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4 Ways Marketing Can Support Your Training Program

According to LinkedIn’s 2019 Workforce Learning Report, learning and development (L&D) professionals reported they only spent 15% of their time promoting their programs. L&D teams may realize that marketing is key to their program’s success, but often struggle to spread the word.

This is where your marketing team can help L&D succeed! Marketing teams can help promote L&D efforts through the following four methods: 

  • Streamline Communication
  • Create Consistency
  • Supply SWAG
  • Fully Harness Marketing Practices

Marketing and L&D are typically thought of as separate entities, but they have more in common than you may think.

Marketing and L&D industries share the same goal: to influence how others think and behave and help an organization reach its goals. L&D teams need to leverage the tools that marketing professionals use to make their content more memorable, engaging, and successful.

Your L&D department works hard, so why not market the work you do?

In this article, we’ll talk about why marketing your L&D department is significant, four ways a marketing team can help, and tools and strategies to successfully market L&D. 

Why Is Marketing Your L&D Department Important?

L&D teams are responsible for adopting new strategies to enable and support learning initiatives. Nowadays, L&D is meant to update traditional training practices, react to the changing needs of learners, and help an organization reach its goals. 

As the L&D field evolves, it’s become essential for organizations to highlight the work of their L&D teams through marketing. Organizations need to market L&D initiatives because both employees within an organization and those outside of it need to know about the value it adds.

By marketing and sharing the critical work that L&D has, organizations can emphasize the vital role that L&D has regarding training, performance, and results. This increases the credibility of L&D internally at your organization, as well as externally to people outside of it.  

4 Ways A Marketing Team Can Help L&D Efforts

Streamline Communication

Marketing L&D can help effectively develop messaging around a training program and explain why it’s important. This helps generate buzz internally at an organization and emphasizes the significance of a program. Communication materials sent across an organization are streamlined best when organizations complete the following steps:

  • Assign a point person
  • Utilize a project management system
  • Set clear communication goals

Marketing teams can help write learning program abstracts for internal newsletters and announcements and create internal advertisements. These communication materials help spread the word about the work that L&D teams complete. Managers and leaders are in a great position to become learning ambassadors and create a learning culture that supports these efforts.

For example, department leaders should be kept up-to-date on various L&D projects so they can discuss accomplishments during executive meetings. This way, department leaders can ensure L&D news is shared within the organization and gets the attention it deserves. 

Create Consistency

Marketing can help L&D deliver clear, consistent messaging across communication channels. Training content itself should appear consistent and professional. This content includes:

  • Branded slide decks
  • Participant guides
  • Handouts
  • Infographics
  • Videos

These materials can help create a uniform look and feel for the training program. Consistency can help your training program develop momentum and is essential in helping your business achieve its training goals. 

Marketing professionals can help design and create training materials to ensure content and messaging are consistent. Additionally, marketing teams can help pull marketing pieces, such as advertisements, promotional videos, and jingles, and incorporate them into the training content. This adds real-world elements and fun into your training program. 

Read More: 4 Benefits Of A Custom Training Program

Supply SWAG

Branded SWAG (stuff we all get) is no longer just for trade shows, but can also be a great way to personalize L&D and onboard new employees. SWAG items can include:

  • Mugs
  • Bottles
  • Shirts
  • Notebooks
  • Pens

Within training programs, custom certificates, ribbons, awards, and prizes can help employees feel more motivated to complete training. Additionally, SWAG can increase your brand recognition, increase business exposure, and build loyalty among employees. A marketing team can collaborate with the L&D department to generate fun ideas.

Fully Harness Marketing Techniques

With all the essential work that your L&D department completes, it deserves excellent marketing. A marketing team can help your organization harness the power of marketing technologies through emails, newsletters, apps, blogging, intranet posts, and websites. 

55% of employees discover learning programs via the employee intranet. Employee intranets are a great place to successfully market learning programs considering over half of employees find information there and it’s readily accessible.

Email marketing is another successful marketing practice that can promote learning opportunities. 65% of L&D teams use email marketing to promote learning opportunities, with 61% of workers discovering learning programs via successful email marketing. Organizations should never underestimate the power of email marketing.

Top Tools To Help Market L&D

There are a variety of marketing tools and strategies you can use to promote your L&D team. These tools include:

  • CanvaCanva is a free online design tool where users can create professional graphics. Canva can be used to market L&D through designing print flyers, online advertisements, and images with consistent messaging and branding.
  • Wistia Wistia is a video and podcast hosting platform with analytics and marketing functionality that helps organizations grow. 
  • HootsuiteHootsuite is a social media management platform that guides organizations to social media success. 
  • VidyardVidyard is a video-hosting platform that helps organizations humanize their communications and personalize their customer experiences. 
  • BuzzSumo BuzzSumo can help marketers promote L&D by running a search to discover popular pieces of content and discover new outreach opportunities. 
  • MailChimpMailchimp is an email marketing company that allows users to create slick email marketing campaigns that consistently share pre-programmed content.

Are You Ready To Market Your L&D Team?

We’ve covered why marketing L&D efforts is essential, as well as how a marketing team and tools can help an organization achieve its goals. Whether it’s sharing promotional content through email campaigns or giving employees branded SWAG, marketing L&D efforts at an organization is critical. 
Now, it’s time to ask yourself: “Are you ready to market your L&D department?” Check out more resources here.

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