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Expand Your Training Business by Addressing New Audiences

Using online training you can now reach out to new audiences that you could not address in a cost effective way before.

Let’s face it: as a successful trainer, especially if you’re a trainer with a deep expertise, you are most likely not cheap.  This is of course a good thing, but it also limits your market to rather large organizations or big corporations. Smaller companies, let alone individual employees, cannot afford your services.

Online training, if done correctly, can change this. It is an opportunity to sell your skills and experience to a larger audience. You can start by using your existing clients as marketing channels for your online training products. How does that work?

As an example, suppose you are training pharmacy employees. You tell them about the safe use of certain drugs: the correct dosage, the potential side effects to watch for and the best way to administer the drug. Suppose you could sell pharmacies an online training package which is really a light version of your original training. This training “light” is focused on one specific drug only and explains everything without any pharmacy jargon.

There are plenty of training opportunities outside your established base of customers

Now, why would pharmacists buy what is essentially a dumbed down version? To educate their customers of course. Think about having to read the instructions that are included in the box, in tiny script and boring prose. Surely an online presentation with a little quiz afterwards creates a much better learning experience.

As another example, if you are training personnel managers in interviewing and screening job applicants, why not sell your expertise to those same job applicants? After all, you already know exactly what personnel managers are looking for. Box your expertise in an online training and sell it directly to employees. Consider focusing on a select group  (e.g. high potentials looking for a new career opportunity) as this facilitates your marketing efforts.

To turn your skills as a trainer into an online training package, there are various options. For starters, you can conduct an online seminar. This is a natural extension to what you’re already doing, presumably, on a day-to-day basis. You talk to a group of people, the only difference is you’re doing it online. For a potentially larger audience.

The other option is to extract yourself from the process, either entirely or partially. If you participate in asynchronous discussions – a fancy phrase for using e.g a forum – you get to decide when you provide the answers and advice. This means you can also employ other people to answer the easier questions for you. If you create a truly standalone interactive course, you eliminate yourself entirely from the process – freeing up your precious time for lucrative training sessions in big corporations.

In short: online training is an opportunity to expand your customer base because you can reach audiences which could not afford your services  previously.