We live in an era of information overload.

Today, to convert leads and stand out in a competitive crowd, business leaders and marketers must attract prospects and speak to their targeted needs. The messaging must trigger interest with the offer of a solution that meets consumers’ pain points. The same strategy applies to learning and development (L&D): Marketing your training initiatives is a valuable and critical step in your organization’s training strategy.

Have you ever wondered: “Why aren’t people signing up for my training programs?” The answer is oftentimes rather simple: Because they don’t know it exists. People don’t know what they don’t know. Unfortunately, this is a common question among many L&D professionals and training departments. They invest time and money to design and develop the training without a marketing plan or strategy to ensure participation.

“It’s kind of like creating a product and never marketing it — training is the same thing. It’s a product, and if you’re not going to market it, then nobody’s going to consume it,” says Kim Davis, CPTM, senior manager of comprehensive and innovative faculty development programs at the American College of Surgeons and an instructor for Training Industry’s Managing Remote Learning Certificate course.

To maximize the investment of training and procure praiseworthy outcomes, you must treat your training course as a product and learners as consumers. L&D leaders must step into the mindset of a marketing professional to engage learners.

“L&D can draw valuable insights from the marketing industry to enhance training engagement and relevance,” says Kate Hixson, Ph.D., CPTM, strategic partner at WeLearn. “Applying principles like audience segmentation to understand diverse learner needs, crafting compelling narratives to make content more relatable, and utilizing multimedia formats for interactive and visually appealing delivery can significantly improve the effectiveness of training programs.”

In this article, we’ll review practical strategies to marketing your training programs and developing a marketing strategy.

First Things First: Building Your L&D Brand

Training is the solution your people need to obtain a promotion, learn a new function or improve poor performance in a particular skill. When marketing to your organization’s people, you have to show them not only the “why,” but also, the “what”— in other words, “what’s in it for me?”

“If it’s compliance training or something that is required, they know they have to do it, but why should they want to do it? What is it going to contribute to? What is the bigger “why?” How does it impact their role or the organization?” Davis shares.

All of this is important to consider when cultivating a distinct L&D brand. An L&D brand should be at the core of any marketing strategy. Establishing a brand can personify your department, building trust and loyalty with your organization’s people. To create an L&D brand, you need to define what L&D promises to deliver.

The brand must have a clear and memorable message that resonates with your people’s training needs. Aimee Hess, CPhT, CTC, CPTM, corporate liaison trainer, shares that an effective marketing strategy for L&D should work to engage learners and deliver a cohesive message. “Connecting at the learner’s level to make training meaningful and relatable.” This can get your people excited to participate in your training programs, because they know it’ll be relevant and engaging.

An example of an L&D brand’s promise can include: to deliver high-quality, immersive training programs that support professional development and career growth. Whatever you brainstorm, ultimately, the promise must clearly communicate what the L&D department aims to achieve, and as consumers, what they can expect to receive.

Marketing Strategies for L&D

Most, if not all, of us have consumed a product to fulfill a specific need. If we look around, we will notice that every product ever made was designed to cater to the consumer. L&D professionals must view their training courses in the same light: These courses aren’t only to help your people meet business demand, but most importantly, to achieve their professional and personal goals.

“By focusing on effective promotion, learning professionals can increase awareness, participation, and overall engagement with their training initiatives,” Dr. Hixson says. Let’s evaluate some marketing tactics to consider when crafting an effective marketing strategy.

Digital marketing tools.

Companies with an intranet can take advantage of digital marketing tools (i.e., landing pages, pop-ups and banners) to increase the conversion rate of people who sign up for the training program. Digital marketing tools are concentrated and optimized for conversion with a targeted and streamlined experience for visitors. Different digital assets can be customized and tailored to attract a specific segment in the organization, such as one to trigger a response for employees, and another for your leadership team. Here’s what to consider when evaluating digital marketing tools for your campaign efforts:

• Landing pages can convert more traffic because they’re highly focused on a specific goal or call to action (CTA), which is to entice visitors to clickthrough to the registration page. When the employee enters the organization’s internal webpage, the engine takes the learner to a promotional page with a description of the course and a CTA. The limited navigation mitigates distraction from other links that could potentially take the visitor away from the page.
• Pop-ups are graphical marketing assets that appear on top of the current webpage, in a separate, smaller window. They can be triggered by time spent on the page, clicking a button, entering a website, etc. You can use pop ups to collect email addresses to aid with your email marketing efforts, to share a special offer, or click the CTA button. The overall intent is to prompt the visitor to complete a specific action.
• Banners are eye-catching, multimedia graphic advertisements. Their intent is to attract website visitor’s attention toward a brand, product, service, etc. When visitors click the banner, they are redirected to a landing or product page. Placement of banners on the webpage is important to attracting more attention.

Email campaign.

Email campaigns are a cadence of scheduled emails that are deployed during a set period of time. They can include images and multimedia, backlinks, content, and most importantly, a CTA. Subject lines and headers must be relevant and focused on attracting users to open the email.

You can do A/B testing to see which variations of emails perform the best. To track your campaign effectiveness, measure the number of open emails and how many visitors signed up for the training program after opening that email. This is an effective tool to reach knowledge workers, front-line managers and professionals with access to a computer during work hours.

Visual collateral.

Building engagement and enhancing visibility of L&D and your training courses is also vital to increasing course participation. Learning professionals can design media like brochures, signs, posters, newsletters, etc., to promote L&D initiatives in the organization. Signs, posters and other physical media should be accessible and visible to everyone in the company (e.g., work cafeteria). The design and messaging should be tailored toward the specific employees you wish to attract.

Davis explains that training should include, “the colors and fonts and all those things that gravitate us to liking promotions for non-training products. It kind of looks like, feels like something that would want me to go to the store and buy something.” For example, an advertisement geared toward Gen Z employees for a new soft skills training course may look different and have a different color scheme, tone and message versus the advertisement designed for Gen X and baby boomers.

“If we treat learners like consumers, we are approaching L&D through the eyes of our learners … being mindful of learner’s personality traits and connecting with the learner at their level,” Hess shares.

Video marketing.

Learning professionals can leverage marketing videos to build engagement and visibility of their brand and offerings. Video is a great way to capture testimonials, success stories and a preview of the course. “You can get testimonials from people who did the pilot testing or previous iterations of the training,” Davis explains. “Those are always helpful, because you’re hearing from one of your colleagues who you know.”

You can include a link to the promotional video in your email campaigns and digital marketing assets. You can also embed a video plugin on the company’s landing page. Engaging videos inspire and motivate learners through the power of storytelling and real-life examples, relevant and personal to their experience.

Measuring Your Marketing Campaigns

The goal of your marketing campaigns is to impact engagement and brand visibility to increase course participation. So to demonstrate the efficacy of your campaign, you’ll need to monitor and evaluate the course’s participation rate. To establish a baseline, you can collect and analyze data from past trainings or conduct a pilot test as a dry run. Once the baseline is determined, L&D professionals can use this to define their campaign goals.

After the campaign kicks off, L&D leaders can compare the current number of participants to the desired goal to determine success. To calculate the participation rate of your training courses: Divide the number of total participants with the total number of people reached and multiply this sum by 100. Hess shares that another effective way to measure results is through feedback and reaction. “The most successful L&D that I have been a part of has had positive reactions and feedback.”

Continuously analyze and measure the participation rate to ensure that your campaigns are hitting the right target and performing well. “Continuous assessment and feedback mechanisms enable L&D professionals to refine their strategies, ensuring ongoing alignment with learner preferences and organizational goals,” says Dr. Hixson.

Design, Develop — Market! Treating L&D Like a Business

The L&D department is like a business — they design and develop customized training experiences to service their peoples’ growth and development. And like a business, L&D teams must champion and promote their offerings to attract attention. To do so, they must adopt a marketing mindset, and visualize their organization’s people as consumers in need of what they have to “sell.”

With this comprehensive guide to marketing training courses in your L&D arsenal, you can impact your learning initiatives and build trust through L&D’s brand promise, and who knows, you may have the potential to elevate training participation to such a degree that you’ll have to initiate a waitlist.