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The Professional Testing Blog

Looking for Love in Your Marketing Program

In today’s multi-channel world, we often refer to marketing value in overly narrow and simplistic views. When one calculates their marketing budget or plans, it is done with the same narrow focus.  Yet, in the real world, the line between the real and perceived characteristics of an economic good is blurred. Our beliefs about the goods we buy are just as much a part of their value as anything that can be weighed or measured. Bridging this subjective to objective gap and redefining our sense of reality is how marketing campaigns build value – especially in certification programs.

All too often we limit our measurement of marketing value to dollars and cents. This does not, of course, measure the subjective value created, but it reveals how much value consumers place on marketing in financial terms. If a marketing campaign costs $100,000 and it results in an additional $500,000 of revenue, we believe that this marketing effort created value.

Yet if the campaign made the certification more valuable to more people, building their love of the program or inducing them to buy more or buy at a higher price, that is a reflection of subjective value. Storytelling is the marketing jackpot – it’s connecting people with the emotional intangibles that makes something we own or something we do more valuable. In the case of certification, it’s not about the letters that come after your name or the certificate hanging on the wall – but the pride you feel, how it changes your life so that it changes your family’s life too. In other words, you want these professionals to feel that their certification was more than just a transaction and more than the money they paid to obtain it. The real value is in the new value their certification has created for them.

Unfortunately, so much of certification marketing today is focused on the immediate calls to action – “sign up today,” “exams happening soon” or “last chance to get your CE hours” –that it misses opportunities to build real value and create human connections with the target audiences.

One of the goals for certification marketing efforts should be to make your constituents love and take pride in your certification offering. In doing so, your marketing efforts not only create value beyond just dollars and cents but also ignite the subjective side of value based on the human experiences we all share.

Subaru has its “Love – It’s what makes a Subaru” campaign. In reality, they are selling cars that weigh 2,500 pounds, have four doors and good safety ratings – but their marketing is not focused on these purely informational facts. Rather, it is focused on creating that human connection, which reminds us of pivotal moments that happen in our lives and makes us proud of what we accomplish and, more importantly, proud of what we purchase. This award-winning campaign helps connect us to that full human experience, and it has built value for Subaru’s brand.

For those securing certifications, the knowledge and the emotions that come with certification  cannot be separated. Certification marketing efforts need to look for ways to create love and draw on these human experiences even more. In doing so, certification marketing efforts will create more value for the program to your current and future certificants.

Good marketing has the ability to alter our perceptions of reality and, in turn, improve our quality of life. That is powerful. When you create love in your marketing efforts, you have the same power to make your certificant’s lives richer and better — and that is what drives value for your program.

Image Attribution: Axelle B

Categorized in: Industry News