Why it pays to invest in training for your local business community

By Jenny Clarke, Associate

It’s well known that in corporate life training is important; keeping employees’ skills up to date is a vital part of business success. Training empowers employees, builds expertise, and improves performance. Ultimately it helps to deliver happier customers and boosts the whole business community.

In just the same way, when it comes to rejuvenating high streets, training also has a key role to play. Why not?

If we consider the high street as a whole entity, with each business as an interconnected yet separate part, it makes sense that the high street can benefit from shared training in the same way as any large company or organisation.  

Training: helping to support the high street transformation

For those whose objective it is to transform their local town centre and keep footfall at its peak, we know there are many challenges. DigiKind have worked with many councils and BIDs and have identified a suite of ways to revitalise high streets; predominantly by building communities, and creating digital ecosystems – helping businesses to use the digital tools which cultivate and serve these communities.

But doing these things in isolation is not enough. ‘Building a community’ happens over time, organically, and with the buy-in of businesses working together. And ‘creating a digital ecosystem’ requires knowledge of digital tools and the best practice ways of using them. Business owners are busy, the digital world moves fast. How are time-poor retailers and hospitality specialists supposed to also keep up to date with the latest technology, and how to use it?

This is why training is the vital, unsung-hero, quietly underpinning the endeavour to bring about change in the high street. 

How does training benefit the high street?

1. Gives latest thinking and expertise.

Let’s be honest, the very definition of training is the ‘process of teaching the skills needed for a particular job or activity.’ Receiving tailored training from experts about the fast-moving world of digital tech means that business owners are equipped with the very latest tools and tricks to make sure that their digital marketing strategy is aligned with up-to-date thinking, and works as well as possible.

2. Builds the business community.

Bringing together people from businesses within the same town or district for training helps to create a network. Learning together is a great leveller and often relationships are forged which live long after the training is finished. Business owners find they can learn from each other too, and the more links that are made, the stronger the community.  

3. Generates higher quality output and outcomes.

Training is all about honing skills. If businesses are trained in what works and what doesn’t they can spend more time on the right things, and not waste time on activities which don’t achieve their goals.

4. Creates consistency.

By offering the same training to each business within the community, and giving them the same exposure to ideas and expertise, the activities that are inspired by the training are more likely to be compatible across the whole community.

5. Helps to shape the basis of a digital ecosystem.

For an ecosystem to work, everyone – from councils and BIDs, businesses and organisations, consumers and residents – needs to be engaged in creating and sharing content. With the right training businesses can confidently create their own content which feeds into the broader digital community and raises awareness online.

DigiKind training success

Using our experience of working with Councils and BIDs, DigiKind has developed a range of off-the-peg and bespoke training specifically for high street businesses. For the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead (RBWM) alone we have delivered five-day ‘Lunch and Learn’ digital training to over 120 businesses in just four months. Part of the programme supported an Additional Restrictions Grant Innovation Scheme where our team also provided one-to-one business support training, helping businesses access significant amounts of grant funding. This training is broken into bite-sized masterclass sessions specifically for busy business owners and covers going digital, branding, campaigns, websites, search engine optimisation (SEO), and building in resilience, enabling them to develop their own digital strategies which interlink with the wider community. Also for the borough we have held hugely successful weekly online Breakfast Briefings where award winning business leaders share their expert tips for success.

The response from attendees has been overwhelming, proving to us that the right training for high street businesses is definitely worth the investment.

“I will certainly utilise the tools I have acquired over the course of this week to help me drive my company further into marketplaces I hadn’t embraced fully in the past.”

“I would encourage all small local business owners to jump in and attend these sessions, not only for the information shared throughout from the trainer – but also for the opportunity to network with other small independent businesses who are all facing similar challenges, and it’s easy to forget that.”

“I already applied Social Media into my plan and launched click and collect so it was practical as well as thought-provoking for me.”

Do you want to help your business community improve their digital efforts and work together as a community? We can help.

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