Help with Marketing our IT Training

Mark,

I took a look at your website and have a number of observations:

1) There are some grammatical errors. They're not glaring, but professionals will notice them. For example, you use 'which' when it should be 'that', and 'advise' when it should be 'advice'.

2) The search engine doesn't work too well. I tried searching for courses (I used MS Word as an example) and had little luck when searching by location. The only way I could find courses was by selecting all locations and all applications. The interface needs to be more user-friendly.

You asked for advice about marketing, so here's my two penny's worth:

- You need a clear value proposition. What makes you different? Why should a company purchase from you and not from the many other training companies? You need a compelling story, and I don't see one.

- The general rule is that you either compete on price or you differentiate. You won't win on price because self-paced online courses will beat you every time; hence, you need to differentiate.

- Some possible themes come to mind immediately: personal approach, professional (which is why your grammar must be perfect), on-site, hands-on, intensive, certified, experienced, ....

- Do you focus on a particular industry? Do you bring PCs for customers to use during training? Do your customers receive some type of certificate upon completion of a course?

Again, what makes you different? What's your compelling argument?

Hi Mark

Before you start to market you need to look at your website coding. There are some major issues you need to address which will help your search engine position.

If your working on the site yourself I can give you some pointers.

Reuben

It's really all about tiny, tiny little things. If you're claiming to deliver excellence, then excellence should be reflected in your own brand.

Right now, the website is letting the brand down pretty badly. The actual layout and information architecture are OK - though dHTML dropdowns are a bit 2003 - and the design concept is pretty good. The graphics are causing a big problem, though. Your logo, and other things like the green "Secure remote access..." splurge need proper antialiasing. To put that in plain English, they need fixing up so that edges and lines are smooth rather than jagged. That may seem like a trivial thing, but it speaks volumes about your brand to a potential visitor.

I'd think hard about the copy, too. There are a few mistakes, but a bigger problem is that it's just a bit turgid. It's loaded down with unnecessary complexity, passive sentences and words that are just plain ugly. For example, on your "IT Management" page you use the words "utilise" and "leveraging". What's wrong with "use" and "using". Copy should be written in the plainest, clearest, most direct English you can muster, even when you're writing for a specialist audience. This is especially true for B2B copy. Good business people really hate waffle.

The style of your copy says as much about your brand as the quality of your graphics. Rightly or wrongly, prospects are going to think that if your writing style is unclear and imprecise your service is going to be like that too.

Sorry if the above sounds a bit harsh. You've clearly got a great service and bags of enthusiasm. I'm only coming down hard on you because it would be shame if you sabotaged your own chances by making a few advertising and branding mistakes that can be easily put right.