The phrase “marketing mix” refers to the tools and tactics a company uses to reach its marketing objectives. In L&D, we usually don’t think about all the tools and tactics we have available to pursue our objectives, learning experiences as products, or how to promote and place them within our organization. There is a lot to be learned from marketing.

What Is a Marketing Mix?

In a nutshell, the marketing mix positions the right product, at the right place and price, at the right time. It is most commonly known as the four Ps: product, price, place and promotion.

Through research, marketers ensure that they have the right product in place. Furthermore, they have to keep an eye on declining sales and the possibility to reinvent the product to stimulate more demand. The main question that they need to answer is, “What can I do to offer a better product?” Marketers often look at what customers want from a product, how and where they will use it, and even what the name of the product should be.

Price determines a company’s profit and has a big impact on the marketing strategy by affecting sales and demand of the product. Place dictates how customers access the product. Marketers need to understand their target markets well in order to develop the right distribution strategy. Questions they ask might include where potential customers look for the product and how different distribution channels are accessed.

Lastly, promotion helps marketers boost brand recognition and sales. Marketers often ask themselves about the best time to promote a product and if social media can help promote the product, and they might look at the promotion strategies of competitors. In the services industry, we can often find a modified version of the 4Ps: the 7Ps. This model adds people, process and physical evidence to the mix.

Create an L&D Mix to Engage Learners

In L&D, we can leverage some of this thinking to deliver more effective training. People are the target audience for whom we build our product. L&D professionals already carefully analyze their audience to ensure a learning solution meets their needs.

The product is a particular learning solution, such as compliance training. It is not enough to look at the content itself; L&D professionals should consider how to make this solution better in order to achieve higher completion rates. A simple “click-the-next-button” module is most likely not enough. Instead, think about how you can use a story to draw the learner’s attention to the course and keep them engaged throughout it. Come up with a more catchy title for the course, instead of just calling it “Sexual Harassment Course.” Continuously watch analytics and data to ensure the product meets your objectives. If not, you might have to reinvent the learning solution.

Price might not seem like a component of the L&D mix, but costs need to be considered as training solutions are developed. As L&D professionals come up with exciting ways of delivering training, often, the price tag goes up. It will be your task to sell the higher price tag to your stakeholders and, at the same time, show the value the learning solution brings to the table.

More often than not, training solutions are still delivered through LMSs, which means the place in the L&D mix is often predetermined. However, L&D professionals should consider other access points, such as intranet sites and YouTube. Think about how learners are accessing the course (i.e., mobile versus desktop). Use LMS data and Google Analytics to better understand how and when learners access content. This analysis will help place the product in the right spot.

Promotion strategies are rarely considered when creating new learning solutions. The success of a course is often measured through completion rates, among other metrics. Adding the course to an LMS and sending an email to all employees isn’t enough. L&D professionals should think about ways to promote the product, create excitement and engage learners from the get-go. Think posters, teaser videos, informal lunch meetings or flyers on employees’ desks. Be creative, and see your completion rates go up. To further investigate, ensure you are using additional data points wherever possible, and take evaluations and test results into account.

Process is the overall project planning, from the first ideation to design and all the way through to the end product. It should include all stakeholders. Project management tools can help L&D professionals stay organized.

Free Tools to Help Create An L&D Mix

It might sound daunting to look at L&D through a marketing lens, but there are many helpful free tools out there to get you started. First, to work collaboratively with the rest of your team, find a project management tool that allows you to capture all elements of your L&D mix in one place.

There are also free resource that offer hundreds of designs for your promotion strategy. On these websites, you have access to basic backgrounds, layouts, illustrations, shapes, icons and charts. Once you created a design, you can download it as a JPG, PNG or PDF. Also look for a simple-to-use video tool. These tools are a great way to create online videos and animations that you can share on your social media channels. Some offer predefined slide layouts to choose from and the ability to customize text and color and even add music.

If you feel that a video is too long for the message you want to convey to your learners, or you want to bring some pep to your promotion strategy, try using GIFs. Online programs offer the ability to record a section of your screen from which to create a GIF. Try to keep the GIF frame to the area of interest, and refrain from too much scrolling. You will achieve the best outcomes if your GIF is seven to 10 seconds long.

Marketing and L&D have more in common than we might think, and L&D professionals should not shy away from taking a peek into the marketer’s toolbox to create learning experiences that stick.

The concept of personas is well known to marketers. To create a persona, marketers develop multiple fictional character profiles that describe their real and potential customer base. Based on these personas, they then develop content that resonates with them. L&D professionals can also leverage this user-centered approach to create better and more engaging learning.

What Are Personas?

You can think of personas as fictional, generalized characters, each with individual goals and needs. Marketers observe behavior patterns among their real and potential customers and couple those observations with educated guesses, which help them understand their customers better. A persona can include the following information:

• Job role and responsibilities
• Biggest challenges
• Industry
• “Watering holes” (Where do these learners go to get their information, such as blogs, websites, publications, etc.?)
• Demographic
• Personal background

Marketers research personas by capturing specific information through forms on websites, interviewing current customers, looking for trends in databases and asking for feedback from the sales team. Developing three to five personas typically results in the best outcomes. Some personas are very detailed, while others are a brief sketch of each user. Either way, marketers usually include a fictional name and a picture in the persona. When reading a persona profile, the “person” comes to life, helping marketers create products and content that align with his or her needs, goals and interests.

Developing a Learner Persona

Why should L&D professionals care about personas? They can help you can create the right content, for the right audience, at the right time.
Here are some questions you can ask, or extract from learners’ personal information you have on file, when developing your learner personas:

• What is your job role?
• Are you a manager?
• How many years have you been with this organization?
• Have you changed roles within the organization?
• How would you rate your tech-savviness?
• Do you prefer learning online or through face-to-face training?
• Are you an early bird or a late riser?
• Are you involved in volunteer work organized by our company?
• What do you do in your free time?

Ask these questions, but also use data from your learning platform. Many platforms enable you to see when and how content has been accessed. If your system doesn’t capture these data, try to collect them using Google Analytics on any activities that are happening outside the LMS, and combine them with data you can gather using your LMS. The combination of questions, learning platform data and demographic data will result in a variety of profiles, and you can then categorize your learners into different groups.

Creating Engaging Content That Resonates With Your Learner Personas

Let’s look at two examples of learner personas:

• Burt, 43 years old, he has been with your company for six years. He’s a manager in the support department, overseeing five staff. He is extremely tech-savvy and loves to learn about new technologies in his free time. Burt learns best after work hours and prefers to access learning through his mobile device on his commute home. He volunteers his time twice each year to help with charity events organized by your organization.
• Apama, 23 years old, is fresh out of university. English is her second language, and she works as an administrative assistant. She enjoys getting up early and going for a run before coming to work. Apama loves her iPhone and is good at using her Mac, but she isn’t as familiar with PCs, which your company uses. She isn’t really interested in new technologies and learns best in face-to-face training where she can asks questions on the spot.

Burt and Apama are, of course, not real people, but their personas can be extended to other people in your organization who have similar interests and job roles. To create content for “Burt,” you might develop a training solution that is quickly accessed through a mobile device and shorter than eight minutes in length, delivered over a couple of days. You can push this content to those learners shortly after 5 p.m., which is when they are on their way home. “Apama,” on the other hand, would need the same content in a face-to-face training session, where she can ask questions, ideally held in the morning.

Developing multiple training solutions for the same content is more labor-intensive and might not always be possible. However, considering the positive outcomes you will be able to achieve (more engaged learners, better on the job performance, etc.), it might be worth the investment, especially for programs you run on a regular basis, such as onboarding or annual compliance training.

Improve Learning Experiences with a Marketing Funnel

Marketers use a funnel to help them visualize the buyer’s journey or the path a prospect takes from discovering their company all the way to purchasing a product or service, and beyond. This allows them to write content that aligns with every step of this journey and predict the buyer’s needs along the way. L&D professionals can use this idea of a funnel, take a look at the employee’s lifecycle and develop a content strategy that aligns with their needs.

The Marketing Funnel

The marketing funnel is a tool consisting of multiple stages, starting from the introduction of a product or service, all the way through to conversion and beyond. A prospect moves from one stage to the next as interest in a product increases, or exits the funnel if they are no longer considering a product. The top of the funnel is always wider as more prospects are interested in your product than prospects that love your product and want to purchase it. The marketing funnel consists of five stages:

• Awareness: prospects learn who you are
• Consideration: prospects are willing to consider your company
• Conversion: convince prospects to purchase
• Loyalty: retain customers
• Advocacy: turn customers into fans

Marketers understand that prospects have different content needs based on the stage they are in. For example, in the awareness stage, marketers educate prospective customers about their products in order to show the value of it. Prospects don’t know about the value of a product at this stage yet and won’t be engaged by sales heavy content. In this stage, marketers often use blog posts or eBooks that generally educate on their product to position themselves as a thought leader. In the consideration phase, marketers build deeper relationships by offering targeted content that is product specific. Often, you can see case studies in this stage that are focused on a particular pain point. Marketers move prospects along the funnel by offering very specific and personalized content that aligns with the stage they are in.

Leverage a Marketing Funnel in L&D

L&D professionals often conduct a quick needs analysis before starting to create content but by no means are stages of the learner lifecycle considered, neither do L&D professionals pay attention to what kind of content really spikes learners’ interest. If thinking about an L&D funnel, most likely learners wouldn’t exit a learning initiative before the training is over and the L&D funnel would have the same width regardless of the stage. Learners would however lose interest throughout training which certainly should be considered from an engagement perspective and be built into your funnel.

One way to leverage the marketing funnel approach is to build out different pieces of content for one learning initiative, starting with making the learner aware of the training all the way to implementing the newly learnt content at work (conversion). For example, you are tasked to redo the health and safety training. Instead of assigning three eLearning modules on the LMS to everyone, you could create a short video that spikes interest in the topic. One way you can achieve this is by using some dark humour that hits the spot. Check out this example of safety stats on construction sites. This is your awareness stage and the first step in the funnel for the learner.

Next, you might want to create some more personalized training in the consideration phase that aligns with the learner’s job role and how health and safety affects her directly. There is no need to create one piece of content for every job role, rather focus on departments instead. The content could be in form of a website or delivered through email that uses dynamic content, meaning you display different content based on the learner’s job role. You only have to create the framework of the landing page or email once and add the different content pieces into the dynamic fields. Talk to your marketing department, they will be able to help with this.

In the conversion phase, you should make your learners true believers in health and safety. One way to achieve this could be a live webinar followed up by an open office online chat where everyone can share their thoughts, ask questions and maybe even make suggestions on how to improve health and safety in your organization, and add suggestions for further training initiatives. This will then also help you turn some of your learners into health and safety advocates.

Along each stage, you can collect data points: video views, video drop-off rate, click-through rates in email or heatmaps for landing pages, live webinar attendance, engagement throughout the webinar (chat participation, questions asked, suggestions made, etc.). These data points will show your stakeholders that health and safety training has been participated in, and it will give you valuable insights into learner engagement and content usability.

Develop a Content Strategy to Engage Your Learners

No matter the topic of your training initiative, the main focus for using the idea of a marketing funnel in L&D is a solid content strategy that aligns with the learners’ needs. Go beyond a basic needs analysis and establish what content needs to be delivered when and where. Often, we forget about how learners want to access content and we focus too much on creating a shiny object. Leverage data throughout to better understand what really excites and engages your learners and use that data to improve your learning offerings in real time. Thinking about a learner funnel will allow you to improve not only your learning experiences but also collect data along the way, and create an engaged workforce that will understand the importance of the content you deliver to them.

Have you used a funnel for your learning experiences? Share your thoughts with me below.

Improve Learning Experiences with a Marketing Funnel

Marketers use a funnel to help them visualize the buyer’s journey or the path a prospect takes from discovering their company all the way to purchasing a product or service, and beyond. This allows them to write content that aligns with every step of this journey and predict the buyer’s needs along the way. L&D professionals can use this idea of a funnel, take a look at the employee’s lifecycle and develop a content strategy that aligns with their needs.

The Marketing Funnel

The marketing funnel is a tool consisting of multiple stages, starting from the introduction of a product or service, all the way through to conversion and beyond. A prospect moves from one stage to the next as interest in a product increases, or exits the funnel if they are no longer considering a product. The top of the funnel is always wider as more prospects are interested in your product than prospects that love your product and want to purchase it. The marketing funnel consists of five stages:

• Awareness: prospects learn who you are
• Consideration: prospects are willing to consider your company
• Conversion: convince prospects to purchase
• Loyalty: retain customers
• Advocacy: turn customers into fans

Marketers understand that prospects have different content needs based on the stage they are in. For example, in the awareness stage, marketers educate prospective customers about their products in order to show the value of it. Prospects don’t know about the value of a product at this stage yet and won’t be engaged by sales heavy content. In this stage, marketers often use blog posts or eBooks that generally educate on their product to position themselves as a thought leader. In the consideration phase, marketers build deeper relationships by offering targeted content that is product specific. Often, you can see case studies in this stage that are focused on a particular pain point. Marketers move prospects along the funnel by offering very specific and personalized content that aligns with the stage they are in.

Leverage a Marketing Funnel in L&D

L&D professionals often conduct a quick needs analysis before starting to create content but by no means are stages of the learner lifecycle considered, neither do L&D professionals pay attention to what kind of content really spikes learners’ interest. If thinking about an L&D funnel, most likely learners wouldn’t exit a learning initiative before the training is over and the L&D funnel would have the same width regardless of the stage. Learners would however lose interest throughout training which certainly should be considered from an engagement perspective and be built into your funnel.

One way to leverage the marketing funnel approach is to build out different pieces of content for one learning initiative, starting with making the learner aware of the training all the way to implementing the newly learnt content at work (conversion). For example, you are tasked to redo the health and safety training. Instead of assigning three eLearning modules on the LMS to everyone, you could create a short video that spikes interest in the topic. One way you can achieve this is by using some dark humour that hits the spot. Check out this example of safety stats on construction sites. This is your awareness stage and the first step in the funnel for the learner.

Next, you might want to create some more personalized training in the consideration phase that aligns with the learner’s job role and how health and safety affects her directly. There is no need to create one piece of content for every job role, rather focus on departments instead. The content could be in form of a website or delivered through email that uses dynamic content, meaning you display different content based on the learner’s job role. You only have to create the framework of the landing page or email once and add the different content pieces into the dynamic fields. Talk to your marketing department, they will be able to help with this.

In the conversion phase, you should make your learners true believers in health and safety. One way to achieve this could be a live webinar followed up by an open office online chat where everyone can share their thoughts, ask questions and maybe even make suggestions on how to improve health and safety in your organization, and add suggestions for further training initiatives. This will then also help you turn some of your learners into health and safety advocates.

Along each stage, you can collect data points: video views, video drop-off rate, click-through rates in email or heatmaps for landing pages, live webinar attendance, engagement throughout the webinar (chat participation, questions asked, suggestions made, etc.). These data points will show your stakeholders that health and safety training has been participated in, and it will give you valuable insights into learner engagement and content usability.

Develop a Content Strategy to Engage Your Learners

No matter the topic of your training initiative, the main focus for using the idea of a marketing funnel in L&D is a solid content strategy that aligns with the learners’ needs. Go beyond a basic needs analysis and establish what content needs to be delivered when and where. Often, we forget about how learners want to access content and we focus too much on creating a shiny object. Leverage data throughout to better understand what really excites and engages your learners and use that data to improve your learning offerings in real time. Thinking about a learner funnel will allow you to improve not only your learning experiences but also collect data along the way, and create an engaged workforce that will understand the importance of the content you deliver to them.

Have you used a funnel for your learning experiences? Share your thoughts with me below.

L&D professionals are often order-takers and as a result, we create one-off learning solutions that are quickly put together with no real thought or engagement. If a marketer were to reach out to a prospect once, because they are on our website or filled in a form, and never be in contact again after that, what do you think would happen? Most likely, nothing. The prospect isn’t engaged, we didn’t understand her needs and pain points, we can’t deliver valuable content to move her along in the marketing funnel and we won’t be able to make the sale in the end. Take this scenario and flip it over to L&D: we take an order, offer a training, the learner comes, sees, takes a quiz, and leaves. That’s the end of the training, the engagement and knowledge sharing.

What is a Marketing Campaign?

In order for marketing to not lose any prospective clients, they leverage campaigns. A campaign is simply a defined series of activities using various marketing channels and media to deliver content. It isn’t just the use of email, advertising or social media, it also includes word of mouth and influencer marketing. Campaigns can have different goals such as increasing awareness and engagement, building a brand image, introducing a new product or increasing sales. Marketers usually go through a number of steps to get started:

1. Set campaign goals and measures of success
2. Define the target audience
3. Develop a clear message
4. Review and select the right type of media
5. Track success
6. Make adjustments as needed

Create Campaigns to Engage Learners

Back to L&D, what does all of this have to do with learning? Marketers are excellent in planning quarters ahead and thinking about how to engage prospects and moving them through the funnel with content that resonates with where they currently are in their purchasing decision: are they just looking around and want to learn more? Are they already more informed and need a deeper dive on a product? Or are they ready to buy but need just a little bit more convincing? Based on their needs, marketing offers them content just-in-time that is relevant for them.

Taking a closer look at the steps marketers take when creating campaigns, you will see that L&D professionals follow a very similar process: needs analysis (set goals, define target audience and decide on delivery channels), develop content (develop message) and evaluate success (track success). The difference is that In L&D, we often react to immediate needs (that often are not really training needs) and create ad-hoc content that doesn’t resonate with the learner, let alone engage the learner. We don’t plan ahead and even if we do, we look at one learning initiative as a point in time, rather than an ongoing engagement piece. The other challenge is that we are often asked to create eLearning and are then given the content, meaning the delivery channel is chosen for us. Imagine a marketer would decide on the delivery channel before even looking at the target audience!

Think About the Learner First

Instead of being told what delivery channel to use, leverage the steps a marketer takes in creating a campaign, relay it back to what you already do every day, and think about the learner first. How can you engage the learner, and what other delivery channels besides eLearning can you use to teach a learner about a new product or service? How can you space out the content over time, and add an element of repetition? The solutions are sheer endless and just thinking about this puts a smile on my face! My ask to you is that for your next learning project, give this concept a go and see how you can delight your learners.

Tell me in the comments below how you put the learner first.