marketing strategies for training

Reaching external audiences for training

Organizations have a range of motivations for reaching, engaging and educating an external audience. Often it's to raise awareness of new products or opportunities as well as information that could be relevant for safety or legal reasons.

External audiences have a multitude reasons to engage with an organizations educational offering, they may wish to improve their skills and provide more value to their customers. They may wish to explore their capability to work with a new product or technology.

Manufacturers and vendors often rely on external partners to sell, maintain or install products. They may need to train and certify the people they trust to deliver with their brand and reputation. Associations and authorities who license individuals need to be confident that people are who they say they are and are capable of delivering a compliant service. The value of a certification or association membership needs to be maintained with a strong reputation.

Often growth of an organisation or industry is limited by confidence and capability out in the real world. People tend to stick with what they know and for new products, processes or techniques to thrive - there needs to be opportunities to learn. Education is a way to accelerate growth in both revenue and industry size.

Why external audiences are different

Traditional learning platforms are designed for mandated internal employees. They can be required by their employer to log into an LMS and complete some training modules. They are often given time to do this at work, provided with the means and reminded by their manager to complete the assigned learning.

External audiences often don’t have these luxuries and generally don’t have to complete the training if it doesn’t suit them. There are many great courses in LMSs with lots of licences assigned to an external audience who either never logged in or had a quick look and never came back.

Practitioners, partners and operators outside your organisation need to be motivated to learn in other ways. Some will learn because they need to know something to complete a task, others may take the lead in their own professional development with things that interest them.

Organizations have limited opportunities to influence a learning journey if the individual doesn’t already engage with the organisation or have a good reason to.

To reach these audiences, you need to steal from marketing and make people aware they have a problem that your training can help solve.

Using marketing strategies

Marketing departments use a number of strategies to target and reach audiences, make them aware of new opportunities and motivate them to engage.

• Targeting and personalisation
  Marketing departments recognize their audience is rarely homogenous and some messages can resonate better with some sections of the audience. They group their audience based on a range of factors and tailor their messaging to suit. There are limited opportunities to connect with a target audience and the message needs to be as relevant and on point.
  
  In a training context, you want your audience to understand some key things and meet some desired outcomes. With internal audiences, you are clear on who they are and can mandate training - so relevance is less important.
  
  With external audiences, it’s important to focus on the necessary details and avoid anything that isn’t relevant. The content needs to be optimized and personalised to make sense for the target audience.
  
• Hooks for attention
  Marketers often know that when you need to deliver a complicated message or explain something in detail - you need to get someone's attention with a hook first. If you overload or present too much information people lose interest really quickly.
  
  Hooks are visual, short pieces of content that trigger a response or pique interest in the target audience. Training modules for internal staff are often large pieces of content that cover a lot of bases. Unless audiences are very aware they need to complete the module, they’re unlikely to engage on their own volition.
  
  A hook to encourage someone to engage with some training is making them aware they don’t fully know the subject or might have some gaps in their knowledge. Short challenges, quizzes or scenarios can motivate someone to acquire deeper knowledge when they know what it is they don’t already know.
  
• Campaigns
  Marketing campaigns are multiple messages, delivered over time to a target audience. The idea is to repeat and reinforce the theme of the campaign to have more chance of resonating with the audience. Often a single message or piece of information has a limited chance to have impact, but broken up and delivered over time can lead to better outcomes.
  
  You may have experienced that after signing up for an online service you start receiving hints or advice in regular emails - that is a learning campaign. The learning campaign is designed by the marketing team to drive adoption of the service and encourage engagement.
  
  For training, the same concept can be applied. Breaking up longer courses into smaller bite size modules can make them easier to digest. They can be presented consequently for those who are engaged, or sent in emails delivered as a drip to the inbox over time.

Workflow techniques

You can use training workflows to implement these strategies in your educational programmes. Workflows enable you to customize delivery and adapt the content to suit your audience.

• Grouping audiences
  Use group nodes to group your audience so they can be assigned relevant content further along the flow. You can use a number of methods to determine which group someone should belong to, this can include working it out from where they came, which country they live in, answers to questions or other factors.Audience members can be added to multiple groups and removed if required as part of a workflow. Modules can be added, removed or modified for particular groups to optimize the content and maximize relevance.
  
• Challenge upfront
  Use short and engaging modules as part of a hook, to give someone a challenge and make them aware of what they don’t know. You can use parts of longer modules to encourage someone to engage. Use short scenarios, quizzes and simulations that challenge the audience and can be completed quickly.
  
  The introduction text can be in an email or social media post to be the first hook that can then load a short and visual module. You can also screen record some video from the module to get attention. The audience can continue in the workflow to the rest of the module or longer version, or be sent further emails or notifications.
  
• Emails with delays
  To create a drip to an inbox with short learning content, use module nodes with notification delays. Determine the right cadence for your audience to deliver enough nudges and notifications without getting too annoying.You can add interactions inside emails to prompt engagement, including selecting answers to a quiz. Use images that visually demonstrate the learning objective or set the scene to raise interest.

Optimizing your workflows

You can measure engagement, click through rates and group memberships to establish workflow performance and reach. The workflow stats can tell you where you get bottle necks, if content isn’t hitting the mark and where your audience falls off.

You can continuously improve and optimize to show the most relevant content to your audience groups and remove anything that is causing them to lose interest. You can adjust cadences for the drip to allow enough time between emails or raise the tempo if you feel the audience is engaged.

As you get to know your audience you will be able to identify segments and groups who may need more or less training on certain subjects depending on their requirements. There may be parts of your solution that will resonate more, so you can adjust the learning flow for those individuals for a greater impact.

You have a range of options you can use to reach and engage your target external audience. Good luck!