One question learning and development (L&D) marketers are constantly asking themselves is what marketing content will provide the best return on investment (ROI)?

Which is better: an engaging webinar with a charming, witty, energetic host, or an expertly crafted email sharing data on human behavior, an eye-grabbing banner ad with an enticing call to action (CTA), or a massive display at a conference with beautifully crafted visuals?

Where do Potential Buyers Source Information?

The answer lies in recent L&D buyer persona data. Training Industry, Inc. asked 800+ L&D buyers where they go to source information when they have a need and want to find a solution to help address that need.

When asked “What are your top information sources when seeking a provider”, the pool of L&D buyers had the following in the 50-59% percentile:

Marketers can use these responses to gain valuable insights about what type of content provides the highest return on investment.

With that being said, a marketer should not simply focus on one of these solutions. Instead, they should develop a marketing campaign that builds off of providing multiple information sources for their audience.

What is Your Buyer Asking?

To get a marketing strategy up and running, marketers must focus on a variety of marketing content types to reach their audience.

Instead of getting overwhelmed, let’s focus on an easy way to spread your content to the right areas and take advantage of the different types of content to provide the best ROI for your company.

To start, put yourself in the shoes of your buyer and answer five questions they would ask on their journey, spanning from seeing your brand for the first time to becoming a client:

• Who is this company?
• Why should I care who this company is?
• What does this company do?
• What problems do they solve?
• How can they solve my problems?

Who are you, and why should I care?

The first thing potential buyers want to learn about your brand is who you are. They are not willing to search hard for that answer.

In the “swipe” age of social media, content that does not immediately grab the viewer’s attention will get lost in the scroll. You will want to make sure that you’re answering the “who” in a clear, succinct way so that you can compel people to engage at a deeper level to learn the “why,” “what” and “how” which is the meat of your content.

To show who your company is in a clear, concise way, you must create content that:

1. Answers questions. People have questions that need answers, and when they need those answers, they’re looking for them as quickly as possible. Creating content with the question in mind will help search engine optimization (SEO) as well as help your content get found when people are actively looking.

2. Shows the problems you solve. Why are people looking for answers? Because they have problems! This is another way to ensure your content ranks high in search results, to help distinguish your brand, and to help you reach the right people.

3. Shows your company’s expertise and experience. When people are looking for quality answers, they want to trust the source, and those are two very powerful tools to help establish your credibility!

You can use any of these three angles to create compelling content and promote in the right avenues.

The best content type for answering who your company is and why the audience should care is content focused on brand awareness.

How to build brand awareness?

Brand awareness is the level a brand is recognized by potential buyers and associated with specific solutions and/or specialties. The goal of brand awareness is to get your message out to a wide audience and let them know who you are as a company. This is why many brand awareness campaigns are centered around clicks. Marketing channels such as banner ads, thought leadership articles and social media can all help build brand awareness without tracking leads. With these campaigns, it is crucial to optimize your SEO to ensure the right audience sees your ads, reads articles and engages with your social posts.

What do you do?

To answer this question, it helps to have a clear, defined business purpose statement as well as variations of your value propositions depending on which product you’re marketing with your current content.

Once you’ve built up your brand awareness campaigns you can transition from building awareness around your brand at a high level to sharing how you can help individuals with your experience and expertise. At this stage, you’re going to utilize content that helps show experience, expertise and the fact that you can solve relevant problems for your audience.

So, what is the best content type for answering this question? There are a few!

1. Content marketing: To help build interest in your audience, send your content to your audience directly! Utilize your internal list and find reliable partners to help expand your reach. Examples of effective content marketing pieces include e-books, infographics, research reports, case studies and job aids.

2. Podcasts: Audio-only content offers a more relaxed, real format where hosts can let their personality shine through. Podcasts can help provide thought leadership and show both your experience and expertise, but engagement doesn’t have the deep level of trackability like conventional content marketing options.

3. Sponsored content: If you work with an established partner with quality existing content, utilize it! Doing so will help build out your lists while aligning your brand with topics, which is more powerful than traditional brand awareness.

When building interest, use your experience and expertise to align your brand with specific areas that you specialize in. This will help show how your training solution can solve problems in specific areas while establishing credibility and gaining your audience’s trust.

How can you solve buyer’s most relevant problems?

At this stage of the buyer journey, your audience recognizes your brand and likely has an idea of specific topic areas that you specialize in. Now is the time to show that you can actually solve problems that your audience is experiencing.

If you can show your audience that you can solve problems like theirs efficiently and effectively, it comes down to timing and budget, which is where the sales process begins. Exciting!

So what types of content are ideal for these lower two stages in the marketing funnel? Looking to increase engagement with your audience and encourage them to take action is all about creating opportunities for conversations to take place. These conversations open the door to learn about the specific people you’re targeting, their unique pain points and if you can help them address those pain points. Here are a few go-to ways to engage in those conversations:

1. Thought leadership webinars: Toward the bottom of the sales funnel, buyers are seeking thought leaders and partners to guide them in solving their day-to-day challenges. Webinars hosted by thought leaders provide value to this audience while aligning your brand with specific topics that your company specializes in.

2. Events and conferences: To engage in conversations, you need to be where your potential buyers are. Industry-specific conferences or events are the perfect place for someone to go to learn about the industry as well as connect with potential problem-solvers. When picking an event or conference, ensure the audience aligns with your unique buyer personas to maximize ROI for your company.

3. Product demonstrations webinars: Product demos are about as low funnel as you can get with a marketing activity. Someone attending a product demonstration is actively seeking solutions, so this is the content type for compelling your audience to take action.

Best Practices to Choosing the Right Marketing Channel

To maximize your marketing team’s efforts in answering the five questions above, here are some final best practices for marketing to L&D:

• Build a well-rounded campaign that has activities for each of those questions and each level of your marketing funnel.
• Create environments to encourage conversations with your sales team.
• Partner with industry experts to boost engagement in all levels of your sales funnel and grow your audience
• Re-work existing content into new content types to provide another avenue for your audience to engage with your content (turn a webinar into an e-book or turn a podcast into an infographic).

When driving engagement with your audience, L&D marketers need to create environments and opportunities that encourage conversations. Industry partners can help provide a significant boost in these lower two parts of the funnel if they have an audience that includes your ideal buyers and buyer personas, so explore industry partners to help increase the size of your audience for these pieces of the funnel.

The Bottom Line

What types of content can provide the best ROI? The short answer is all of them!

Your buyers are looking for information in many different places, so as a marketer, you want your company’s content to be in as many places as possible. To do this, know where your buyers are, know what types of content they consume, and provide that content!

If you need help marketing your training company, let us help connect you with over 250,000 learning and development professionals.