More marketing essentials to help engage your learners

Ali Soper shares more marketing hints and tips to help you identify your audience and effectively frame questions. Focused marketing can ultimately help you engage your workforce and contribute to any learning initiative’s success.

An essential element of any marketing plan is understanding who you are targeting, their demographic, needs and expectations. This information will help you promote and drive your learning strategy.

For example, if you were working in customer service with shop assistants or traffic wardens, you would change your approach to achieve the best outcome. Each group has different needs and they work in quite different ways. But how can this be achieved?

1. Define your audience
The first step of any successful campaign is to think about who you are trying to reach. The following questions can help:

  • What is the demographic of your teams/learners/audience?
  • What makes them get up in the morning?
  • Why do they do what they do?
  • Where are they positioned within the organisation?
  • Do they all work from the same location?
  • What environment do they operate in?

It’s only when you understand the background of your target audience – such as their job role, age, length of service etc – that you’ll be able to market your learning initiatives. This kind of detail will influence both the message you share and the way in which you implement your plan.

2. What motivates your audience?
Don’t assume that one approach will work for everyone, especially when you have a diverse team made up of both office based and remote workers. Take time to consider what motivates your target audience, what will reach them and what makes them tick.

If you have an idea for marketing or learning strategy, don’t go in blindfolded! Instead, ask your target audience what they think – they’re a fantastic sounding board to help you work out what will work.

3. What approach should you take?
Once you understand who your target audience is and what motivates them, you can use this knowledge to determine the approach you’ll take to market your learning initiatives. This could be through a series of creative emails, regular newsletters, posters and a social media campaign.

Understanding the medium that will best convey your message is essential for ensuring a successful campaign. To reinforce your message, keep mixing things up with a variety of different techniques.

4. Always ask for feedback
Finally, get involved and keep asking lots of open-ended questions to gauge how both the marketing and initiatives themselves are being received.

NB. If you ask closed questions, such as whether they like receiving emails, you’ll likely get simple yes/no responses. Instead, ask them what they think of the emails and initiatives and why.

To learn more about asking effective questions, check out this infographic. It explores the six key types of questions which you can use in both your personal and professional lives.

About Ali Soper

Ali Soper is the Creative Director and Cofounder of MicroLearn, a passionate team of eLearning creators, developing stunning, engaging and effective microlearning resources. Ali’s career in eLearning first began as a creative developer, building professionally deliverable eLearning content at Jenison Digital Learning. She refused to believe that ‘click next continue’ was really the best way to learn. Alongside her father Steve, the pair cofounded MicroLearn in 2016 to deliver top class, bite-sized content which helps people to work better, safer and smarter in the age of the skills economy.

 

An easy guide to marketing learning

Have you read Ali’s previous feature on the Charity Learning website, on setting SMART goals?

CL Consortium Ltd
Vine House, Selsley Road,
Stroud, GL5 5NN