Metrics for Marketing Learning Programs

Resources for Marketing Learning
Many resources exist to help you better market your learning initiatives to employees, including consultants, marketing courses, books and communities of practice.
If your budget allows, instead of pressing your learning staff into service to plan and implement marketing outreach, hire a marketing pro on a part- or full-time basis to position and promote your initiatives to your optimum benefit. If funding precludes doing that, partner with your organization’s marketing department to make sure your efforts are on target. CorpU’s study notes that 46 percent of learning functions now are doing just that, with 9 percent even accessing the organization’s advertising agency for planning and expertise.

Marketing consultant Gordon Johnson has been working with internal training departments for more than 10 years on strategies to improve their reach and impact.
“It’s not all about tactics,” Johnson said, as he thought of some learning marketing plans he’d seen that included an endless series of e-mail blasts. “You must have a strategy that includes management buy-in, a great training Web site, and most importantly, you have to think like a marketer and focus on making it easy for your workforce to enroll for the training.”

Johnson, who runs HowToMarketTraining.com, said he has seen his share of ill-fated marketing outreach on behalf of learning programs, including boring “talking head” videos running on largely ignored TV screens in public office areas and quizzical wall posters that few noticed and even fewer understood.

In 2002, Lance Dublin and Jay Cross authored Implementing E-Learning, a book that encourages learning professionals to think of learners as customers and their e-learning as brands to be marketed to those customers.
“Implementing e-learning is still hard to do today,” Dublin said. “Successful implementation hinges on executive endorsement of what you’re doing and relies heavily on both change management and consumer marketing principles.”