Turning clients into promoters with Richard van der Blom

Richard van der Blom is one of Europe's most successful and recognized LinkedIn trainers. Over the last 11 years, he has worked as a trainer in the Social Selling segment and has summed a lot of experience.

As a LinkedIn trainer, Richard knows all about the importance of creating a strong and authentic presence online, and for years has been investing his time in educating people about the topic.  

Until recently, Richard (just like many trainers and coaches) did not have an automated way to issue certificates to his clients and decided to test Virtual Badges for one of his trainings.  

Our team decided to reach out to Richard to get some personal insights on how the software was being used to:  

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1) Issue professional certificates which can be validated.

2) Leveraging his marketing strategy, making it easier for his students to give online recommendations.

Interview

Why were you looking for Digital Certificates?

Digital certificates are the essential for a successful training. Participants can store their qualifications peerlessly and retrieve them at any time to make them available to potential prospects. Issuing Digital Certifications now a days is not a luxury, but a necessity of any education provider.

Why Virtualbadge.io?

I have found the idea of Virtualbadge.io quite interesting. While other certification companies also offered similar certificate validation solutions, I saw with Virtualbadge.io for the first time a possibility to integrate certificates in my marketing strategy as a coach.

The whole idea around Virtual Badges is creating certificates made for being shared on social media, right? If all my students would share their certificates from my courses on their LinkedIn accounts, my marketing reach could grow exponentially, without any extra ad expenditures from my side.

How was the feedback from your clients?

It was great. I even received messages from some clients saying that they really like their badges. In the end, the badges by Virtualbadge.io are quite unique and do not get easily mixed with other traditional certificates.

I was worried that some clients might have difficulties creating their own badges, given that it is a full automated process and some of my clients are not digital natives, but it is quite intuitive and not one had problems.

Did you have any big concern when choosing a provider for your certificates?

My biggest concern was always security. If was going to shift to a hosted solution I wanted to be sure that all data was really being handled properly.

Data privacy in Europe is a big topic, so you must be sure to you know who you are working with. When I saw that all Virtual Badges are hosted in European servers under the GDPR legislations a was confident that I was in good hands.

Results

Personal recommendations play a key role when acquiring new clients in the coaching industry, and for Richard that is not different.  

When his clients share their certificates online, they are, at the same time, building their personal branding online and telling their contacts that Richard's course is a milestone in their professional life.

Since the trainer started using Virtualbadge.io to issue his digital certificates, he has had averagely 40% of all his participants sharing their certificates on social media.  

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