Have you invested a lot of time and resources on the main ideas or projects in your company, and failed to achieve the expected results? It often starts at the most basic level, with recruiting and training the right employees—and adopting the best training methods to reach them. If you want your eLearning initiatives to be a success, you have to test and market your project internally.
It doesn’t matter how good your courses are if you don’t have the right people to promote them, and if these people fail to complete them, then it will be just a waste of resources and time. Employees need to feel engaged with your company, and connected to your product. If you can make a believer out of them, they will be able to make believers out of your target demographic. Simply building eLearning courses isn’t enough to attract people to take them, you have to prove to them that there is both a purpose and a personal benefit for them.
With that in mind, here are three marketing strategies to keep your target’s interest.
#1. Set Your Goals
Now that you want to improve the already existing training strategy, or you want to adopt eLearning into your training strategy, you should figure out what you want to achieve. It is difficult to achieve anything at all if you do not first have at least a basic idea of what you need to accomplish. Thus, the very first step you need to take is to set specific goals.
There are a lot of effective goal setting methods and theories that should help you in this regard. Before you set your goals, you should ask yourself what you want to achieve by implementing eLearning, then figure out how you can act to apply them. The goals you set should be at the heart of your idea or project, and the ones you set can either break or make the implementation strategy in your training company. One proven goal setting method is to make sure that your goals meet the SMART tactic.
After you have set solid and actionable goals, you will then be able to keep them in mind as you craft your elearning program. Each step of the way, ask yourself how each decision will get you a step closer to achieving your goals.
#2. Branding
After you have defined what your objectives are, ensure that you analyze your target audience before you kick-off your marketing campaign. You cannot market to someone if you do not even know who they are. You should know who your audience is, their roles in regards to your business, their number, ages, and why they would want to take the course.
This is another reason why it is helpful to start with internal marketing. You will notice that after you introduce something new in your company, there is the potential danger that it will be considered as irrelevant at one point. In most cases, employees resist putting new things on their plates. Therefore, campaigns are crucial to gain awareness.
Begin by considering what you are offering, your organization, objectives, and more importantly your ideal audience. Think also about how you can brand your initiative, how you can include eLearning as a major pathway to promoting your brand, and how eLearning can make daily tasks easier.
#3. Change Perceptions
If you are looking at adopting eLearning, it is advisable to market it for the purpose of changing perception. This is because trying to introduce a new training strategy can often be met with a certain amount of resistance and overwhelming lack of enthusiasm. For this reason, you need to make sure that you identify the issues, fears, barriers, and the weaknesses of your audience. Proceed and analyze this data and how it will affect your project. This will ease things and make your audience more willing and interested to shift, going against their initial thoughts and preconceptions.
Some of the protests a lot of workers might make about eLearning courses include: they are irrelevant, they don’t know about them, they aren’t fun, and that they have real work that they should be working on. Such comments might be indicative of poor internal marketing. This means that you need to help your learners to realize why they have to take the course and how these courses will actually help them. There are several eLearning benefits that you can highlight in order attract both your employees and your audience. This can include the ability to revisit resources anytime, convenience, and the ability to join interactive discussions and receive live help during the ongoing course.
Remember that the main goal of your project is to take your audience through from one situation to another, and the only way to do so is by maintaining proper communication throughout your marketing strategy. Ensure that you also have a reasonable period to run your mixed marketing plan, for instance, 9-12 months. This should be enough time to help your audience become familiar with, and remember the message. If you aim to raise awareness from the beginning, you are more likely to obtain more support from your learners.
Keep in mind that communication shouldn’t stop after the eLearning project has rolled-out. It is vital to have a continuous communication to always remind your target audience when and why they should complete the training. Too many people will think that they can simply take a course once, and then be good forever. The reality is that there are constant shifts in any industry, and constant training and learning is necessary in order to keep at the forefront of your relevant field. This means that constant revisits to eLearning are essential for both your internal and external audiences. If you can convey this message, you will soon find that you have won the largest battle—you no longer have to sell your concept, as the new converts will start to do that themselves.
