Credly
5
min read
As a product certification provider, your credentialing programs can help individuals prove their knowledge and grow their careers. But in a crowded marketplace, it’s important that you increase visibility for the certifications you provide and set your brand apart from the competition.
Whether you’re issuing software or IT certifications in customer success, cloud computing, IT management software, or other areas, offering digital credentials is critical to your success.
What Is a Digital Credentialing Program?
A digital credentialing program is a way to issue secure, verified digital badges or certificates to individuals who have proven a particular level of knowledge or expertise in a given area. Digital credentials are a graphical representation of a person’s abilities and competencies, and can be added to a digital wallet or profile, allowing the individual to carry them wherever their career may lead.
A high-quality digital credentialing program will offer outsiders a full and rich description of the relative value of the achievement, the skills and competencies represented, the requirements involved with passing the certification, and all assessment methods used.
While it’s a major benefit to your business, launching a digital credentialing program is easier than you think. And once you’ve gotten your program off the ground, digital credentials can be a powerful marketing tool for your product certification program.
Here are three ways product certification providers can drive visibility for their credentialing program—and as a result, improve its overall success.
3 Ways Product Certification Providers Can Drive Visibility for Their Credentialing Program
1. Make it easy for people to accept and share their achievements
Completing a certification is a proud accomplishment for anyone, and earners are often eager to share their credential to promote their skills, gain recognition for their achievements, and connect to professional opportunities.
When product certification providers design their credentialing program with easily shareable digital badges, they go beyond benefiting earners with a simple way to boost their personal branding and credibility. They also create an organic community of promoters, who increase visibility for the credentialing program and validate the certification provider’s brand and level of trust in the field.
For example, the cloud-based data storage and analytics company Snowflake conducted a survey of their certification earners. Of those surveyed, 85% reported that digital credentials allow them to share their certification more easily, and 92% had shared their digital badges to LinkedIn.
As a product certification provider, it’s a best practice to provide communication encouraging your certification earners to accept and share their digital badges in order to spread the word about their achievement.
For example, the creativity software company Adobe includes on their Certification and Credentials FAQ page a reminder that individuals can accept and feature their certification on their social profiles:
Certification earners value the ability to showcase and share their hard-earned credentials. By making it easy for them to do so, certification providers gain brand exposure with those earners’ networks, growing exponential visibility for their credentialing program offerings.
2. Include rich metadata within your digital badges
Rich metadata on a digital credential benefits both the credentialing program issuer, and the earner of the certification. When an issuer uses metadata to provide context, relevancy, and requirements of a credential, it takes an achievement beyond a one-time gamification hit and helps create a learning pathway for future credentials the individual can earn.
Digital credentials issued through Credly Acclaim allow certification providers to include comprehensive metadata with robust descriptions of the relative value of the achievement, the skills and competencies represented by the credential, the full requirements an earner satisfied, and all assessment methods.
In addition, the metadata can—and should—include suggested next steps an earner can consider as they continue on their learning journey. Certifications that demonstrate advanced levels of competency give users a reason to further invest in your product and remain loyal throughout their career. One badge can lead to many possibilities.
CompTIA (The Computing Technology Industry Association) has seen tremendous success with their digital credentialing program in part by utilizing the recommended feature of their digital badges to highlight suggested learning paths that drive earner engagement. Since launching their digital badging program in 2018, they’ve issued nearly three million badges.
Badge metadata can also help earners understand when their certification has expired, driving increased revenue by way of renewals and repeated shares on social media networks.
3. Leverage the power of the network impact
Every digital credentialing platform is different. When you join an open network, your certification program will gain exposure by being a part of a searchable directory alongside some of the most powerful training, assessment, learning, and certification providers in the world, including AWS, Cisco, Oracle, CompTIA, Adobe, IBM, Dell, and thousands of others.
Unlike white labeling, which silos brands out on their own, the network impact allows you to be discovered by potential earners actively looking to upskill with your product certifications.
If your aim is to increase the visibility of your product certifications, it’s important that your brand is discoverable on the network where the most people go to both offer and earn digital credentials.
Optimize Your Digital Badges to Create Visibility for Your Credentialing Program
Secure, robust, and shareable digital badges can equip your organization with free marketing spread by earners who are excited to showcase their proven expertise in your products.
Our customer success team will help you get your digital credentialing program off the ground so you can communicate the value of your product certifications to your audience. We’ll help you design and issue your badges, as well as create collections and stackable credentials to drive earner engagement.
Learn more by scheduling a demo with one of our credentialing experts today.
