Digital Certificates and Badges as Marketing Tools for Education Providers

Reaching and attracting learners becomes increasingly more complex for educators of all kinds.

Tutors, coaches, trainers, and teachers all need to maintain a consistent and professional, yet engaging tone across platforms, and adapt their messaging to these pressing learners’ issues: 

• Entering an unstable job market that rapidly changes the course and demands
• The possibility of skills they’ve spent plenty of time perfecting becoming obsolete the next day
• Adapting to the skill-based hiring method, and job descriptions that demand highly specific, granular skill-sets
• The increasing apathy and lack of learner engagement
• The change in the way learners consume educational content and use learning management system

Education providers need an agile, multi-platform approach — and digital credentials respond to this demand as a perfect asset for both educators and learners.

Here’s how educators can use the unassuming strategy of issuing digital certificates and badges as another organic marketing channel, and score new client pools with little effort.

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Social Media Engagement Powered By Digital Certificates And Badges

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Shareability across all digital platforms is one of the strongest sides of digital certificates and badges, and the ones educators can extensively use to spread the word about their work.

Here’s what it looks like:

1. The educator creates certificates and badges — The platform has special social media optimization features that allow you to adjust the credentials for social sharing:some text
   1. Predefined texts and hashtags — Prepare custom text and a related hashtag that appears when they share the credentials on social media.
   2. LinkedIn integration — An option to create credentials they can seamlessly add to their Skills&Certifications section on LinkedIn.
2. Learners complete the educational program and receive digital credentials in return — Digital certificates (diplomas) or Open Badges that carry the program and credential validity information.
3. Social media sharing — Recipients can now proudly share their certificates and badges on social media.

Digital credentials are designed to be shared across various platforms. When learners earn a digital certificate or a badge, they’re motivated to publicly share their achievements thanks to: 

• A sense of accomplishment and as a celebratory gesture, with praise from peers and social media followers;
• The effect it has on their academic and career development: whenever they share their credentials, they get noticed by potential employers and decision-makers which has an impact on their scholarships and future educational endeavors.

This is where digital credentials get interesting to education providers:

• Each time a recipient shares their credentials with your title and branding on it, they expose your program to new audiences. Plenty of your potential clients can notice you’re offering a course they need and reach out to enroll in your program.
• By setting up the custom text for social media sharing, educators control the narrative: in a brief text, you can decide how to highlight your program’s perks and usability.
• Sharing digital credentials online will enhance your brand awareness naturally: recipients are motivated to share them by default, for their own gain — but you too can reap the positive effects of social sharing.

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Digital Credentials As A Part Of The Email Marketing Strategy

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Just like with social media, digital certificates and badges can be attached to emails for various purposes, and in different ways:

• Attached to the email body separately;
• Pasted onto resumes and motivational letters;
• In email signatures;
• Added to the user’s profile picture.

Open Badges are compact and handy to be pasted directly onto documents, CVs, signatures, and profile pictures. Digital credentials, resembling the traditional diploma, look good attached separately, in full display.

Both types of credentials contain verification elements that make them unique and copy-proof.

Incorporating digital credentials in email signatures can drive brand awareness from the moment an email is opened. 

The learners who use them can spread the word about your program in a similar way they do it on social media. Since emails are intended for more targeted use and sent to specific recipients, you can directly appear to more powerful, niche prospects.

For example — if students apply for a prestigious internship and all of them attach their credentials as proof of skills and knowledge, stakeholders won’t miss it. Your brand appearing on resumes of high-achieving learners and future interns may result in the organization reaching out to you directly, and offering you a spot in their employee training division.

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Building Your LinkedIn Presence

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LinkedIn stands separate from other social media sites, filled with various industry professionals, organizations, and employers. Organizations and individuals on LinkedIn actively seek employment, business collaboration, and partnership opportunities, and advertise their own products and services — and so should educators. 

There’s no better place to offer your program as a way to meaningful self-improvement and relevant education.

Digital credentials can be used to increase educators’ visibility on LinkedIn in several ways:

• Users can share your credentials on their LinkedIn feed, recommend your program, attach the credentials to their profile, or send them via private messages — to employers who inquire about their CVs, for example. When a user shares a digital badge on their LinkedIn profile, it acts as a personal endorsement of the course or training they undertook. This leads to increased awareness about the course offerings and higher participant sign-ups.
• Educators themselves can advertise their certificates and badges on their LinkedIn profiles, as valuable rewards that bring multiple benefits to recipients
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Building a Globally Recognized Brand

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Digital badges have endless possibilities to create brand awareness, brand love, and powerful, top-of-mind associations. These characteristics make them a strong ally when planning your marketing strategy.

To illustrate the point:

1. You can create a social media campaign where you organize a contest and offer a free pass to the first participants who share their event badge and have their first interaction on social media. This strategy will build excitement toward the program and create awareness for the passive audience.
2. Each badge, with its distinctive design and embedded information, carries the brand of the issuing organization. These badges are shared across LinkedIn, resulting in increased brand visibility and growing recognition — along with positive associations.

In the end, your brand-building efforts can result in a strong online community to promote your educational program's future goals.

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Conclusion

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In essence, digital credentials are not just transforming how achievements are recognized — but also how educators can market their services. 

By issuing digital credentials, educators can reach learners where they are, be it on professional networking sites like LinkedIn or social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. 

When learners share their digital credentials on these platforms, it increases the visibility of the educator's brand, thereby serving as a powerful marketing tool. 

Moreover, digital credentials can enhance the learner's experience by providing them with a tangible and shareable token of their learning achievement. This not only motivates learners but also helps in retaining them, thereby ensuring the delivery of high-quality service to existing learners.

They represent a win-win situation for both educators and learners, making them an essential tool in the current educational toolkit.

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