A Guide to Marketing Your Learning Offerings
New year, new marketing strategy to reach your learners! Our desired end goal is a learning culture where employees eagerly drive their own development. Cultivating proactive learning behaviors takes a coordinated effort — and an intentional marketing approach. Here are three recommendations to get you started.
1. Don’t treat your learners as one homogenous group.
Your learners are not all the same. Some of them are new to the organization or new in their role. Some want to advance in their career and will need additional skills to do so. Some learners manage teams and some are individual contributors.
Identify the various groups you want to reach and develop a persona for each one. Craft a message to target each group and share the learning opportunities available to them. Then, identify channels and proxy messengers where you can best to reach each group. This is the start of a strong marketing strategy that makes your learners feel like you are speaking to them as individuals.
2. Create a marketing calendar.
To make learning more relevant, we recommend aligning your marketing schedule with the business cycle and existing organizational routines. For each group you want to reach, add their routines to the persona you created. Think about when you’d want to market relevant learning opportunities for each group based on those key dates.
For example, if Q3 and Q4 is the busy season for your Sales team, set them up for success by promoting learning in Q2 that helps them build their skills in advance. Be sure to specifically reference the busy season coming ahead and appeal to their desire to meet their targets.
In our experience, your business area stakeholders will see the value of your approach and be eager to partner to develop this calendar. They may even be willing to own the promotion and communication efforts — or at a minimum, support you in crafting the perfect message that will draw the attention of their group.
3. Track your results.
You have your groups identified, you have targeted messages that you’re sending at targeted times — now you need to see if your strategy is working. We recommend that you build reports to track results for the specific learning experiences you’re promoting each month. What you measure depends on your goals. We assume you want to see a lift in registrations. But also, when learners launch the promoted learning experience, how far do they get into the course? Do they go on to explore other offerings in the catalog?
You may also want to measure how much overall proactive learning is happening. How frequently do learners visit the LMS? How many hours of learning are they doing? Identify the patterns you’re seeing and marketing techniques you can use to cultivate the desired behaviors. You can also do A/B testing where you send different messages (e.g., with a different email subject line) to different groups to see what works best.
This year, be bold with your marketing. Get to know your learners. Find new ways to get employees excited about learning that will help them improve their performance. And make sure you’re evaluating what’s working so you can build on your success!