Can Internal Marketing Build Learner Engagement?
Many corporate organizations have this grievance that they spend large amounts from their budget on eLearning, but don’t get the expected results. The reason behind this, isn’t that eLearning isn’t effective, but it is simply the fact that these organizations fail to implement it fully and don’t promote or market it internally well enough. According to LinkedIn’s Workplace Report 2019, organizations only spend as little as 15% time and resources to market their eLearning courses to their employees. Agreed, that getting people to learn shouldn’t be this tough, but unfortunately, it is, and organizations need to make continued efforts if they want their eLearning programs to succeed and get a good ROI. It’s time to go beyond simple e-mails to employees to complete their eLearning courses and rely on modern marketing techniques like social media, videos, events, signage, influencer campaigns, contests and the like.
Where To Begin?
The first step, as in any strategy, should be to set clear goals using the SMART methodology. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timed. Every goal you hope to achieve using eLearning must have all of these qualities.
Secondly, define your audience clearly. An organization has various departments in which employees from various fields and skill-sets work. Refrain from building generic, one-size-fits-all eLearning courses because they are bound to fail. You’ll have to create different courses for different employees based on their department (e.g. sales, marketing, production, etc.) as well as based on their designation, i.e. a different course for a sales executive and a different one for a sales manager.
Thirdly, you must have a tried and tested marketing strategy or plan for your internal marketing campaign. The BAIDA methodology is a great marketing strategy for internal marketing and stands for Branding, Attention, Interest, Desire, and Attention. Let us discuss how to use this methodology in the internal marketing of your eLearning courses.
BAIDA
1. Branding
Think of your eLearning courses as a product. Would you buy a non-branded product? Neither would your organization’s employees. Branding is important, and not that hard. Just keep the following tips in mind:
- Use creative and legible fonts, and keep them uniform throughout every course. Give good thought while choosing these fonts as you’ll be using them in all courses.
- Choose a color scheme identical to that of your logo. This ties in your eLearning courses to your organization.
- Use images of your organization, its logos, and its higher-up members to make it more relatable.
- When creating infographics, brand them too using your organization’s colors, logo and such.
- Add social media links to your organization’s pages in your courses (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) Customize the social media buttons to match your branding as well.
2. Attention
Your eLearning course must capture the attention of employees. Apart from creating a visually stunning and wonderfully interactive course, you must market the benefits of the eLearning course, the convenience, the rewards upon completion, the ability to revisit resources, etc. in advance before the launch of the course through emails, messages, and social media channels.
3. Interest
Human beings are selective, and thus, each of your employees will be interested in a different group of things. Some will be interested in the visual aspect of the course, for some, it will be the interactivity, for some, it will be the content. Understand what your employees are interested in. Try to include employees’ interests in your courses, and market the fact beforehand using different internal marketing channels. Give each of them what they want.
4. Desire
Once you understand their interests, understand the aspirations of your employees; What do they expect from the course? What are they looking for? What do they desire? Is it increasing their knowledge? Is it a promotion? Is it recognition? Once you know what your employees desire, create and send personalized messages, e-mails and social media posts for them.
5. Action
Make your course as accessible as you can. Make your plans visible. Market through internal channels thoroughly, and before the launch of an eLearning course, get the L&D manager or some other higher authority to explain and engage the audience. Get them to answer employees’ questions.
Finally, run the campaign, and then launch your eLearning course. The campaign should run continuously without fail until every employee has completed the course. Even then, it is on to the next eLearning course. This is a continuous activity that must be sustained.
Originally published at cblpro.com.
