I screwed up – by marketing to the people my training was designed for

When I first launched my Commercial Skills Training courses, I messed up how I communicated them.

More specifically, I got who I marketed them to wrong.

Let’s back up a bit.

Before launching, I did my due diligence and defined who the training was for.

Primarily, the programme is aimed at people working in creative agencies with creative backgrounds – often designers, although its relevance is broader than that.

The aim of the training is to equip creative people with the confidence and practical commercial skills to contribute more directly to business development and help win new work.

They’re at, or approaching, the stage in their career where they’re expected to ‘step up’ into a leadership role. Perhaps with the word ‘Director’ appearing in their job title for the first time.

Until this point, they’re likely to have built their careers by successfully delivering creative work. But now – or soon – they’ll be expected to help develop business for their company as well.

As a side note, I believe everyone progressing into that layer of a creative agency should contribute to business development in some way.

I designed the training for people at this point in their journey because I remember being there myself.

I also recall realising that my formal design education hadn’t equipped me for the transition. At all.

So off I went, connecting with Senior Designers, putting myself in their shoes and explaining how the training programme could help them.

I didn’t expect it to become an overnight success. These things rarely are. But I had hoped for a more positive response.

It wasn’t working. I needed to rethink.

Why it didn’t work

A clue that I’d got the target audience for my messaging wrong came when a friend asked:

“Are people at Senior Designer level even on LinkedIn?”

Hmmm. Good point.

I see plenty of people near the start of their careers on LinkedIn, often looking for their next role.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are lots of very senior creative agency people trying to build their profiles and sell their company’s services.

But the people in the middle? Are they regularly spending time on LinkedIn? Or are they too busy getting on with delivering the actual work?

Thinking about it some more, I realised I’d spent around six months explaining the value of my training courses.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing to do.

The lack of response didn’t necessarily mean that Senior Designers couldn’t see the relevance. But in most agencies, they weren’t the people deciding whether to buy the training.

I needed to start conversations with people who were already feeling the problem and were in a position to act.

To push against a more open door, so to speak.

The switch

All along, I knew I had a secondary audience: the leaders of creative agencies who would approve – and, crucially, pay for – my training.

So, although I had one product, I had two distinct audiences:

The people who would take part in the training and benefit from it directly.

And the people who would decide whether to buy it.

The audience for the training hadn’t changed. What I needed to adjust was the emphasis of my marketing. I needed to speak to both groups, but not necessarily in the same way.

So I consciously shifted my focus towards the second group. And soon there were signs it was working.

Not through an immediate uptick in sales, but through greater interest, more responses and better conversations. An encouraging start.

I doubled down on appealing to the people who would need to sign off on the training – agency leaders.

I quickly realised that these conversations started at a different point. These people had often been through the same transition themselves, adding commercial strings to their creative bow. They understood the challenge personally – and, crucially, they were in a position to do something about it.

They were also frequently the people carrying responsibility for developing new business at their company. Often, they were one of very few people doing it – or the only one.

They could also see the value of enabling others to help them – and, as I often hear, “spread the load”.

I realised something else, too.

These people are much closer to being my contemporaries. Yes, we can put ourselves in other people’s shoes. But communication is often easier and more natural when it begins with shared experience.

The intersection

Soon, a third distinct audience emerged at the intersection of the first two groups.

These were people with creative backgrounds and education who were now running their own, usually smaller, creative businesses.

And what did they need to get good at – perhaps above all else – if they were going to survive?

Winning new work.

But they’d never really been prepared for it.

Perhaps they’d observed business development at a previous company. But, largely, they’d been left to muddle through on their own and learn on the job.

People hunting for their own dinner certainly understand the value of getting better at the business side of their role.

Especially the skills connected to the S-word: Sales.

What I learned

Looking back, the biggest thing I’d got wrong was assuming that the person who needed my training most was also the person I needed to persuade.

It seems obvious now. It didn’t six months earlier.

I’d focused on the end user rather than the buyer. The people I was speaking to might well have understood the value, but they weren’t usually in a position to make the purchase.

Once I started speaking to people who had already combined creative delivery with responsibility for new business themselves, the conversations changed.

The experience has also made me question some of the assumptions we make when marketing creative services.

Are we speaking to the people who decide to buy what we provide?

Are we using the channels where those buyers actually spend their time?

And are we explaining a problem from scratch when there might be another audience already feeling it?

I didn’t change the service. I changed the focus of my marketing.

Have you ever realised you were making a mistake in your marketing – and what did you change?

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Find out more about my Commercial Skills training programme here