In many industries and markets, barriers to entry have collapsed. As a result, a flood of competition has made success in business more challenging than ever before. To gain, maintain, or increase their competitive edge, business owners and managers increasingly look for learning opportunities that they can leverage to increase the capabilities of their marketing team. If you want your company to be successful, you need to keep your employees on the cutting edge of industry knowledge.
Although continual professional development might make sense to practically every organization, many of them balk at the concept and do not do an adequate job. Small businesses might lack sufficient manpower to maintain their operations while staff members attend training classes. Meanwhile, other businesses believe that ongoing professional training would cost too much.
Although flying employees around the country to attend trade conventions, seminars, and other training opportunities, may not be within most companies’ budget, there are other options. Fortunately, by using the following tips, companies can keep their marketing staffers motivated to continually learn without busting their budget.
Summarize conferences
Rather than having team members travel to live industry events, firms can buy summaries of all the information presented during the conference. Team members can take turns reading the recaps and learn much of what they would have learned had they attended the conference in-person. Consequently, the entire company can benefit from such meetings while saving time and money. You can also encourage employees to read blogs and literature by the speakers at the conference.
Use in-house mentoring
Often, the cost of world-class coaching and mentoring programs put those services out of reach for many businesses. However, companies can form their own in-house programs that share expertise among teams and employees.
To get started, managers should learn about the knowledge and skills of each employee. By matching strong and weak employees in each particular skill, marketing teams can improve their overall performance.
Find cheap courses
Only large corporations can afford the price of top-tier online and offline training courses. Smaller firms should look for free and low-cost courses to get similar benefits for their teams.
At the least, companies can acquire books and share them as part of self-paced training programs. Companies should also encourage their marketers to attend free online courses offered by universities, online training websites, and leading marketing companies. A business can even offer some kind of incentive for employees who take the initiative to learn more.
In summary, by ignoring ongoing training for their marketing team, companies often lose their competitive edge. Fortunately, firms can get an affordable start for their ongoing training strategy by using the above tips to encourage their marketing team to keep learning.
