Special measures to promote supplementary professional education services: formation and evaluation of effectiveness

Introduction. The problem of promotion of supplementary professional education services is one of the important issues for attracting consumers of professional retraining and advanced development programmes, contributing to marketing attainments and a company’s efficiency in general. The solution largely depends on the developmental level of the market of supplementary professional education services at a regional level, the specifics and quality of training courses, as well as the relevance of promotion tools used by the organisation. Purpose of the research: development and approbation of the methodology for forming and evaluating the effectiveness of a special tool for the promotion of supplementary professional education services. Materials and methods. To determine the format of a special survey, an online questioning of 1,035 potential consumers was carried out; ten marketing and advertising experts were interviewed and selected by the Delphi method modified by J. Fowles; a questioning of 319 participants and 20 organisers of the special survey was undertaken. The expert judgement was arranged using the Hierarchy Analysis Method by T. Saati, including the processing of the data obtained in the course of the experts interviewing and the calculation of eigenvectors of the pairwise comparison matrix. Results. A methodology for forming and evaluating the effectiveness of a special survey was developed. As a result of the approbation, eleven qualitative indicators were evaluated, scoring 7.92 out of nine, totalling 88%. The quantitative indicators, particularly, the engagement index was 56.8%; the key performance indicator was 8.5% and the return on investment was 336.8%. As a result of the special survey, 27 participants acquired the Internet marketing course. Conclusion. The proposed methodology can extend the opportunities of organisations providing supplementary special education services in terms of selecting, planning and realisation of efficient promotion tools. The methodology can be applied to the formation and evaluation of different-format special surveys with regard to their specifics.