Think back to email marketing in the ’90s. Advertisers would send out millions of emails with the hope that a small fraction of recipients would open the email. Fingers crossed, a small percentage of those would actually take action after opening the message. This was dubbed ‘spray and pray’.

Over the last two decades…marketing has evolved into a personal interaction with their audience. I’ve used this example in a number of my presentations over the last couple of years…but I think it a perfect example of how marketers are personally tailoring their messages to the individual.

A couple of summers ago…I was in the market to replace my car. Like a lot of people, I took my time and did a fair amount of research online to narrow down to the exact car I wanted. I knew the make, model and even color. Apparently so did the dealerships. I started to notice…ads for my next vehicle started appearing all over…seamingly everywhere I went online. Now, keep in mind, this wasn’t for the dealer, or the brand, or even the make. It was for the exact car I had decided on. Dealerships were targeting me with the exact car.

As much as we may not like it…there is a lot we can learn from this experience. Times have changed…and more importantly, so have expectations. Here are four tips to ‘think like a marketer’ to improve your learning content:

1. Ensure you really know your audience. While I’m sure you know who they are, you have to really understand them. What are their expectations and preferences?
2. Make your content as specific and bite-sized as possible. Your content needs to be extremely relevant in order to create value with your audience. You don’t need to spoon-feed them…but you do need to make it easily available.
3. Leverage modern tools to serve up the right content at the right time. True federated search tools and recommendation engines are a powerful enhancement to your toolset. They are a critically important tool for the modern L&D organization. Some LMS platforms are adding these capabilities in…but most don’t support the fourth tip.
4. Break down the walled garden. There is a lot of material people are using outside your organization. Find out what it is…and make it available to your audience. The fact of the matter is….they are already using it, you just don’t know it.
   

Some simple changes can get you thinking more like a marketer. You’ll be on your way to making real connections with your learning audience. Next up…how do you track all of that learning if it’s not in a learning management system?