The concept of personas is well known to marketers. To create a persona, marketers develop multiple fictional character profiles that describe their real and potential customer base. Based on these personas, they then develop content that resonates with them. L&D professionals can also leverage this user-centered approach to create better and more engaging learning.

What Are Personas?

You can think of personas as fictional, generalized characters, each with individual goals and needs. Marketers observe behavior patterns among their real and potential customers and couple those observations with educated guesses, which help them understand their customers better. A persona can include the following information:

• Job role and responsibilities
• Biggest challenges
• Industry
• “Watering holes” (Where do these learners go to get their information, such as blogs, websites, publications, etc.?)
• Demographic
• Personal background

Marketers research personas by capturing specific information through forms on websites, interviewing current customers, looking for trends in databases and asking for feedback from the sales team. Developing three to five personas typically results in the best outcomes. Some personas are very detailed, while others are a brief sketch of each user. Either way, marketers usually include a fictional name and a picture in the persona. When reading a persona profile, the “person” comes to life, helping marketers create products and content that align with his or her needs, goals and interests.

Developing a Learner Persona

Why should L&D professionals care about personas? They can help you can create the right content, for the right audience, at the right time.
Here are some questions you can ask, or extract from learners’ personal information you have on file, when developing your learner personas:

• What is your job role?
• Are you a manager?
• How many years have you been with this organization?
• Have you changed roles within the organization?
• How would you rate your tech-savviness?
• Do you prefer learning online or through face-to-face training?
• Are you an early bird or a late riser?
• Are you involved in volunteer work organized by our company?
• What do you do in your free time?

Ask these questions, but also use data from your learning platform. Many platforms enable you to see when and how content has been accessed. If your system doesn’t capture these data, try to collect them using Google Analytics on any activities that are happening outside the LMS, and combine them with data you can gather using your LMS. The combination of questions, learning platform data and demographic data will result in a variety of profiles, and you can then categorize your learners into different groups.

Creating Engaging Content That Resonates With Your Learner Personas

Let’s look at two examples of learner personas:

• Burt, 43 years old, he has been with your company for six years. He’s a manager in the support department, overseeing five staff. He is extremely tech-savvy and loves to learn about new technologies in his free time. Burt learns best after work hours and prefers to access learning through his mobile device on his commute home. He volunteers his time twice each year to help with charity events organized by your organization.
• Apama, 23 years old, is fresh out of university. English is her second language, and she works as an administrative assistant. She enjoys getting up early and going for a run before coming to work. Apama loves her iPhone and is good at using her Mac, but she isn’t as familiar with PCs, which your company uses. She isn’t really interested in new technologies and learns best in face-to-face training where she can asks questions on the spot.

Burt and Apama are, of course, not real people, but their personas can be extended to other people in your organization who have similar interests and job roles. To create content for “Burt,” you might develop a training solution that is quickly accessed through a mobile device and shorter than eight minutes in length, delivered over a couple of days. You can push this content to those learners shortly after 5 p.m., which is when they are on their way home. “Apama,” on the other hand, would need the same content in a face-to-face training session, where she can ask questions, ideally held in the morning.

Developing multiple training solutions for the same content is more labor-intensive and might not always be possible. However, considering the positive outcomes you will be able to achieve (more engaged learners, better on the job performance, etc.), it might be worth the investment, especially for programs you run on a regular basis, such as onboarding or annual compliance training.

Improve Learning Experiences with a Marketing Funnel

Marketers use a funnel to help them visualize the buyer’s journey or the path a prospect takes from discovering their company all the way to purchasing a product or service, and beyond. This allows them to write content that aligns with every step of this journey and predict the buyer’s needs along the way. L&D professionals can use this idea of a funnel, take a look at the employee’s lifecycle and develop a content strategy that aligns with their needs.

The Marketing Funnel

The marketing funnel is a tool consisting of multiple stages, starting from the introduction of a product or service, all the way through to conversion and beyond. A prospect moves from one stage to the next as interest in a product increases, or exits the funnel if they are no longer considering a product. The top of the funnel is always wider as more prospects are interested in your product than prospects that love your product and want to purchase it. The marketing funnel consists of five stages:

• Awareness: prospects learn who you are
• Consideration: prospects are willing to consider your company
• Conversion: convince prospects to purchase
• Loyalty: retain customers
• Advocacy: turn customers into fans

Marketers understand that prospects have different content needs based on the stage they are in. For example, in the awareness stage, marketers educate prospective customers about their products in order to show the value of it. Prospects don’t know about the value of a product at this stage yet and won’t be engaged by sales heavy content. In this stage, marketers often use blog posts or eBooks that generally educate on their product to position themselves as a thought leader. In the consideration phase, marketers build deeper relationships by offering targeted content that is product specific. Often, you can see case studies in this stage that are focused on a particular pain point. Marketers move prospects along the funnel by offering very specific and personalized content that aligns with the stage they are in.

Leverage a Marketing Funnel in L&D

L&D professionals often conduct a quick needs analysis before starting to create content but by no means are stages of the learner lifecycle considered, neither do L&D professionals pay attention to what kind of content really spikes learners’ interest. If thinking about an L&D funnel, most likely learners wouldn’t exit a learning initiative before the training is over and the L&D funnel would have the same width regardless of the stage. Learners would however lose interest throughout training which certainly should be considered from an engagement perspective and be built into your funnel.

One way to leverage the marketing funnel approach is to build out different pieces of content for one learning initiative, starting with making the learner aware of the training all the way to implementing the newly learnt content at work (conversion). For example, you are tasked to redo the health and safety training. Instead of assigning three eLearning modules on the LMS to everyone, you could create a short video that spikes interest in the topic. One way you can achieve this is by using some dark humour that hits the spot. Check out this example of safety stats on construction sites. This is your awareness stage and the first step in the funnel for the learner.

Next, you might want to create some more personalized training in the consideration phase that aligns with the learner’s job role and how health and safety affects her directly. There is no need to create one piece of content for every job role, rather focus on departments instead. The content could be in form of a website or delivered through email that uses dynamic content, meaning you display different content based on the learner’s job role. You only have to create the framework of the landing page or email once and add the different content pieces into the dynamic fields. Talk to your marketing department, they will be able to help with this.

In the conversion phase, you should make your learners true believers in health and safety. One way to achieve this could be a live webinar followed up by an open office online chat where everyone can share their thoughts, ask questions and maybe even make suggestions on how to improve health and safety in your organization, and add suggestions for further training initiatives. This will then also help you turn some of your learners into health and safety advocates.

Along each stage, you can collect data points: video views, video drop-off rate, click-through rates in email or heatmaps for landing pages, live webinar attendance, engagement throughout the webinar (chat participation, questions asked, suggestions made, etc.). These data points will show your stakeholders that health and safety training has been participated in, and it will give you valuable insights into learner engagement and content usability.

Develop a Content Strategy to Engage Your Learners

No matter the topic of your training initiative, the main focus for using the idea of a marketing funnel in L&D is a solid content strategy that aligns with the learners’ needs. Go beyond a basic needs analysis and establish what content needs to be delivered when and where. Often, we forget about how learners want to access content and we focus too much on creating a shiny object. Leverage data throughout to better understand what really excites and engages your learners and use that data to improve your learning offerings in real time. Thinking about a learner funnel will allow you to improve not only your learning experiences but also collect data along the way, and create an engaged workforce that will understand the importance of the content you deliver to them.

Have you used a funnel for your learning experiences? Share your thoughts with me below.

Improve Learning Experiences with a Marketing Funnel

Marketers use a funnel to help them visualize the buyer’s journey or the path a prospect takes from discovering their company all the way to purchasing a product or service, and beyond. This allows them to write content that aligns with every step of this journey and predict the buyer’s needs along the way. L&D professionals can use this idea of a funnel, take a look at the employee’s lifecycle and develop a content strategy that aligns with their needs.

The Marketing Funnel

The marketing funnel is a tool consisting of multiple stages, starting from the introduction of a product or service, all the way through to conversion and beyond. A prospect moves from one stage to the next as interest in a product increases, or exits the funnel if they are no longer considering a product. The top of the funnel is always wider as more prospects are interested in your product than prospects that love your product and want to purchase it. The marketing funnel consists of five stages:

• Awareness: prospects learn who you are
• Consideration: prospects are willing to consider your company
• Conversion: convince prospects to purchase
• Loyalty: retain customers
• Advocacy: turn customers into fans

Marketers understand that prospects have different content needs based on the stage they are in. For example, in the awareness stage, marketers educate prospective customers about their products in order to show the value of it. Prospects don’t know about the value of a product at this stage yet and won’t be engaged by sales heavy content. In this stage, marketers often use blog posts or eBooks that generally educate on their product to position themselves as a thought leader. In the consideration phase, marketers build deeper relationships by offering targeted content that is product specific. Often, you can see case studies in this stage that are focused on a particular pain point. Marketers move prospects along the funnel by offering very specific and personalized content that aligns with the stage they are in.

Leverage a Marketing Funnel in L&D

L&D professionals often conduct a quick needs analysis before starting to create content but by no means are stages of the learner lifecycle considered, neither do L&D professionals pay attention to what kind of content really spikes learners’ interest. If thinking about an L&D funnel, most likely learners wouldn’t exit a learning initiative before the training is over and the L&D funnel would have the same width regardless of the stage. Learners would however lose interest throughout training which certainly should be considered from an engagement perspective and be built into your funnel.

One way to leverage the marketing funnel approach is to build out different pieces of content for one learning initiative, starting with making the learner aware of the training all the way to implementing the newly learnt content at work (conversion). For example, you are tasked to redo the health and safety training. Instead of assigning three eLearning modules on the LMS to everyone, you could create a short video that spikes interest in the topic. One way you can achieve this is by using some dark humour that hits the spot. Check out this example of safety stats on construction sites. This is your awareness stage and the first step in the funnel for the learner.

Next, you might want to create some more personalized training in the consideration phase that aligns with the learner’s job role and how health and safety affects her directly. There is no need to create one piece of content for every job role, rather focus on departments instead. The content could be in form of a website or delivered through email that uses dynamic content, meaning you display different content based on the learner’s job role. You only have to create the framework of the landing page or email once and add the different content pieces into the dynamic fields. Talk to your marketing department, they will be able to help with this.

In the conversion phase, you should make your learners true believers in health and safety. One way to achieve this could be a live webinar followed up by an open office online chat where everyone can share their thoughts, ask questions and maybe even make suggestions on how to improve health and safety in your organization, and add suggestions for further training initiatives. This will then also help you turn some of your learners into health and safety advocates.

Along each stage, you can collect data points: video views, video drop-off rate, click-through rates in email or heatmaps for landing pages, live webinar attendance, engagement throughout the webinar (chat participation, questions asked, suggestions made, etc.). These data points will show your stakeholders that health and safety training has been participated in, and it will give you valuable insights into learner engagement and content usability.

Develop a Content Strategy to Engage Your Learners

No matter the topic of your training initiative, the main focus for using the idea of a marketing funnel in L&D is a solid content strategy that aligns with the learners’ needs. Go beyond a basic needs analysis and establish what content needs to be delivered when and where. Often, we forget about how learners want to access content and we focus too much on creating a shiny object. Leverage data throughout to better understand what really excites and engages your learners and use that data to improve your learning offerings in real time. Thinking about a learner funnel will allow you to improve not only your learning experiences but also collect data along the way, and create an engaged workforce that will understand the importance of the content you deliver to them.

Have you used a funnel for your learning experiences? Share your thoughts with me below.