Creating, managing, and maintaining a certification standard and the business framework to sell that certification can be arduous. But here’s the great news: you don’t need to be an expert in everything—just your certification.
The technology aspects of the business don’t need to be your forte. Our team has worked in the industry for over 15 years and identified major milestones that help certification organizations take their offerings to the next level.
We call it the Path of Certainty, and we think you should know about it.
What is The Path?
This is the approach we’ve uncovered after our time in the industry. We’ve seen and tried many things working with different certification groups—some successful and some not. The process of trial and error can be a great learning experience, but it comes at the expense of time.
And time is not a commodity every business has.
So we’ve distilled down what we know works for certification organizations, outlining the steps to create an experience that attracts new audiences, scales with demand, and makes an impact on the market.
12 Milestones
- A lean, modern marketing website: Make a great first impression with your web presence. Modern CMS tools make it easy for you to build and scale your brand narrative, ensuring consistency and accessibility across every channel and in any language.
- A successful leading generation framework: Generating interest and getting people to convert is critical to filling your sales funnel.
- Eye-catching, repeatable designs: Building a stunning brand is goal numero uno, but you need to be able to ensure that visual language is consistent wherever you represent yourself.
- A digital space to convene your community: Gathering your advocates in an online space can yield incredible results. Share education, connect peer networks, troubleshoot problems quickly, and foster a growing sense of community around the impact of your certification.
- An automated sales and marketing strategy: Using your CRM platform to its full potential unlocks countless ways to automate your outreach and engage with your customers. Move away from manual emails and spreadsheets with customer data to embrace a new way of doing business with automation.
- A dominant presence on search engines: Elevating a content strategy and long-term search engine optimization plan isn’t just good for certification businesses, it’s good for every business. With emerging technologies like Google’s search generative experience (SGE), there’s a tremendous opportunity to create helpful, people-focused content that ranks.
- A frictionless checkout and payment system: Building an e-commerce experience for your certification—from enrollment and renewal payments to a swag-filled storefront—requires technical talent and a user-focused vision. Customers expect online buying to be simple and intuitive—and it’s one of the many ways to streamline your revenue processes.
- AI and machine learning planning: Artificial intelligence is a future of untapped potential. From training AI to process applications and reviews quickly to tying an all-knowing chatbot into your customer service interactions, AI can unlock a host of opportunities for certification organizations looking to scale.
- An online wiki for self-service support: A knowledge base or self-service support wiki for your customers will keep support inquiries down and allow users to troubleshoot their issues before taxing your customer support team.
- An online directory of all projects and participants: Showcasing your certification’s impact is core to your brand and business. Catalog the people and projects embracing your certification in an online directory to provide much-needed social proof for your future customers.
- A cloud-based system to guide the achievement process: Establishing an online account system for the certification process is a game changer for organizations. Users can log in, upload documentation, access educational content, monitor progress, and connect with support teams in a single platform.
- A user-friendly digital standard: Ditch the PDF and move your certification guidelines and standards to a digital standard. It provides customers with a user-friendly experience, simplifies updates and addenda, and ensures your standard is cataloged for search (if you want it).
Be certain of your impact.
As with everything in business, there’s no straight line to success.
These steps aren’t meant to be linear or sequential. Some steps might take priority over others while some might not be right for your organization at all.
But in our time in the industry, we’ve seen certification businesses grow and tap into broader audiences after implementing strategies to move along the Path—namely their Path.
So find out which milestones are critical for your organization by using Certainly’s assessment tool.
For more information about us, check out our website.
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