Krista Neher
Dec 11 2018
This week I’m running 4 full days of Digital Marketing Training for international marketers for a large CPG company.
Running long-format workshops can be a challenge – let’s face it – nobody wants to hear me talk for 4 days!?!?!
So how do we keep our trainings engaging, interesting and educational?
We receive average scores on our trainings of over 80% pretty consistently, which is well above training industry averages. How do we do it? We design training not only to be interesting but also to drive actionable results.
We don’t do death by powerpoint – it is boring for the audience and also doesn’t match adult learning methodology where people need to analyze and synthesize in order for the training to stick.
- Plan Interactions – Death by powerpoint is the surest way to lose an audience – especially in longer-format training settings. Plan interactions to keep your audience actively participating in the program.
- Know the Audience – Knowing the audience – their brands, customers, knowledge levels, etc. – allows for a more tailored approach to the training vs. a generic training class.
- Do Live Demonstrations – We try to focus on live demonstrations vs. theory to make the content practical. People love “looking under the hood” to see how things really work.
- Plan Live Examples – Looking at real, live examples increases the relevance of the training and allows the audience to discuss and apply the learning principles.
- Make it Tangible – What’s in it for me? That is what the audience wants to know. The more we make the content tangible and relevant to the audience the more successful it is.
- Be Prepared – We make sure that we prepare everything in advance – from the room setup to the technology to the materials we bring. Experience helps you develop a checklist of preparations to make sure the training is a hit.
- Be Flexible – Energy levels in a room can rise and fall based on time of day, etc. The audience may also find some content more relevant and valuable than others. We always align in advance with the client on how we can be flexible to let the discussion go where it is most valuable.
- Make it Actionable – After a training session we want to impact the results on the JOB. This means that the training should be actionable and we try to build action-planning in to all of our sessions – whether they are 1 hour or 1 week long.
- Let them Discuss – The audience can always learn so much from each other. There are tons of opportunities for them to learn and discuss what they are doing or their ideas and challenges in implementing. Especially in corporate digital marketing training programs we try to build discussion in to the program.
- Think Beyond the Program – When people leave the session, they should take action. We try to incorporate tools, checklists, action plans and take-aways so that people can implement what they’ve learned. We are often so focused on the training itself we forget that the goal isn’t the training – it is what happens after.
Need help planning an engaging training workshop for your team? We can help. Email us at [email protected] to get started!
For a sample of our training materials, click here.
Read some more of our recent posts
