying Your Target Audience

Your target audience is the group of professionals you envision signing up to attend your CE training event. Although some trainings can apply to different disciplines, you want to make sure that your marketing efforts are directed towards who will get the most out of the presentation. When you reach out about an upcoming seminar, the recipient will have to determine whether or not this information is relevant to them; it’s best to be certain that it is before the message even reaches their Inbox. 

For example, a CE training on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder might not resonate as well with a dentist as it would with a social worker. In this case, the dentist isn’t a member of your target audience, and it’s best not to contact them at all about this particular training.

How to Reach Your Target Audience

Once you’ve identified your target audience, you’ll need to determine the best way to reach them. In today’s digital world, there are many useful avenues for engaging with your target audience; the trick is to find the one that maximizes your reach within that specific group.

While some marketing approaches may be more effective, a combination of several different strategies will have a broader reach. Within each target audience there are always differences, and having multiple methods of communication will help you spread the word about your CE training much more effectively.

Email Marketing Campaigns

When contacting professionals about CE training, there’s no doubt that email is an effective way to go. You can find contact information for many professionals in national and state licensing databases, as well as on listings for professional organizations and associations. Some sites provide this information for free, while others require you to be a member or subscriber to have access. 

However you choose to gather your contact list, you’ll want to make the best use of it once you do. The goal is for your recipients to engage with your content and ultimately sign up for your training events. 

For this, make sure that your emails are relevant, useful, and timely. The content needs to be relevant to the recipient, the training has to provide useful information, and the frequency of the emails needs to be enough to where the recipient feels informed, but not overwhelmed. You don’t want them to unsubscribe or mark the emails as Spam. To this end, we suggest putting together a weekly or monthly newsletter that allows you to share a lot of information at one time and cut down on the number of emails you send to your contact list.

As a tip: email marketing campaigns can be managed on softwares like Mailchimp or Salesforce by creating a LISTSERV for all of your contacts. Organizing your contacts this way will allow you to send mass emails and segment your contacts in different ways, such as by location, profession, organization membership, etc. 

Promote on Social Media

Although email is one of the best ways to reach your target audience, professional networking sites such as LinkedIn can be useful for promoting professional resources. Consider creating a page for your organization and begin connecting with professionals within your specialization. The more connections you make on LinkedIn, the more likely your page will be recommended to others and will show up in their newsfeed. This increases awareness of your organization and brand, and will potentially grow your contact list.

Simply put - the more people that know you exist, the more people who are likely to attend your workshops. You could also make professional accounts on social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Twitter and Facebook can be used to promote content to the thousands of users who interact with these sites every day. Official channels on YouTube can be used to showcase clips from previous training sessions, as a preview of what attendees can expect to learn.

Sharing Your Event with Relevant Organizations and Associations

Properly marketing your organization and content takes continuous work, and not everyone has time to dedicate to these tasks. So consider reaching out to and connecting with professional organizations that members of your target audience are also likely to connect with. When you do this, be clear about your purpose for connecting with the organization or association, and explain how your CE training will be useful to their members. Sometimes these organizations have their own LISTSERV and will be able to add your upcoming events to their existing newsletter. 

While there are many ways to advertise your upcoming CE training, email marketing, social media and connecting with relevant organizations are great ways to connect with your target audience and get the word out.

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