Marketing, marketing, MARKETING! That’s what we as modern L&D Pros hear daily.
It’s been an industry topic for nearly a decade.
I love marketing. I talk about it a lot. Marketing frameworks have helped me accelerate my L&D career. The thing is marketing is not the cure to all our problems in the vast world of learning.
You don’t need to be a marketer.
Yet, learning a few frameworks from our friends here can help you in the world of L&D. We live in an attention economy. If a piece of content doesn’t pass the instant gratification test, we throw it into a black hole.
So, building awareness of all those learning products into which we pour our soul is a benefit, really.
You don’t want to spend time building an amazing learning experience just for it to get no engagement, right? If you build it, no one will come.
Unless you know how to build awareness.
Let’s focus on how you can build awareness to drive the value of your products.
Marketing Is HUGE
The problem with a lot of the “L&D needs to do marketing” advice I see online can be broken down into 2 areas:
Saying “L&D needs to do marketing” is a captain obvious statement. We all know this. How about providing some direction?
It’s not specific enough. The world of marketing is huge. So, for the modern L&D pro, what are the most useful areas for you?
Some areas of marketing include:
Outbound marketing
Inbound marketing
Email marketing
Brand marketing
Search Engine Optimisation
Stealth marketing (Ok, I might have made that one up)
You get the picture, right?
Not everything under the umbrella of marketing is right for you.
I want to be specific and break down one type of marketing that I believe works for our industry.
Content Marketing.
Content Marketing Explained
Our friends at Hubspot (an all-knowing and cool marketing company) summarise content marketing as:
“Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content via channels such as social media, blogs, websites, podcasts, apps, press releases, print publications, and more.
The goal is to reach your target audience and increase brand awareness, sales, engagement, and loyalty.”
Now, some of you might be thinking “But. I’m a learning designer. I don’t need to know how to raise awareness of my work”. What are you…crazy? You do!
You might not realise it, but we’re marketing all the time.
We market our skills to potential employers.
We market our careers when building a case for promotion.
We market our compatibility when convincing our crush to go on a date.
Each of these is a piece of marketing.
L&D is no longer about design alone. You need to know how to position a product.
No matter if that product is you or what you’ve created.
Now, content marketing is best placed for L&D because it focuses on maximising awareness of your current assets to deliver value to users.
The important word here is value.
You can use all the marketing tactics you want. But if your experience or product sucks. It will still suck, no matter how many keywords or fancy visuals you used to promote it.
In summary, content marketing does what it says on the tin.
Market your content. Simple.
Content Marketing: How to use it in L&D
Ok, let’s get into the good stuff!
At its core, content marketing focuses on providing people with information that educates, inspires, informs and empowers.
Not much to ask for, right?
We can use this in both digital and physical experiences. Like content from your local learning platform or hyping up your next live workshop.
Content marketing can be both educational and entertaining. The best content marketing is a mix of both.
Types Of Content Marketing
We have a lot at our disposal with CM.
This commonly includes:
Blog posts
Articles
Toolkits
Infographics (are these still a thing?)
Video
Audio
Plenty for you to sink your teeth into.
Don’t be limited by picking one or two. Try them all out and find what works for your context.
Content Marketing Benefits
So many, my friends.
Here are some of my favourites:
Build L&D brand awareness
Surface value-add content that would otherwise be lost
Build trust within your company
Convert more people to accessing useful stuff
Maximise ROI on your learning content and experiences
That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
I’m sure you’ll discover more in your own journey.
Getting started with content marketing
Right, you’ve had your crash course in content marketing.
Now it’s time to put what you’ve learnt into practice. Lucky for me (and you), I’ve compiled a bunch of resources on bringing CM into the L&D world already.
The education and workplace learning space is built on the foundations of content libraries. It’s been this way for decades.
You’ve probably heard the phrase “Content is king” muttered by some LinkedIn guru or marketer somewhere. While that might have been true at one point in time, the times have changed.
Anyone can create content, and as such, everyone can be a creator.
Whether they’re good or not is up for debate.
So that leaves content in a weird place. Is it really king anymore?
Perhaps, yet I believe it has little relevance in today’s AI overwhelmed world, where more of the internet is becoming AI generated content summarised by AI for you, without a key component.
That, my friend is context.
I like to pretend I’m good at playing chess, and any good chess player knows the king on its own has little power. Yet, when we know how to use the queen for thoughtful and calculated moves, you can command the game.
Context gives content purpose, direction and a meaningful impact.
The amount of information available to us today is staggering.
In 2025, the world will have produced enough content to fill five Libraries of Congress or nearly 16 zettabytes of data.
While this abundance of content presents us with unprecedented opportunities, it also poses a challenge: how can we make sense of it all?
Without the right context, content can become overwhelming, confusing, and even dangerous.
Content paralysis is a legit issue.
The compass of context
How do you navigate a map?
You find a compass!
That’s what context can be for you. A compass that reveals how we can make sense of it all.
One thing LLMs aren’t quite so good at right now are pairing content with experience and context. Granted, human users could do more to help here but that’s a different challenge.
When you have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and who you’re trying to reach, suddenly all that content becomes a whole lot more useful.
I think about this a lot (probably too much) for the L&D world.
I speak with lots of practitioners who are on a hamster wheel of either trying to survive the content avalanche of their libraries or doing the ill-advised act of creating more content to combat the poor quality of current content.
Before we carry on, let me frame the problem with more relatable data.
The team at Askwonder delved into the scale of content consumption in their article “How much Information do we Learn Everyday?”. They unpacked the content consumption of an average American.
The team shared “According to a report by the University of California–San Diego, the average American consumes about 34 gigabytes of data & information every day. That estimated to be the equivalent of 100,000 words heard or read every day– or about how many words in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (95,356 words).”
This is a phenomenal stat considering I could barely read The Hobbit over the last decade let alone in one day!
Comparing this to activities today, the team found you can use the 34GB of data to stream every episode of popular Netflix hit Stranger Things, 15,000 hours of playtime in video game Fortnite and 94hrs worth of doom-scrolling on TikTok.
Yet, when I see so much AI generated content, shared by accounts and websites run by AI agents receiving comments on those posts from other AI run tools, it gets me thinking.
I’m not against AI generated content.
It has a time and place, for sure. What I don’t agree with is the ever popular ‘copy and paste’ actions too many humans use AI for, rather than working with AI to create something meaningful.
As much as AI can fuel more content, it can also save us.
It can do this by providing both context and the capability to craft valued curation . If used in the right way, AI can summarise, define and be precise on the context of content you consume. Thus, saving you the precious non-renewable life force we call time.
We’ll talk about AI as a context partner throughout this journey.
The dangers of content without proper context
“Information without context is like a fish out of water. It may look good, but it’s not going to survive.”
Howard Rheingold, Author and Critic | Quote from Crap Detection 101″ on his website Rheingold.com.
If content is our map and context is our compass. I’m sure you can imagine the dangers of being in a jungle area with an analog map alone (AI isn’t available in jungles, as far as I know).
Here’s the ways content can go wrong without context.
Misinformation
Confirmation Bias
Overload
Inaccuracy
Unintended Consequences
Examples of when lack of context causes real harm
“Context is everything. It is what makes content relevant and separates signal from noise.”
Brian Solis, Digital Analyst and Author. What’s the Future of Business? Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences (2013).
Here’s a few examples to bring colour to this for you:
Misinformation In 2020, false claims about the connection between 5G technology and COVID-19 were circulating on social media. Many people took these claims out of context and believed them to be true, leading to an increase in attacks on 5G towers and a spread of misinformation.
Confirmation Bias During the 2016 US presidential election, fake news stories were widely shared on social media. Many of these stories were shared by people with a particular political affiliation, reinforcing their pre-existing beliefs and biases.
Overload
The average person spends over three hours on their phone each day. This constant consumption of content can lead to information overload and a lack of productivity.
Inaccuracy
In 2021, a clip of a speech by US Vice President Kamala Harris went viral on social media.
The clip appeared to show Harris saying “we will not let up, and we will not give up” in reference to the COVID-19 pandemic, leading some to accuse her of advocating for continued lockdowns.
However, the clip was taken out of context, as Harris was actually referring to the need to continue to push for vaccine distribution and other measures to combat the pandemic.
The full context of the speech was not immediately clear, and it took further investigation and analysis to understand what Harris was really saying.
Unintended Consequences In 2018, Elon Musk tweeted that he had secured funding to take Tesla private at a price of $420 per share.
The tweet was taken out of context, and it was unclear whether Musk was serious or joking. The tweet had unintended consequences, causing Tesla’s stock price to surge and prompting an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Musk was fined and forced to step down as Chairman of Tesla’s board as a result.
The Role of Context in Unlocking the Power of Content
“Content is king, but context is god.”
Gary Vaynerchuk, Entrepreneur | Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World (2013).
Ok, we’ve covered the perils of when content goes wrong.
Now lets look at the other side of the coin when we add context to the mix.
1/ Clear Intent and Relevance
Content must have a clear purpose and be relevant to the user’s needs.
Without clear intent, content can be irrelevant or even misleading. This is why knowing your audience matters. Consider what they need to know and why. Apply that same thinking to your own consumption.
Content that tries to please everyone should be discarded.
Trying to please everyone is a fast road to providing nothing for nobody. Being precise about who you’re content is for is not only smart but necessary.
The same goes for your own content engagements, avoid the obvious hyperbole – ask, is this content worth the exchange of my time?
2/ Credibility
Content that is trustworthy, credible, and reliable always wins.
Being able to write with credibility is crucial. Knowing whose words you’re reading is too. The bar to create content is so low anyone can share anything.
This is both incredible and complex.
That’s why we have to be careful with whose words we trust.
Trust but verify is another popular phrase, and I feel like in the AI-dependent world, you have to do more of your own research on both the source and their references.
3/ Application
What problem is this content solving? I feel we never ask this enough.
Think about it.
We each exchange moments of our life to engage with a piece of content, so it makes sense to know it’s going to deliver value, right?
Reading another article highlighting obvious content or someone getting on their soapbox for a good old moan might be entertaining but it’s not great for improvement.
If we’re going to invest, we need to know what we get in return.
Is the juice worth the squeeze? (as an annoying former manager used to tell me). By providing practical applications for content through context, we can increase its relevance and impact.
Again, we see how context helps users make the most of the content they consume.
What L&D teams can learn from this
I don’t think this is just for L&D teams.
You could apply this to other careers and generally life. We all take part in the content-driven world.
Here’s a few things I’d recommend fellow L&D pros consider:
Provide context
Give people the necessary context to help them understand the purpose and relevance of the content.
This could include providing background information, explaining how the content fits into a larger learning curriculum, or offering examples of how the content can be applied in the workplace.
If you want to carve out value for L&D in the future, it would be better placed on bringing more context into the workplace than content.
Check accuracy
Before sharing any content ensure that it is accurate and reliable.
Take the time to fact-check and review the content to avoid sharing misinformation or inaccuracies that could lead to confusion or misunderstandings.
This is far too common with all forms of content today.
AI trust can be too high, especially when creation can now be done in minutes. Yet, inaccurate work that leads to consequences can erode human trust quicker than anything I know.
Consider the source
Always consider the credibility of sources.
Ensure the sources are reputable and trustworthy, and avoid sharing content from questionable or unreliable sources.
Tailor content to the audience
Keep the needs and interests of your audience top of mind.
Tailor the content to their level of expertise and knowledge, and provide content that is relevant and useful to their roles and responsibilities. No obvious, non-specific dribble here, folks.
Encourage critical thinking
Encourage people to think critically about the content they consume.
Teach them to ask questions, consider the source and the context, and evaluate the content for accuracy and reliability. This will help them become more discerning consumers of content and better learners overall.
We need more of this.
TL;DR
Content without context is useless.
Clear intent and context are necessary for content to be helpful.
Don’t peddle low-quality content from non-credible sources
Curate and create with care.
Before you go… 👋
If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.
You can join me every Tuesday morning for more tools, templates and insights for the modern L&D pro in my weekly newsletter.
Think about the common questions on post-course surveys.
Classics include 👇
> Were you happy with the course?
> Was the pace ok?
> Did the coach entertain you?
I’m taking the piss here a bit, but you get my drift.
Questions like this provide little use in knowing what works and what doesn’t. So, how can we do better?
Read on my friend.
Introducing B.A.R
Let’s keep this simple and tactical.
We want to gather 3 pieces of information to construct a useful piece of feedback.
1/ What was the knowledge level and/or skill confidence before the experience?
2/ What was the knowledge level and/or skill confidence after the experience?
3/ Would they recommend this experience to others? And, if so, why?
These 3 answers will give you the most useful feedback to take action.
The bonus is they’re easy to answer (think of short attention spans here people) and act as a testimonial you can share with future potential participants.
Don’t overcomplicate this.
Cut through the noise, get to the stuff that matters and make improvements based on this data.
You’re welcome.
FYI, I stole this idea from SEO expert Brian Dean. Another example of a technique from the marketing playbook that helps the L&D community.
Before you go… 👋
If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.
You can join me every Tuesday morning for more tools, templates and insights for the modern L&D pro in my weekly newsletter.
I believe that looking after and leading other humans is one of the most challenging roles we can take on (outside of raising children of course).
That’s why we could all use a little help in putting our best foot forward.
Below, I’ve compiled data from a high-performing organisation to inform and inspire our own discovery on this topic.
There is no straightforward approach to building world-class managers.
No one has all the answers, sadly.
But, we have lots of data and experiences from those who’ve walked the walk from which we can learn.
What we can learn from high-performing organisations
Back in 2008, Google launched Project Oxygen aimed at discovering what makes a great manager at Google.
Although this research focuses on the walls of Google, there’s much we can all learn about the role of management at one of the world’s largest and most profitable organisations.
This project kicked off in 2008 and continued until the end of 2018, accumulating a decade worth of research.
In their original findings from 2008, Google identified 8 behaviours on which they educated their managers, and of course, many other organisations copied to do the same in pursuit of similar success.
An update was released in 2018 which scaled to 10 behaviours to reflect the world at that point, including👇
Google’s data showed a strong statistical relationship between these behaviours and the effectiveness of managers across all corners of the organisation over the decade.
We could agree that these ten probably cover most, if not all, of the behaviours we look for in people managers.
The funny thing is that before Google conducted this research, they funded another internal research project to prove don’t managers don’t matter in a modern organisation!
Instead, they discovered that they do and they better find out what makes them great.
The turning point came in how the team defined manager quality.
They did this based on two quantitive measures: manager performance ratings and manager feedback from Google’s annual employee survey.
To their surprise, this data revealed that managers did matter.
Not only did they matter. They discovered that teams with managers were happier and more productive. Who would have thought, eh?
How can you do the same in your organisation?
No doubt, Google’s findings inspire us all, but how do we find out what makes managers great in our organisations?
The team recommends that to determine what makes managers great, we should consider these three questions:
1/ Do managers matter in your organisation? Explore external research and internal input like surveys or interviews to determine if people managers matter to your team members’ performance and happiness.
2/ If managers matter, whom do you need to convince and how? Google used internal data to convince engineers and leaders that managers matter.
How will you convince your organisation?
3/ What makes a great manager at your organisation? Google found ten behaviours of successful managers – you might find you have two, three, or twelve.
Internal data, like employee survey results and interviews, can help uncover the elements of good management at your organisation.
You can also explore external research through, you guessed it, a simple Google search to get started.
What might you discover?
If, like me, reading research like this gets you excited to do the same in your workspace.
Although I like the behaviours that Google have listed, we could certainly add a few pieces to make this even better.
One thing that stands out for me is Emotional intelligence.
Though not specifically called out in the ten behaviours, we can see a few areas where it would overlap.
Nonetheless, the lessons learnt during the pandemic have brought this behaviour to the forethought of how we lead (and so it should).
Teaching people how to be more emotionally aware and lead with empathy can only be positive moves, right?
Hopefully, this edition has given you some food for thought, data to utilise and some idea on how to take action in your practice.
Before you go… 👋
If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.
You can join me every Tuesday morning for more tools, templates and insights for the modern L&D pro in my weekly newsletter.
