Integrating Training into Your Interactive Marketing Budget
Posted by Alan K'necht in 
All too often, clients merely budget for specific components of their on-line marketing budget. It might the cost of hiring an SEO consultant, or for a firm to set-up and manage their paid search campaign. I’ve seen a lot RFQ (Requests for Quote) and RFP (Request for Proposal) over the years and they almost all always fail to list staff training as one of the requirements.
While you can technically feasible to run these programs without training your staff; you’re only getting perhaps 50% to 70% of the benefit of these efforts. This is akin to what transpired in the mid 90’s when companies were frantically trying to play catch up and launching corporate websites left and right without informing their staff of the site, nor the sites URL. Employees had no idea what the company was saying to the outside world and when you talked to a receptionist with a question about the content on the site, the dead silence gave the impression of a deer caught in the headlights and quickly killed the corporate on-line image.
So where does training come in? What is the point of having a professional search marketing firm like Digital Always Marketing take on the effort of an SEO project, when the moment they’ve completed the website clean-up portion of the project, that your staff reverts to writing SEO unfriendly copy, or starts making changes to the website that can kill the SEO efforts.?
The same applies to the link building aspect of search engine optimization. While you can engage a firm to obtain quality organic links on your behalf, why not train your staff to know how to spot appropriate sites for links or how not to pass up on an appropriate link opportunity, create effective links and avoid links that can actually hurt your SEO efforts.
As a professional trainer for past 10 years or so, I see the immediate benefit to organization of either sending their staff to a formal training sessions, or bring in a professional trainer. As a trainer once you see these people eyes light up “ah that’s what it’s all about, I get it now and I can even do it” you know the people paying for the training are going to get their monies worth. While the immediate ROI on paper for training isn’t always self-evident, the longer term benefit of happier employees (everyone loves training), more effective employees and more knowledgeable employees can’t be denied.
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Matt Joswick says:
Good points Jim.
Integrating training into a proposal, or convincing a client that this beneficial really does pay off in the long run. In my experience, iteven creates a stronger bond between you and the client for continued work.
However, I sometimes find clients balking on paying for training when they see the increased cost for it. How do you package it, sell it? And what do you find are the most important, reoccurring themes for training topics? (link building, copy writing …)
Cheers
Matt