Elearning August-September

AUG-SEP 2016

Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.

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Elearning! August / September 2016 15 >> Make email automation your friend. is might not be suitable for all training programs, but it certainly is for the ones that have to reach an outside audience like partners or customers. Trainers can send emails via an email marketing automation platform for speed, but there's another bonus — analytics. Track those efforts to better understand which approach is working and which, if any, you need to reevaluate. >> Get social. Social is a powerful tool, and its benefits aren't isolated to one department. Like market- ers, trainers should consider leveraging (see, there it is again) social media organic and even social advertisements. Facebook has excellent options because it is user-friendly, affordable, and allows for hyper-targeting. >> Empower and inform, don't dictate and preach. Both marketers and trainers seek to tell their respective audience something — that's a given. e difference oen lies in the approach. Success- ful marketers tend to view campaigns from a very human, audience-driven perspective. As a result, winning campaigns aren't dry regurgitations of features and benefits — they're engaging, memorable snippets of a bigger picture of a brand. Trainings can be, too. >> Go small or go home. Yeah, you read that right. Marketers don't tell their consumer base every- thing about a product in one piece of content. Rather, they focus on digestible chunks presented in a memorable way. Rinse, repeat. Trainers can take a hint here. In order to get the big picture, some- times baby steps are required. Breaking trainings down into segments can be an effective way to reach a larger percentage of the audience more effectively. >> Make it pretty. As marketers know, design and delivery are uber-important, and trainers can get in on the action, too. So, maybe all trainers don't have access to the hottest design soware—but I bet many of them have a smartphone or a device that can record video. Start there. Incorporating video into trainings is an easy and fun way to break up the monotony of text blocks and slide transitions. THE CASE FOR COLLABORATION When I worked at Cisco once upon a time, I worked with Faith Legendre, a wonderful learning and development expert at Cisco. She was always trying to get the marketing experts and training expects together when it came time to design, implement, and promote new training initiatives. She is the one that taught me that marketers and trainers can learn so much from each other. Legendre said, "Just like an effective well designed commercial that a brilliant marketer would do (hint, hint partner with marketers) break up your training into digestible nibblets, take the complex and break it down, make it super simple, sequential and fun. en embed it right where the learner needs it on that page of the system, application, or even a Word doc." I agreed with her then and I agree with her now — the case for collaboration here is a strong one. Trainers and marketers have a lot to learn from each other. Trainers, for instance, take so much time and effort to create content that can easily be consumed. ey're also great at making sure that knowl- edge is transferred. Marketers are great at identifying a message that will reach an audience in a memo- rable way — seems like a match made in heaven, if you ask me. If your trainers regularly had the help of marketers, how do you think knowledge retention and ses- sion attendance would improve in your company? Isn't it at least worth a try? Can you relate to any of the suggestions above and find one or two that would be a cinch to implement? I'd love to hear your thoughts. – Eric Vidal, Editor & Chief Content Officer, e Marketing Scope. @EricVMarketing

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