6

Think Like a Marketer to Drive Learning and Development

At the beginning of this book, we talked about training’s bad rap. We also talked about how people may be carrying negative baggage from their school days and be resistant to workplace learning. At the very least, you’re targeting busy people with deadlines and goals that usually feel more urgent than upskilling. And employees, like all busy, distracted consumers, need a reason to pay attention to what you’re peddling.

That’s why you have to think like a marketer: to cut through the noise, resistance, and misinformation and get people motivated to embrace continuous learning. To drum up interest in L&D offerings and keep people engaged, modern L&D has to be consumer-grade.

It All Starts with Creativity

When I accepted my job at Udemy as learning leader for a learning company, I was presented with two big asks: that I focus on talent development for employees around the world and that I be innovative and creative in doing it.

I’m not sure most of us in HR or L&D think of ourselves as creative people first, but we can and we should. Although I understand how scary it can be to break out of legacy programs you’ve been doing the same way for a long time, it’s also what makes our jobs exciting, rewarding, and fun.

Creativity is a skill, not an art. That means you can learn it and keep getting better at it if you practice. It’s all about making connections between things and ideas and your business objectives. You just have to keep asking and challenging yourself, “How do I come up with the new?”

In fact, people often come up to me after speaking appearances and ask me how I answer that question for myself: How do I keep coming up with awesome new ideas? It’s not luck or divine inspiration; it’s a learned behavior. I have a simple framework I follow to keep my creative juices flowing, and I’ll use our reboot of Udemy’s onboarding process to illustrate.

Case Study: Taking Onboarding from Boring to Boffo

Onboarding is something we all have to do, but most of us don’t do it well. That’s what workers say, at least. According to ADP’s report The Human Touch Drives Onboarding Success, 79 percent of all employees believe the onboarding process has room for improvement.¹ When you’re at a company that’s hiring and growing like crazy, with locations around the world, maybe it’s no surprise that we’re not great at making each and every person feel welcomed, prepared, and totally ready to dive into their new jobs.

I admit we faced these struggles at Udemy, too. But where do you start in reinventing something as fundamental as onboarding, something you know like the back of your hand and can’t imagine doing another way? Here’s how we brought new life to onboarding, by thinking differently, with the help of a five-step framework (Figure 6.1).

FIGURE 6.1 Framework for creativity

Step 1: Consume

As a human being living in the digital age, chances are you consume a ton of content—websites, chats, social media, entertainment, news, books, movies, magazines, and more. And what you consume fills your head with ideas and changes the way you think about things. You never know when some article or show will spark an idea you can apply to your L&D programs, so try to bring an active eye to your media consumption and be on the lookout for things that might connect with your learners.

For my team, it was the wildly popular Pokémon Go game that triggered an idea for shaking up Udemy’s onboarding. The Pokémon franchise was conceived in 1989, but in 2016, a new iteration of the game launched for play on mobile devices, and it became one of the most-used apps of the year.² Indeed, it was a global phenomenon and the first time augmented reality (AR) technology really entered the mainstream.

I had already been thinking about the potential of using AR and virtual reality (VR) in the learning space to enhance content and deliver immersive experiences. When I gave Pokémon Go a try, it sparked a connection for me that I would pursue further.

Step 2: Flip the Script

Creating a mobile game for onboarding sounded cool, but we didn’t just want to put the same old thing in a fancy high-tech wrapper. We had to step back first and force ourselves to see things differently by flipping the script. Take a hard, honest look at the status quo and identify what’s not working as well as it could be. How are things now, and what could we do to make them better?

In our onboarding example, a few things were broken. For starters, it was eight hours long and boring. There wasn’t much interaction, and people weren’t retaining knowledge because it was coming at them like water from a firehose. Then, we thought about what qualities we wanted our 109onboarding process to include: it should use time efficiently, allow for self-driven exploration, incorporate social learning, and promote information retention.

We then translated those qualities into key objectives: to engage employees in our mission, share knowledge about Udemy, and create opportunities for people to bond.

Step 3: Incubate

Too often, we feel pressure to focus on output and completion. We don’t let ourselves stop and give our ideas time to percolate. Now, I’ve already talked about the importance of having time and space for self-reflection if we’re going to learn and grow. Well, you need time and space to let your work ideas develop too. So, go ahead and give yourself permission to step back, take your time, go do something else, then return to your reverse brainstorm ideas with fresh eyes.

And if anyone questions why you’re using your time this way, you can tell them neuroscience backs it up. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of having a great idea come to you while you’re in the shower or cooking dinner or taking a walk. When we give our brains time to relax and “idle,” different areas light up and communicate, which is how we form unexpected connections among the countless ideas in our heads. That’s the essence of creativity.

That’s how I moved from thinking about AR and VR to playing Pokémon Go to being inspired to create a mobile game for the onboarding experience.

I’ve seen Britt Andreatta speak at a few L&D events, and she does a great job of explaining how the brain generates creative ideas.³ She emphasizes three important conditions:

■ Rest your brain. Take breaks to give your neocortex some downtime.

■ Prepare your brain. Expose yourself to lots of information, especially from unfamiliar sources (because discomfort can be good).

■ Use sensory gating. Go out in nature, take a shower, or do something else to get a literal and figurative change of scenery.

Step 4: Connect the Dots

I am definitely not espousing technology for technology’s sake, as I hope I made clear in Chapter 2. Cool and creative ideas still need to deliver on your learning objectives. Or, as I like to say, you have to prioritize pedagogy over novelty. My Udemy team didn’t start out trying to figure out how we could incorporate AR into our L&D programs; we sought to improve onboarding and landed on a solution that leverages AR for maximum results.

That solution was Udemy GO, an AR scavenger hunt where players had to catch the welcome balloons we tie to every new hire’s desk. Along the way, they were challenged with activities and missions that laddered up to our learning outcome objectives. Not only did this fun experience expose people to information about Udemy’s business, but the self-guided nature of the game also empowered players to follow their interests at their own pace, thereby improving retention.

The game also succeeds in making connections (and workplace buddies) among coworkers, as they collaborate on challenges and “visit” our global offices by viewing 360-degree videos and photos.

Step 5: Follow

As psyched as we were about the Udemy GO idea, we faced a pretty big obstacle. I didn’t know how to build an AR app from scratch and neither did the L&D program associate on my team who was working on this project with me. How would we do this?

As a former teacher, I like to follow other teachers online. The very nature of the job requires them to be resourceful and creative, even though they’re always superbusy. They’re also constrained by time and budget, something else in common with the team envisioning Udemy GO.

By reading teacher blogs, we found a lot of approaches that aligned with what we were trying to accomplish. The blogs introduced us to tools that would let us be creative and fulfill our vision without having to invent something from scratch. We ended up using a free “AR experience builder” that made it pretty easy for us to make a game app that incorporates polls and surveys, quizzes, 360-degree video and photo tours, Snapchat-style selfie filters, leaderboards, and more.

Don’t give up on your ideas without digging around to see how others have tackled the same challenges. Both the online and offline worlds are full of people sharing project stories and helpful advice.

The last step in the creativity framework also refers to how we follow up with participants to get their feedback and measure our success. Asking these questions helps us improve our programs and can spark additional ideas we can apply to other projects.

Udemy GO keeps new hires engaged with onboarding content far better than sitting them in a conference room for hours to passively watch presentations. And we have this creativity framework to thank for surfacing the great idea in the first place.

Marketing Your Creative Ideas

Just as you need to have a road map for creating and rolling out your L&D programs, you need to think about how you’ll promote those programs—and not just at launch either.

Before you offer any L&D opportunities, you need to set your goals and define your key performance metrics. What will success look like? Who is the target audience for the training and, if it’s a broad group, how can you communicate its relevance and value to everyone? You may even want to create “learner personas” to guide your messaging, based on an employee’s years of experience, job level, functional area, career aspirations, and so on.

Borrowing Principles from Advertising

Now that you’ve got creative ideas and a framework for generating more and more, you need to operationalize those ideas.

When you’re thinking like a marketer to promote your company’s L&D offerings, you’re advertising to your audience of learners. You can apply lots of tips and tricks of the advertising trade to move employees from thought to action.

Segmentation

Audience segmentation is a way of ensuring relevant messages reach the right people. Depending on your objectives, you might want to break your audience up by job level, department, time with the organization, or job function. Then, think about the motivators, needs, and friction points of each segment you’re targeting and how to tweak your messaging to best communicate the value of your offering to them.

We’ve found ways to personalize the Feedback Is Fuel workshop (see Chapter 5) using audience segmentation. We survey attendees prior to workshops so we can tailor our content to their biggest needs and interests. The survey includes questions around how often people receive feedback from their managers, how they prefer to receive constructive feedback, and so on. Then, we share that information at the start of the workshop. We’ll let people know that, for example, only X percent of them said they want to get affirmative feedback in a public setting or Y percent said they prefer to deliver 114feedback via Slack. When we get into the meat of our presentation, we can refer back to people’s current behaviors and be specific in pointing out possible areas for improvement.

Go Viral

You know what it means if your video or meme goes viral. Everyone shares it, more people see it, then they share it, ad infinitum. Imagine if you could get people buzzing about your L&D programs like that.

When we first began developing the Feedback Is Fuel workshop, we met with the vice president of marketing for Udemy for Business. Our vision was to “rebrand” feedback, from punitive to empowering. The VP helped us position our content and messaging for our audience and talked us through various creative assets to support our launch campaign. For instance, for our launch campaign, we took inspiration from the Mean Tweets segments on the late-night TV show Jimmy Kimmel Live, where celebrities read aloud the nasty things random people have said about them on Twitter. The Udemy version is called Mean Feedback and features employees reading questionable pieces of feedback. It connects really well with our audience and it gets laughs, but it also makes people think about how the impact of feedback changes, depending on whether it’s “mean” or constructive. We’ve continued producing new Mean Feedback clips, featuring different employees, so it never gets stale.

Referrals

Building out your learning “fan base” relies on storytelling and word of mouth. Nothing gets Udemates more jazzed about their jobs and the impact of learning than when we share stories about real students and instructors who have succeeded on the Udemy platform. These have ranged from a Syrian refugee living in Germany who was able to secure his dream job after taking Udemy courses, to a Silicon Valley–based engineer who quit his day job after discovering he got more satisfaction and joy from teaching his skills online to other aspiring developers.

We share inspirational stories at our all-hands meetings and on our blog, and we distribute them in external marketing channels and recount them at company events. We also have a “udemy-fuzzies” Slack channel where people share positive comments from students and instructors alike. We even post the best fuzzies in our bathroom stalls.

Real-world stories are the most powerful way of showing how learning truly does improve lives. They inspire everyone at Udemy to keep striving toward our vision of a world in which everyone can find the right teacher, but they also remind us of our own obligation to be continuous learners. And we have ways of surfacing stories of internal learning success too. We’ve integrated Slack so it’s easy for Udemates to share when they’ve completed a course, say what they liked about it, and recommend it to others (Figure 6.2).

FIGURE 6.2 An example of how we leverage real employee reviews to market our workshops

Teasers

One of the mantras of the L&D team at Udemy is that we “eat our own chocolate.” This was inspired by an old expression in software development—“eat your own dog food”—that exhorted employees to become active users of their company’s products and services, the idea being that we need to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers if we’re going to deliver solutions that align with their pain points.

When we were ready to do a big launch of L&D programs at Udemy, we knew we would attract more flies with honey, so we revised the expression to be about something a little more appetizing than dog food. We left a chocolate bar on every employee’s desk with a customized, Udemy-branded wrapper reminding everyone that learning (by taking courses on the Udemy platform, specifically) equals eating our own chocolate.

We also post reminders around the office with fun messaging and visuals to get people talking about our newest courses and workshops. People respond enthusiastically when we get creative with our communications, like the posters we made for DEAL Hour that were styled after vintage travel advertisements and asked employees where their learning would take them. Then, we had a call to action reminding them to participate in DEAL Hour.

Communicate Scarcity and Urgency

This is Advertising 101. You don’t just want to get your audience interested in acquiring your product or service some day. You want them to do it now—before they click away to another browser tab or watch another video and completely forget about you. We, too, try to instill a FOMO (fear of missing out) mindset around learning at Udemy.

You can build anticipation and excitement the same way the geniuses behind hit movies do it: start your timeline a few weeks out with teasers and “coming soon” messaging that hints at something cool people will want to keep an eye out for. This can be done with signage around the 119office, reminders via chat and email, and speaking slots at all-hands meetings. You know your teasers are working when you hear “watercooler” conversation about your signage and campaign. Be sure to include clear directions on what steps you need people to take to participate, and clearly indicate the date, time, location, and where to go with questions.

Get a Celebrity to Star in Your Commercial

No, I don’t expect companies to have the budget to hire Jennifer Aniston to endorse their L&D workshop. But you do have superstars in your midst—employees known and respected across the organization who can model learning behavior for the rest. Some may come from your most senior leadership; others might be longtime employees regarded as influencers (Figure 6.3). Get your CEO involved; maybe you can use the opportunity to show his or her lighter side too.

FIGURE 6.3 Get employees involved to amplify your message.

Make Giveaways Special

No one is going to be motivated to attend a workshop by a piece of swag that’s handed out on every generic occasion. They have a whole drawer full of logo pens and stress balls already. And what does that have to do with learning anyway? Just as you can connect better with advertising that is attention grabbing, you can lure your customers in with the promise of something truly special (and relevant) for everyone who completes the program. For example, at the end of our Career Navigator workshop, we give out branded luggage tags. They fit with the theme of the training, they’re something people will actually use, and employees can only get their hands on one by participating.

Follow the Seasons

Advertisers plan around important, predictable events that occur every year, and their customers know it. Holidays, back to school, spring break, Mother’s Day. Amazon invented Prime Day for the very same reason: customers know it will be a good day for them to buy something at the right price. There is certainly a lot of FOMO around Prime Day.

Think about your company’s calendar. Do you have recurring events you can use to “prime” people for L&D? You may have performance reviews, an annual retreat, company milestones, or another anticipated event. Use these occasions as another tie-in to push your learning message to the fore.

Retaining Your “Customers”

Getting folks to keep coming back for more might be the most challenging stage of your work. The secret is to continue communicating something new and fresh all the time. Again—not easy.

Sometimes, you can build on existing offerings to give them renewed relevance, such as when we hosted a Manager Lab about giving difficult feedback during performance reviews. This “advanced” class expanded on and reinforced what people learned during the core Lab experience. We also wrote a blog post with five tips for writing effective peer reviews and challenged all employees to use the review setting to talk openly about how they like to receive feedback.

And, I’ll be perfectly honest, there’s nothing like a yummy bribe to get repeat customers for your learning content. So we give workshop attendees chocolate bars (the good stuff) in a Udemy-branded wrapper. It doesn’t matter how senior an employee is, they all get excited by treats and stickers!

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When you think of yourself as a marketer, you can let go and get really creative, but you’ll also be taking a customer-centric approach that resonates with your learners’ needs. The best ways to retain learners are to understand their needs and wants; get creative about how you engage them in learning experiences; and market to them before, during, and after training to keep them interested and aware of what you have on offer.