Bianca Baumann
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.
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