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.

There is a proportional relationship between staff performance and the workload of an L&D professional: as staff performance decreases, our workload increases. We are often asked to fix something that doesn’t work and then expected to create a solution that makes everything better.

Training that results from such short-sided requests is often just temporarily masking staff’s inabilities until someone realizes that things still don’t work and another training session is prescribed. This use case can often be seen on sales teams: if sales numbers are low, managers ask for training in order to increase quarterly numbers.

A Day In The Life of a Salesperson

Here’s a scenario: Sales numbers aren’t where they should be. It is the second month of the quarter and the sales manager decides that her team needs refresher training on product. Typically, we put the team in a room, present the content in a boring PowerPoint presentation, follow up with a pop quiz, and hope for the best.

There are of course some major flaws with this approach. For starters, one size doesn’t fit all and we can’t prescribe training that no one is interested in, despite it being important to the business. It is your responsibility to create excitement around your content and explain the why behind it. Consider taking a page out of marketing’s playbook in order to promote your content through emails, in departmental newsletters, or across your intranet site.

Further, we don’t consider the possibility that one salesperson does know a lot about certain features of the product already, but not others. So why do we have this person sit through an entire session of which only 20% is relevant? Instead, review each individual salesperson’s records and identify where and why they are losing deals. Based on this data, you can tailor the training to each individual and offer just-in-time content. For example, you could build short learning units that cover different parts of the product and only the relevant aspects have to be taken into consideration by the learner.

Deliver Just-in-Time Content for L&D Performance

We are stuck in the past and believe that someone will only learn something if they are sitting in front of us. With new technology advancements, however, it becomes easier to deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time and also measure its effectiveness. One tool that makes waves right now is Slack, and going Obie, a chatbot that can be integrated with Slack. It allows you to attach files from your Google Drive, for example, and lets the learner pull information from Obie, or have Obie push content to the learner as needed.

Going back to our example, chances are your salesperson already knows a good deal about the product through previous training, conversations with the Product Managers in the hallway or through an informal huddle. You can create microlearning units and program Obie to send out information in a predefined flow at a certain time. The learner decides if, when and how he will leverage the presented information, meaning do they need a refresher on said content or should they wait for the next piece of content to be pushed out?

Alternatively, you can program Obie to answer ‘what, why and how’ questions relating to the product. When the learner needs the answer to a particular feature, he can simply ask Obie and will be presented with the answer. Obie needs to be trained and learns as you go along. Still, it’s a much more fluid experience and the just-in-time delivery will help the learner to be successful in the moment of highest need: when he is on the phone with a client and quickly needs the answer.

Become an L&D Hero

In the past, Marketing efforts were hard to measure, but quickly, Marketers picked up on automation and embraced data to make more informed decisions, which by the way also made them a key player at the table. L&D is still behind the curve when it comes to delivering the right content at the right time and leveraging data to design learning that sticks. Follow Marketing’s example and become an L&D hero, who has a place at the table, by moving away from the one- size-fits-all towards just-in-time content that makes a real difference to the learner.

What are some unconventional tools that you are using? Let me know in the comments below.

The LMS has been a staple in the L&D sphere for many years now. When the first learning management systems hit the market, it was revolutionary. A way to measure and track what learners do, how much time they spent, what their answers to certain questions are.

The traditional LMS aligns perfectly with traditional learning models, such as the beloved ADDIE model. L&D professionals like the LMS and ADDIE because it allows them to put what they do into perspective. It allows them to prove their worth to the rest of the organization, it makes them feel in control and needed because no one else knows how to upload content onto the LMS and how to pull reports. When creating training and being able to talk about the analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation phases of a project, they sound like big shots and they show off what they know about the concept behind education. “Education isn’t just fluff and not every SME can do what I can do, you need me”, is the thought of many L&D professionals when creating training. The learner is just an after-thought at this point.

Change Your Thinking

What we seem to forget is that with the development of technologies in general and the advent of mobile devices, apps and chatbots in particular we started to consume information in very different ways and our learners’ expectations are changing based on these technological development. An LMS is not the newest and coolest tool anymore, it is often a nuisance, another tool you have to remember a password for.

I believe the LMS will be around for still quite some time and that’s alright. I would suggest however to start thinking outside the LMS box and start creating learning solutions and experiences that really make a difference to a learner. The LMS is not some magic box that creates amazing training. If your content sucks, your LMS won’t fix that. Always start thinking about your content first and then decide what the best delivery channel would be. Now you are probably thinking, well, that’s great, but I still need to track and measure what I am doing. Don’t worry, there are LMS-free solutions for this!

Slack and Obie

Two of my favourite tools are Slack and Obie by Tasytt, a chatbot that works within Slack (bonus: they are Canadian based!). Obie can be connected to your Google Drive and retrieve any stored information. Don’t use Google or don’t want to connect your Drive to Obie? No problem, you can create books within Tasytt that Obie has access to. You can create flows that can either push content to the learner at certain times, or the learner decides to pull this content as needed. The basic version is free but the upgrade allows you to track usage in the system, just like your LMS!

Wistia and ViewedIt

If you leverage a lot of video content for your learning, Wistia or ViewedIt might be for you. Wistia allows you to upload a video that you have created, whereas ViewedIt lets you create a screencast on the spot. Both platforms allow you to track usage and see how much a user viewed and where they dropped off. This information is extremely helpful as the learner is either not interested anymore or already knows about the content that is covered.

Degreed

This platform is free if you are an individual learner, and they offer an enterprise version for 250+ learners which connects users to free and paid learning resources. Unlike a traditional LMS, Degreed recognizes all forms of learning; inside and outside an organization. Users can discover content and share it, and track learning from any source. It’s a learner-centric solution that helps boost employee engagement.

Thinking outside the LMS box doesn’t have to be difficult and it doesn’t mean that you will be out of a job anytime soon. Get yourself up-to-speed with the newest technologies out there so you can stay relevant and help shape the L&D landscape for years to come.