Discern Which Skills Employees Need And Promote
As organizations are challenged with navigating the hybrid workplace, including the polarity of real-life interactions and online engagement, Learning & Development teams (L&D) are challenged with keeping employees engaged, inspired, and committed to their learning. Marketing in-house learning is an important lever L&D teams can leverage to engage the workforce to keep up with their learning. This article offers six tried and tested tactics you can explore to amp your in-house marketing efforts of eLearning.
6 Ways To Maximize Your In-House eLearning Marketing
Curate Content Around Learning Skills
Review the learning needs of your employees that you have collected via surveys and small group conversations. Next, prioritize the skills the employees said they need the most and select a skill from that priority list to feature each month. Select the learning module or modules you want to feature and create a mini-marketing campaign around them. For example, next month, you can focus on digital skills. Select the eLearning module you want to market, a related TED talk, and source a related article on digital skills and post them on the Learning Management System (LMS) front page.
Create A Mini-Marketing Campaign
Next, plan a mini-marketing campaign. You will want to reach your learner audience in at least three different ways through three different channels. For this article, we recommend posting a story, hosting a webcast, and sending an email message to engage employees. These three ways will likely engage the majority of your employees through multiple channels. It is advisable to also define the metrics for the success of your campaign. Throughout the campaign, you will be collecting data against each of your success metrics. At the end of your campaign, you will analyze your data to evaluate the success of the campaign, as discussed later on in the article.
Leverage storytelling
Develop and post a short article of 300-400 words that describes the eLearning module and centers on the story of an employee who completed the learning and how it helped them improve their skills. Ask the learner to discuss the journey: what was their learning need, where did they access the module, how long did they spend learning in the module, and what was the impact on their job because of the module? Storytelling can help you zero in on the “what’s in it for me” or WIIFM element of the learning module. Metrics for the success of this tactic include the number of impressions, number of likes, and number of shares.
Host An Online Conversation
A great way to make a new learning module come alive is to have a compelling online conversation via a webcast about it. Invite the subject matter expert on the topic, an instructional designer, and a workforce member to discuss the learning module from their angles. You can allocate 30 minutes to the discussion, allowing the remaining 15 minutes for questions. Each speaker will bring a different perspective to the conversation. The subject matter expert can discuss why the particular skill is important, while the instructional designer can highlight how to learn the skill using the module. Importantly, the user can discuss what they reaped from the module and what benefits the module offered for their day-to-day work.
During the question and answer session, if you have a small group of attendees below fifty people, you may offer participants the opportunity to engage with the speakers live, using their microphones and cameras. If the audience is larger than 50, it is best they engage via chat only, keeping their mics and cameras off. You can then field the questions received via chat to your speakers, who can respond verbally to each question. Metrics for the success of this tactic include the number of participants in the audience, the quality and quantity of their questions and feedback, and the depth of the conversation overall.
Send A Monthly Email
A simple yet effective way to reach each learner in your organization directly is to send them an email. You can curate a monthly email around the theme you selected and send the links to the course, the TED talk, and the article on that topic. Metrics for the success of this tactic include the number of clicks on each curated asset. One way to collect data on engagement for each of these assets is to include a UTM code, also known as Urchin Tracking Module code which is the text you can add to the end of a URL. When learners click on the URL, through the UTM code, you can collect data, including which division they are located in, when they clicked, and who they are.
Collect Data To Evaluate And Iterate Your Efforts
At the end of the month, collect the various data points on the metrics you set for each tactic. Next, analyze the data. What is the data telling you? How many learners viewed the story you posted; how many participated in the online discussion and what did they say; how many clicked on the links in the email you sent; and, most importantly, how many signed up and completed the module you set out to promote. Depending on the results, you will need to iterate your efforts and tweak the mini-campaign for the following month so that you can reach even more learners. At the end of the three months, review your three-month data and evaluate whether the mini-marketing campaigns are working overall. Share the results with your team and the learners and discuss the next steps together.
Conclusion
Engaging learners in a complex, hybrid workplace can be challenging. Being deliberate about understanding the learning needs of your workforce and curating mini-marketing campaigns around them to promote the learning experiences you have curated can help address the challenge. This article offered five tactics to help you amp your in-house marketing of eLearning assets, including curating a theme around the skill you want to highlight; leveraging storytelling to highlight the value of the eLearning to an actual learner; moderating an online conversation around the why, how, and what of the eLearning module; sending a well-crafted monthly email with curated content around the skill theme, and finally, collecting and analyzing data to evaluate and iterate your efforts.
