Who are the customers likely to enroll in your workforce or education programs? What do they currently think about your brand? What are the motivators and barriers to getting them engaged with you?

Prior to crafting and telling your brand story, you must have an extensive understanding of your market and what your community thinks about you. This series gives you a brand blueprint to help you understand your unique selling proposition to build a high in-demand brand. Learn how to position your mission and create highly effective messages to communicate your unique value in the market.

Workforce and education organizations serve widely diverse audiences, many of which include underserved and underrepresented populations. They also want to engage different industries and employers to hire and provide work-based learning opportunities to their job seekers, students, and youth.

Your ideal customer is someone who gets their exact needs met by what you're offering. Narrowing the market allows you to save valuable resources to get to the likely market segments who need and want your products and/or services. This module teaches you how to get inside the head of your ideal customers and understand what motivates them in order to be effective at communications.

Storytelling is a strategy that unlocks empathy in our brains and helps your customers remember you. It builds a business case as to why you are the best organization to solve their challenges. This module walks you through how to build a brand narrative and tailored messaging that align with your ideal customer profile.

Workforce and education organizations tend to work in silos when it comes to recruitment and outreach efforts, which can contribute to market confusion, brand narrative inconsistencies, lost opportunities, and wasted outreach dollars. This module helps your team understand their role at various customer touch points and how to leverage and coordinate each department/division efforts into a seamless lead generation machine that benefits the entire organization.

Your potential customers are multidimensional so your marketing approaches should be too. Integrated marketing is a strategy that uses different forms of media, called channels, to tell a story or convey an idea. This module is a deep dive into the PESO marketing model which stands for “paid, earned, shared, owned,” and serves as a means of segmenting all of the marketing channels at a brand’s disposal into discrete groups.

Reaching customers online is what digital marketing is all about; it’s the promotion of your brand to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This includes nurturing your online footprint through your website, search engine optimization and search engine marketing. It also entails proactive outreach through email marketing. Learn all of the elements of digital marketing in this module.

Direct marketing is a form of advertising that involves directly communicating a marketing message to a potential customer, usually through mail, email, telemarketing, or door-to-door visits. Experiential marketing, also called experiential brand marketing, grassroots marketing, engagement marketing, or live marketing, is a way for brands to connect with consumers through experiences. In an ever-crowded digital landscape, how can these two forms of marketing differentiate your brand? You’ll learn when and how to implement these high-touch marketing strategies and some of our favorite resources.

Public relations (PR) is the strategy of managing how others see and feel about a person, brand, or company. This module highlights how to garner earned media placements. You will learn how to research and write media pitches, create a highly effective list, develop and distribute press releases and effective follow-up for placements.

Your instructor knows a few things about this topic! Anika Jackson has over 50K monthly viewers and has earned over 2000 5-star ratings on her podcast, Your Brand Amplified®. While podcasting is one of the most valuable marketing tools around, find out if you should start your own podcast or use other methods to elevate your brand through guest podcasting and how to do it right.

Now that you have all of the foundational tools and skills to understand the best way to market your business, what is your plan? This module shows you a step-by-step method for identifying the right strategies, tactics, objectives and metrics to jumpstart your plan and keep your brand building efforts on track.