Following a recent webinar, Alexis Kingsbury continues his advice series about how to make sure your training sessions stay well attended.

In some ways, marketing and L&D are very similar. Although many L&D professionals wouldn't like to think of themselves as 'marketing' their development resources, often that's exactly what they are doing. Like marketing, L&D have to:

• Identify their target audience and what their needs are
• Design a service based on customers' needs
• Explain service in terms that appeal to the audience
• Communicate & engage them through a variety of channels (increasingly, including social media)

However, many L&D professionals find some of the activities and challenges of marketing very hard. For example, getting employees to register on, and attend, training courses requires a lot of marketing-like skills. Marketing would tell L&D that, if they want people to attend their courses they are going to need to practise some key principles, and answer some important questions:

Research the target audience

Who is the target audience for your training course? What are their needs? What drives and motivates them? What problems do they have and how does your course help them with these? What concerns or worries do they have and how can you overcome these?

Create a compelling campaign

What specific benefits will your course deliver to the target audience? How will you communicate this to them? How will you persuade and influence them over time (not just one email)? How will you help them take action to solve their problem/get the promised benefits? How will you overcome common objections and concerns? How will you segment your audience based on their needs and behaviour and nurture them over time?

Measure the impact

How will you measure success of your campaign? How will you know what channels or messaging works best? How will you use analysis for decision making?

Test and iterate

How will you test different approaches to see what works best? What will you aim to improve first? What ideas do you have to help improve this? What improvement will you test first? What results would encourage you to work on improving another area? How quickly will you make changes & iterate the process of improvement? When will you re-visit the assumptions you made about your audience?

If L&D can learn from marketing like this, it'll massively increase the attendance on courses, and significantly increase its standing in the organisation.

If you'd like to learn more about how L&D can 'up their game' in the area of training attendance, watch this recording of a recent webinar, co-hosted by Alexis Kingsbury and Jon Kennard: '3 Steps to Improve Training Attendance'.