How to Use Marketing Tactics to Drive Learner Engagement

We’ve seen a growing interest in new ways to market learning and development over the past few years. L&D teams are looking for opportunities to cut through the clamour of competing messages to encourage people to find and engage with learning.

But in an age of information overload, it’s only getting harder to make your message stand out.

Here are our top ways to use marketing to promote your learning and development (even if you’ve never had experience with marketing before).

The AIDA model for marketing learning

The AIDA model was developed in 1898 by St Elmo Lewis in an attempt to explain how personal selling works. Although this was primarily focused on selling, it was later taken up by marketing and advertising theorists.

The beauty of AIDA lies in its simplicity – although this makes it best-suited as a communications model rather than a decision-making model. It focuses on human behaviour, which is exactly what you’re addressing when marketing your learning offerings to employees. 

Each stage of the AIDA model respects their journey – from being unaware of what’s available to becoming enthusiastic advocates for your L&D programmes:

• Awareness – How do you make employees aware of the learning opportunities available to them?
  
• Interest – How can you get them interested in learning?
  
• Desire – How can you build a desire to commit to a learning programme?
  
• Action – Finally, what action do you want them to take? (For example. sign up for a leadership course.)

Let’s take a look at what you can do at each stage to drive your employees from awareness to action.

Step 1: Create awareness of learning programmes

You can’t expect your employees to sign up for learning programmes if they aren’t even aware they exist. To cut through the noise of constant emails, pings and notifications from multiple platforms, you need to take a creative, multi-channel approach that matches how your employees prefer to communicate. 

Every workforce is unique and so are its communication habits. Here are some examples of how different employees might prefer to receive communications:

• Digital natives (younger employees) – Mobile push notifications, quick updates and bite-sized content delivered via apps or social channels such as Slack or Teams.
  
• Hybrid or remote workers – Vdeo updates or instant messaging tools over email for better engagement.
  
• On-site teams – Physical reminders such as posters or in-person announcements.
  
• Global teams – Multilingual notifications and emails that are accessible across different regions and cultures.

To communicate effectively, you must understand your audience – just as any marketer does. The great thing about marketing L&D is that your audience is internal, which means you can use simple methods to identify what your employees want.

Whether you conduct surveys, questionnaires or even have an informal chat with employees, you can uncover people’s pain points and interests so you can craft a compelling message that reaches them in the right way.

With a learning management system (LMS) such as Totara or Moodle, you can raise awareness of learning opportunities in the way that works best for your people:

• Push notifications – Both platforms support mobile notifications (when using the native apps) to inform learners of new courses, upcoming deadlines or learning events. This keeps learning top-of-mind, especially for those employees who spin many plates.
  
• Announcements – You can use the announcements feature on both platforms for specific course notifications.
  
• Marketing banners – Highlight new or high-priority courses using custom banners, which can link directly to enrolment pages. Synergy Learning’s Spark LMS theme is a time-saving and highly configurable Totara and Moodle theme that allows you to create promotional slides, cards and grids to form a website-like LMS experience.

Step 2: Build interest in workplace learning

Once you have people’s attention, it’s time to get them interested by showing them what’s in it for them. This involves demonstrating the relevance of learning to each person’s role, career path, and ambitions. When we consider that 80% of employees say learning adds purpose to their work (LinkedIn Workplace Report 2024), letting people know about relevant learning opportunities impacts retention.

Tailor your messaging to address specific challenges or ambitions, based on what you’ve discovered about your employees in the previous stage:

• Leverage role-based learning paths – Use your LMS to create personalised learning paths based on job roles, skills or departments. For example, for project managers, you could communicate that mastering agile workflows can help them manage cross-functional teams more effectively.
  
• Use targeted recommendations – CRM integrations (such as integrating your LMS with Hubspot) can be used to send personalised emails suggesting courses or programmes relevant to your employees’ past learning history or stated interests.
  
• Highlight the benefits – In your messaging, highlight the benefits of taking a particular course or learning programme. For example: “Spending too much time sifting through data? Our marketing analytics workshop is designed to help marketers like you uncover the metrics that matter.”
  
• Remember localisation and multilingual support – If you have a global workforce, ensure communications and courses are available in employees’ preferred languages. Totara and Moodle’s multilingual capabilities make this easy.

Outline how the learning will make employees’ jobs easier by equipping them with skills relevant to their specific roles. If learners see how learning will benefit them personally, they’ll have a solid reason to get on board.

Step 3: Spark a desire for learning

The desire stage is about building emotional connections and helping people visualise success. A great way to do this is to use senior leaders as advocates for your learning programmes. According to Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion (1984), authority figures have a strong influence on people’s actions. 

Employees naturally look to their leaders for guidance, inspiration and behavioural cues. When leaders actively participate in and advocate for L&D initiatives, they send a clear message: “Learning is important, valued and integral to our success.” What’s more, employees are far more likely to trust and value a learning programme when it’s endorsed by credible leaders within the organisation: they are proof of the success that comes with learning.

It’s important that leaders can share both their wins and their struggles to make the learning process more relatable and attainable. After all, we are all human – no matter how senior our job titles may be. If employees see someone in a senior position investing time in learning, this challenges the misconception that learning is only for those at the start of their career journeys. Learning is a lifelong endeavour.

Here are some tips for using social proof to drive a desire for learning:

• Recommendations and testimonials – Share stories of colleagues who have taken a course and seen tangible results such as a promotion or a new project. Use quotes or short snippets embedded in emails or LMS announcements. For instance:“Meera achieved her promotion to Head of Compliance through this course and now leads the team. What could it do for you?”).
  
• User reviews and ratings – Encourage learners to rate and review courses and content in the LMS for other users to see at a glance which ones their peers have gained value from.
  
• Use statistics – Your LMS will have a wealth of reporting and analytics. Start simple and mention how many employees have signed up or completed a course to tap into behavioural psychology: for example: “Join the 500 employees already creating amazing presentations with this course!”

Step 4: Inspire positive action

The final step in the AIDA model is to transform interest and desire into real action. This is where all the awareness, interest and desire you’ve created come together and people start actively enrolling in and engaging with your learning opportunities.

The key here is to make the process seamless and intuitive, and to ensure there are no barriers between employees and the learning opportunities you are offering.

Start by offering clear calls-to-action (CTAs) on every communication touchpoint. Whether it’s an email, an in-app notification or a poster in the break room with a QR code, the messaging should be direct and action-oriented (e.g. “Sign up today and start learning!”). There should be minimal steps between the decision to enrol and actually accessing the learning content. Adding single sign-on (SSO) to your LMS can eliminate any frustrations with login, making it easier for employees to get on board.

Here are some other tactics you can use to increase your chances of success at this stage:

• Create a sense of urgency – Urgency is a proven motivator in decision-making, which is why we see it so often in marketing campaigns. How often have you seen messages asking you to “hurry” or that an offer “won’t last”? This sense of urgency taps into the audience’s fear of missing out, prompting them to react quickly. Use phrases such as “Sign up by Friday to join the next cohort.” or “Limited spots available.” to encourage quick responses.
  
• Use push notifications – Push notifications delivered through platforms such as Moodle or Totara mobile apps are particularly useful for driving immediate action. Plus, it makes it easy for people to take action immediately from their phones.
  
• Remove barriers to action – People are busy and are dealing with thousands of competing messages every day, so even small obstacles can put employees off taking action. If employees feel uncertain about the value of a course, you could offer preview sessions such as a free first module or live Q&A with instructors. For those worried about time restraints, highlight flexible, self-paced options or modular course designs that allow them to progress at their own pace. Again, mobile apps can make things more flexible.

Finally, make sure employees know exactly what to do once they decide to act. This is where being clear in your communication is essential. Whether it’s a single-click enrolment link in an email or a detailed step-by-step guide shared in a Slack channel, your instructions should leave no room for confusion. Follow up immediately after sign-ups with confirmation messages that include additional resources. A course outline or an onboarding video welcoming the learner are both useful options. Personalised dashboards in your LMS will also help to clearly communicate the next action to your learner: “You’ve enrolled in Leadership 101. Start Lesson 1 now.”

Remember, the more intuitive and compelling you can make this final step, the more likely your employees will be to take action, ready to embark on their next learning journey.

Want to find out more about how you can promote your learning opportunities using your LMS? Get in touch and one of our experts will happily chat through what you can do with Totara and Moodle.

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