KEY PRINCIPLES OF MARKETING FOR L&D

There are seven key principles, or areas, of marketing for learning, so lets look at at them in a little detail:

1. ADOPTING A MARKETING MINDSET

The first step to getting marketing for learning right is adopting a marketing mindset. After all, we can't change our behaviour if we don’t change our mindset first. A marketing mindset is primarily about combining creativity with audience centricity. It’s about looking at the world through the eyes of your customer to find out what they want.

This is a substantial shift for most L&D teams. Until now most L&D teams have had two key priorities: ourselves and the business. But it's critically important that we ditch this mindset, and turn our thinking to the people that matter:

And if we’re gonna switch our mindset to start thinking like a marketer and being more audience centric, it’s about time we got to know them a bit better too…

2. UNDERSTANDING OUR AUDIENCE

Here at MAAS we take umbrage with the word ‘learner’. It comes with a lot of baggage and implications about what our audience are doing. In fact, it implies that they’re thinking about learning or that they’re already learning – but we all know that isn’t reality!

Instead, we think it’s time to start thinking about your audience as your consumers. This shift will instantly change the way you approach communicating with your audience – instead of talking to them about something they’re already doing; you’ll be persuading them to engage with something you want them to do.

But this alone isn’t enough, we need to truly get to know who our audience is – and the key to doing that effectively is with personas.

A learner persona is: “a semi-fictional representation of your learners, combining market research, qualitative and quantitative feedback from employees and YES! some assumptions to provide L&D teams with an actionable audience segment designed to improve both learning design and communication approaches.”

Learner personas should be baked in research and have three key components

Want to dig further into personas? Check out our fool-proof learner persona guide!

3. CRAFTING THE RIGHT MESSAGE FOR YOUR L&D AUDIENCE

Understanding your audience is only half the battle. Now that we know who they are, it’s time to focus on what we want to say and, perhaps more importantly, how we say it. Crafting the right message is about connecting with your audiences’ emotions, addressing their needs, and persuading them to act. This is where L&D can really embrace the art of marketing.

Here are three top tips for crafting the right message for your audience:

1. USE AUDIENCE-CENTRIC LANGUAGE
   Speak your audience's language. Don’t confuse them with jargon or hyperbole. Reflect the language they use back at them. Put them front and centre, using ‘you’ instead of ‘we’ or ‘us’. For example:
   
   🚫 “Our learning platform has curated pathways!”
   ✅ “Want to boost your productivity and have more time for the things you care about? Skill up today on your learning platform”
   
   

2. FOCUS ON BUILDING TRUST
   Trust is not given, it’s earnt. So be honest, empathetic and consistent in your marketing to build this trust. Be transparent and realistic about what your learning offering can deliver. And, where possible, use social proof to validate your claims. For example:
   
   🚫 “This course will guarantee you a promotion!”
   ✅ “Great leaders develop over time, start building the skills you need today”

1. PERSONALISE EN MASSE
   Learning is an incredibly personal task, so our marketing should reflect that too. Although we might not have the tech to personalise every email or communication we send out, we can personalise our messaging to our persona’s desires. For example:
   
   🚫 “Explore our leadership courses”
   ✅ “Be the leader you always wanted”

But the ultimate secret to crafting the right message for L&D audiences lies within answering the ‘What’s in it for me?’ question.

4. ANSWERING THE ‘WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?’

The truth is our audience only cares about one thing: What’s in it for me? What will they get out of taking part in your learning offering? And no… ‘new skills’ probably won’t cut it.

In marketing we are always asking ourselves ‘What’s in it for me?’ (WIIFM). We habitually put ourselves in our audience's shoes, empathise and then determine what the audience is going to get from engaging with our product or service. And it’s about time L&D started doing the same.

SO HOW DO YOU ANSWER THE WIIFM FOR L&D AUDIENCES?

Answering the WIIFM starts with defining your L&D value proposition. Your value proposition should clearly explain what you do and why your audience should care about it. This is sometimes a tricky task, with many L&D brains going straight to…

“We offer learning, they should care because they can learn” 🙃

And if you hadn’t worked it out by now, ‘because they can learn’ is not a good WIIFM. So to make the task of defining your value proposition simpler, we use a nifty tool called the value proposition canvas, which looks like this:

Once you’ve filled out your VPC, you’ll be able to identify what your product offers to your audience (gain creators and pain relievers) and match it up against what your audience needs, wants and struggles with. Somewhere between these two points is your ideal value proposition – and it’s this that will help you craft the right message for your audience, taking your messaging from something generic and boring:

🚫 “Check out our time management course”

To messaging that appeals to your audience’s needs, wants, or pain points:

✅ “Struggling to manage your workload? Learn practical tips in just 10 minutes”

So now you have a clear message, that answers the ‘what’s in it for me?’ and instigates action throughout your audience, is your marketing job done? Not quite. If you really want to get butts a’movin, you’ve got to go to where your audience is hanging out…

5. DECISION MAKING JOURNEYS IN L&D

The decision making process our audience goes through is often overlooked in L&D. We assume that people hear about learning and then take it. Simples.

But that isn’t the case. In fact, learning audiences go through a complex decision-making process. And if we want real impact with our marketing for L&D efforts, we must analyse this process, and work out where our audience are hanging out.

Here at MAAS, we utilise the AIDAL model to help us identify the steps of learner decision making. For most L&D teams, the majority of their audience sit in the ‘awareness’ phase. Their audience is aware of the offering (i.e. they know there is a learning team, they know there’s a platform, but they’re not doing anything with that knowledge!) It is our job to nudge our audience from awareness, through the funnel to action, and then convert them into loyal advocates of our offering.

To do that, we must think about three things at each stage of the funnel:

• What our persona is doing

• What their goals are

• What they’re thinking and feeling

By identifying these three things, for each persona at each stage of your journey, you will know exactly where to go to target your audience. For example, if you know that one of your personas spends a lot of time on your intranet in the awareness stage – then market to them there! Meet them where they are at and watch your learner engagement rates soar.

6. USING MARKETING CAMPAIGNS IN L&D

Once you’ve adopted a marketing mindset, created learner personas, answered the WIIFM and formulated your decision making journeys – it’s time to bring all your marketing efforts together in the form of a marketing campaign.

A marketing for learning campaign is a series of strategic efforts to promote learning and boost engagement. They last a number of months and focus on one key topic, theme or objective at a time. By integrating campaigns into your marketing for learning efforts – you will ensure that you are consistently promoting your offering to your audience, cutting through the corporate noise, rather than adding to it.

THE SIX STEPS OF A MARKETING FOR LEARNING CAMPAIGN

To create an effective marketing for learning campaign you have to follow these six steps:

THE POWER OF MARKETING CAMPAIGNS IN L&D

You don’t need to take our word for the phenomenal impact learning campaigns can have on organisations. The proof is in the pudding… Our award-winning Gen AI campaign for Capgemini had an astounding impact on the organisation. Just check these numbers out:

Want to know more? Check out the full case study now.

7. LEARNING BRANDS IN MARKETING FOR L&D

Branding and marketing go hand-in-hand. And for good reason; a brand is your identity. It’s what makes your target audience remember and relate to you and understand your offering. And whether you realise it or not: you already have a learning brand. Because your brand exists in the minds of your audience. It’s how you – as an L&D team – present yourself, and how your audience thinks and feels about you. And it’s important to control that narrative about your brand.

HOW TO DEFINE A LEARNING BRAND

Creating a learning brand is no easy feat. But here’s a streamlined, five-step approach to guide you:

STEP ONE: UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE
Use your personas to dig deep into your audience. Don’t just think about them as employees of your organisation or learners. Instead, you have to think of them as human beings. What are their emotional drivers and aspirations? What really matters to them? And what are they looking for from you?

STEP TWO: CONDUCT AN ANALYSIS ON YOUR CURRENT POSITION
The most frequently overlooked step in branding is evaluating your current position. It’s important to assess your current strengths and weaknesses, and you can only do this by talking to your target market! Find out what your audience thinks about you now, and use that insight to build your brand identity.

STEP THREE: DEFINE YOUR BRAND PROMISE & POSITIONING STATEMENT
Your brand promise and positioning statement is designed to align your marketing efforts with your L&D team and value proposition. It’s the purpose behind your brand, it’s what you stand for and what you want to represent. It's only when you have a strong identity, that you can move on to the visual elements of your brand.

STEP FOUR: DESIGN THE VISUAL ELEMENTS TO YOUR BRAND
Now you have a clear understanding of your audience, your current position and what you stand for as a team, it’s time to get visual! At this stage you want to be thinking about a logo for your team, colour palettes, typography and tone-of-voice. None of these are essential, but using a combination of these elements will help you create a solid brand identity. (Top tip: please check with internal comms or marketing before going full steam ahead with branding… they probably have some rules you should follow!)

STEP FIVE: LAUNCH AND LET IT EVOLVE
Now is the time to unleash your masterpiece into your organisation. Make sure everything you do is on-brand and reflects your team. But don’t be afraid to let the brand evolve and change as your organisation and audience do! Take our brand at MAAS as an example. Our brand is about being bold, bolshy and stand-out. We’re here to disrupt, and our brand reflects that. It’s also fun, quirky and vibrant. And this has been the same since the day we were born back in 2019. But look at how our brand has evolved over time 👇. We've always been bright. We've always been quirky. But our style of bright quirkiness has evolved and changed over time.

WHAT IF INTERNAL COMMS SAY NO TO AN L&D BRAND?

Unsurprisingly, this is a challenge we face a lot. Internal comms, marketing or branding want you to use the external brand for your internal marketing. And although we think that’s a very bad idea (your internal audience isn’t the same as your external audience, is it?) there are a number of ways we can work with corporate guidelines and still make a strong L&D brand identity.

1. LEVERAGE COLOUR

Most organisations have a primary and secondary colour palette, so if you have to use the corporate colours, why not choose one of the lesser used colours? Here’s an example of how we made this work for Lloyd’s Register:

These are LR’s primary brand colours:

We had to stick to these brand colours when defining their brand, so we carefully selected colours that would represent their brand identity:

You can see here how it’s on brand, but still distinctive to the rest of the corporate identity (primarily due to using purple as their leading colour).

2. IMAGE STYLE

Another way to make your brand distinctive is by choosing a unique image or photography style for your team. Deliberately making this a stark contrast to your corporate guidelines will ensure your marketing stands out and grabs attention. For example, if I was creating a learning brand for Salesforce, I might go for human-led imagery, to contrast to their vibrant, illustrated style:

The contrasting, human-centred images I’d choose:

You can see all of these images maintain the purple undertone in Salesforce’s corporate brand, but bring the human element into the branding. Just to note: I have no affiliation with Salesforce, and picked these images after 0.5 seconds of looking at their website. It’s just to show you an example 😊

3. TONE-OF-VOICE

When devising a brand, tone-of-voice is incredibly important, and it’s also a great way to differentiate yourself from your corporate brand. If your corporate brand has quite a staunch and professional tone-of-voice, why not bring a fun and relaxed tone to your L&D communications? Let’s look at an example from one of our clients:

Their corporate tone-of-voice could be described as: clear, professional, and inclusive. It always maintains a polished, purposeful style.

Their learning tone-of-voice is described as approachable, arresting and absolute:

• Approachable. Maintaining clarity and respect within our communications, whilst incorporating inclusivity, authenticity and friendliness.​
  ​

• Arresting. We love what we do, and our tone of voice reflects that. It’s lively, energetic and full of positive emotions. The way we talk inspires and motivates our people to learn.​
  ​

• Absolute. We’re intelligent, and we have important things to say. But being clever is more about being clear and simple, than using overzealous, superfluous words. ​

You can see here how this is an evolution of the corporate brand, and gives the learning brand its own unique style.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BRAND HIERARCHIES IN L&D MARKETING

Learning brands are hugely beneficial for L&D teams. However, too many learning brands are not. In our time in the L&D space we’ve encountered many organisations with more than one learning brand. In fact, the worst we encountered had nine. Yep. 9 brands, just for learning products. Crikey.

This excessive creation of new brand identities only does one thing for your audience: it confuses them. To learners, learning is just learning. Whether it’s compliance training. Whether it’s on an LMS or an LXP. Whether it’s mentoring or classroom. It’s all just learning. So branding each element uniquely just adds more noise and confusion into the mix. And that leads to one thing: lower engagement rates. So it’s incredibly important to establish a brand hierarchy for your organisation, and realise that not everything needs to be a unique brand!

Although we cannot give you a definitive answer without delving into your organisation in a lot more detail, we usually recommend brand hierarchies look a little like this:

1. CORPORATE BRAND
   This is your externally facing brand identity. The brand you see when you land on your corporate website.

2. EMPLOYER BRAND (if you have one)
   This usually represents the employee value proposition and highlights your internal culture & values.

3. L&D BRAND
   The primary brand for your entire function and everything that sits within your remits

4. L&D PRODUCT BRANDS (to be used very sparingly!)
   In rare situations, an L&D product can be used. It’s really important that you only create these for distinct and highly specialised learning programmes or initiatives. Otherwise, keep the branding in line with your L&D brand above!

You can see here that each brand has its own unique audience and offering, and therefore is entitled to be its own brand. And that should be your benchmark: does this have its own, incredibly unique audience that we need to capture the attention of? If the answer is no, use the primary L&D brand.

MEASURING MARKETING FOR LEARNING SUCCESS

Alright, so this is all great – but how do we measure the success of marketing in L&D? Well it starts with getting comfortable with numbers and data, and then digging in to these three buckets:

It’s only by looking at each bucket that we can truly prove the efficacy of your marketing for L&D initiatives. But we know you’ll be amazed with the results.

MARKETING FOR L&D IN ACTION

But you don’t just need to take our word for the impact marketing for L&D can have, let’s dive into our partnership with Dechra Pharmaceuticals to prove our point…

We’ve partnered with Dechra since July 2020, and in that time we have helped them reimagine marketing for learning across their organisation. Dechra have their own internal L&D brand, Delta, but they also have an external string to their learning bow: Dechra Academy. Throughout our collaboration together, we have helped bring both the Delta and Dechra Academy brands to life, creating identities that truly resonated with their audiences.

But we didn’t leave it there, we’ve also run marketing for learning campaigns with the Dechra L&D team, to make sure their learning was getting the attention and engagement it deserved. In fact, our campaign for Dechra Academy’s 10th birthday is award winning! 💁🏻‍♀️ But even more impressive than our shiny trophies (yep, there’s more than 1) is the data from the campaign, which culminated in a 701% return on investment. Wowzers.

So yeah, this marketing for learning thing DOES work, but if you want to learn more, check out the full case study now.

GETTING STARTED WITH MARKETING IN L&D

Firstly, if you’ve read every word of this article, then CONGRATULATIONS. You’ve just completed the virtual download of the MAAS hive mind. 🤣 But more importantly, you might be wondering about where you should get started with marketing for learning in your organisation. And the answer to that question has a few different answers:

• START WITH PERSONAS. Throughout this guide, we’ve been explicitly clear that nothing matters more than your audience. So this is a solid place to start with your marketing efforts. Research your audience and create personas that really represent who they are as human beings.

• START WITH A TEST. If you’re not convinced by our 4,000+ words on the power of marketing for learning, why not start with a test? Run a mini campaign. Design a better email. Make sure you answer the WIIFM. And evaluate its impact. Once your test is successful, we recommend starting with personas 😉

• START BY BEING 1% BETTER. Okay, we know that sometimes L&D are up against barriers internally. But that doesn’t stop you changing your mindset, does it? If you adopt a marketing mindset, and commit to being just a little bit better every day, we’re sure you’ll see an impact too. If your leaders only want you to send out emails about new courses – make sure they’re the BEST emails your audience receives. Make sure they answer the WIIFM and leave your audience wanting to get involved with your offering. Sometimes we can’t go wild with marketing campaigns and research – but there's nothing stopping you making sure what you’re currently doing is absolutely perfect for your audience.

And if you’re looking for more tips on how to get started… then check out our guide on how to apply marketing to your L&D function.

SO WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

Marketing for learning isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a necessity in today’s distraction-heavy workplace. By adopting a marketing mindset, prioritising your audience and thinking strategically about promoting your learning content – you’ll be well on your way to transforming your engagement rates (at last!)

But if you’re looking for a strategic, expert partner to help you develop a marketing for learning strategy for your organisation, get in touch – we’d absolutely LOVE to help you on this wonderful journey of marketing for L&D.