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The Professional Testing Blog

Your Certificants are Your Best Marketers

You have built your certification program from the ground up: from conducting market research to calculating the ROI of your program. You have identified experts to enhance the profile of your program and recruited customers to build a network of certificants. The next logical step forward is expanding your program. While traditional forms of marketing and advertising are necessary for program growth, no program can make it on its own.  It is increasingly important for you to look to your certificants as ambassadors and equip them with the tools to bring recognition and credibility to your program.

Helping your certificants market their certification also helps establish good will between you and the certificate holders and helps underscore their value in investing in this certification. It is a way that you can remind your certificants that they have made a commitment to their career and personal development by seeking out certification, that their new credentials are a representation of having achieved and exceeded industry standards for skill and knowledge, and that your program is here to support them.

Outlined below are suggested tips and tools to help your certificants communicate about their credentials and establish their own personal brand, which will ultimately aid in elevating the profile of your program.

Start the Process

To help your certificants develop their own marketing plan, pose the following question to them:

Now that you have reached this professional status, how can you use your credentials to enhance your career and take your personal brand to the next level?

Use Credentials Everywhere

Encourage your certificants to incorporate their credentials into all means of personal promotion, including:

• Email signature
• Resume
• Personal website or blog
• Business cards and other professional materials
• Social media profiles (“About Me” on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)

Integrating their credential into these spaces establishes them as a leader, and success instantly becomes synonymous with their personal brand, as well as your program.  On your program’s website and in your marketing materials, provide them with samples of how others have done this.  And the story doesn’t end there – remind them to communicate their achievements!

Communicate, communicate, communicate

Now that credential holders have added credentials to their online and public persona, help them understand the importance of sharing this achievement with their colleagues, clients and current or future employers. Give them some samples and templates and then inspire them to get creative by:

• Creating brochures or postcards to send to their clients that announce their credentials and the benefit of your certification program
• Writing a post for their blog or personal website that chronicles your certification program and the path they took to rounding out their professional identity
• Crafting emails to their supervisor explaining  the benefit of attaining your credential and the impact that it has on their career
• Sending a press release to their employer’s public relations department announcing their certification, and encourage them to distribute it to local newspapers, journals, etc.
• Using talking points that you provide for how they can share their certification story with their employers and in internal company media such as newsletters and intranets.

Create a Community of Sharing

Create a “brag page” on your website, in your social media or other marketing materials where certificant holders can share their own marketing success stories. Allow them to share the examples organically to teach others through their success. 

While every program needs a solid marketing strategy of its own engaging your large community is equally important.  Investing in your certificants once they have completed your certification program has a strong return on investment in many ways and will greatly aid in growing your program further.

Categorized in: Industry News