Leverage Marketing Tools to Improve L&D Effectiveness

• 3 min read

By communicating effectively to audiences, marketers can help L&D better reach learners

Marketers are excellent at writing short and precise messages that resonate with their desired target audience, and they use great marketing tools to accomplish this. They don’t use bullets to get their points across but instead leverage catchy language, images, and colors to speak to our emotions.

Just imagine a big billboard with bullet points on it? Would you end up buying the promoted product? Probably not. So why do we think our learners will buy into an eLearning module if we overwhelm them with boring bullet points and clip art graphics?

Marketing tools should be a part of the L&D arsenal

L&D professionals should use marketing tools more often to reach their audiences. Marketing doesn’t have to be difficult and you don’t have to be a graphic designer to create stunning images in your presentations or eLearning modules. Here are some tools you might find helpful.

Use Canva for basic DIY design

Canva is an excellent free resource offering you hundreds of designs for your presentations, social media posts, infographics, and so much more. They even offer free tutorials – “Learn how to design”, for example – to help you along the way. Their newest feature allows you to invite up to ten team members and share your creations with each other.

With Canva, you have access to basic backgrounds, layouts, illustrations, shapes, icons and charts. Canva offers you the option to upgrade for unlimited assets or simply purchase images one at a time. Once you created a design, you can download it as a .jpg, .png or PDF. Automatically, the application saves all of your designs for you to conveniently download them at any time in the future.

Biteable lets you build online animations

Biteable is a great way to create online videos and animations that you can share on YouTube or other social media channels. It offers a multitude of predefined slide layouts to choose from. You can customize text and color on each and even add music to them. Biteable does have a free version, but the downside is you will have a watermark in the bottom right corner of your videos and you can only share them to YouTube instead of downloading them directly.

You can purchase one video at a time or sign-up for a one-year subscription for $99. It’s a fun way to engage your learners before a training session and show them what’s in it for them (instead of listing boring bullet points).

Create simple videos with ViewedIt

ViewedIt is a video, screencast, and voice recording tool. In the application, not only can you create and send videos, you can track them. ViewedIt is a Chrome Extension and sends you weekly notifications about video views. On top of that, it creates thumbnails so you can ensure your audience is clicking the play button to learn more. This tool is used best for screen recordings that you want to share with your learners ahead of a training session to help increase engagement and interest.

Licecap lets you create brief, instructional GIFs

If you feel that a video is too long for your message you want to convey to your learners or you want to bring some pep to your FAQs, try using GIFs in your eLearning approach. Licecap is a very basic tool that allows you to do to exactly that. Once the program is open, record the section of your screen you want to create a GIF from. Try to keep the GIF frame to the area of interest and refrain from too much scrolling. You will achieve ideal outcomes if your GIF is seven to 10 seconds long. Next time you want to show learners how to reset a password or log into a system, try creating a GIF and sharing it in an email.

Marketers use an array of marketing tools that make their lives easier and that delight their customers. We should learn from marketing to delight our learners by taking a peek into their toolboxes on a regular basis.

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