Digital Channels to Support the Learning Journey

The key to marketing and enablement is reaching the intended person to transmit knowledge to effect action. Marketers are experts at finding and engaging people towards making a purchasing decision, utilizing a robust toolkit to do this. As learning professionals, we can utilize these strategies as a component of the Learning Journey. In this post, I’ll provide an overview some of the digital channels marketers use, and some ideas on how L&D can leverage them.

Web: A website is the core of every company’s marketing and provides the digital hub for prospects and customers to learn about the product or service. L&D teams often do this via learning portals. What we should optimize here is usability, content personalization, and predictive intelligence to support recommendations.

Social: This channel is well used by marketing and L&D today; it provides an excellent broadcast mechanism, as well as providing a forum to engage and interact with learners. There are excellent resources on social and community building which provide much more expertise than I have.

Mobile: Mobile is all the rage in marketing and has been actively discussed and used by learning professionals for several years. One variance though is a focus on mobile first; most digital visitors are on mobile devices and design is catering to the mobile experience first and progressively enhancing for desktop. This should be applied in our industry as well; although corporate learners are often at a desktop we should consider when a learner will be either on the go or using their device as a second screen for performance support or to support a workforce that conducts their day outside the office. From this perspective we need to adapt content to be more concise, require less swiping, remove unsupported interactions, and possible assess content length to better serve the on-demand need.

Email: In digital marketing, an email address is often the center that fuels the other channels, in addition to serving as the highest ROI digital stream. L&D needs to leverage this. Leveraging automation, drip campaigns and transactional messaging will enhance learner experience and guide them through the learning journey.

Have you utilized these channels to promote learning at your company? Which one has been the most effective for you?

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