Why L&D should be at the core of your marketing strategy?

Marketing typically brings to mind all the cool and the not so cool stuff. Goodies, loyalty points, snazzy ads, movie-integrations (Jason Statham driving his BMW into a pool and then racing at 150 miles per hour) and well... a lot of noise sometimes. There are just too many messages, and sometimes all sound similar. Marketing if not done right, can diffuse the impact of your brand, can make you look like a 'me too' rather than a disruptor (even if you are one).

Marketing has evolved as the market has got crowded. While on one hand you have brands like Netflix which dominate the social media with witticisms and memes to keep you engaged, in the B2B space almost every brand in the IT and ERP space try to keep you hooked with whitepapers and blogs. If we look at how marketing has evolved over the years, then at some point in time we had started out with roadside flyers to plain canvassing with advertisements, evolved to areas like branded content and content integrations and then started taking up your mind space with thought leadership. The journey was not linear as some got better with it earlier than others. For B2B, healthcare, insurance brands it became imperative to become a thought leader while for consumer focused brands such as it remained paramount to engage the audience first with commercials.

A classic example of thought leadership that I have always admired is that of Hubspot. Hubspot established the Hubspot academy and pretty much owned the concept of 'inbound marketing' with its free certification programmes. End of the day, Hubspot is a marketing and sales software that offer you an opportunity to use DIY methods to design all parts of your marketing campaign and track them. However, the point to note is the way they used 'learning and development' as the core of their entire marketing strategy. The other brand that has been educating people for years is Adobe which has built learning communities around design, learning and its publishing product suite. A few years down the line, you now have almost every B2B brand redefining their marketing strategy with enough free and paid courses.

For example, if you visit Coursera, you will be flooded with certifications from Google around cloud computing, Google Unlocked is available as a free tool to certify you on areas like Adwords, Microsoft Azure has been pretty much doing the same and of course Amazon which has been fusing AWS Certifications with college level engineering and technical courses. If you are an entrepreneur looking to build an app - you may get an entire ecosystem at your beck and call from AWS along with the related training to keep you in the game. Of course, the AWS credits will need to be bought at a future date at a pretty penny, but even then, there's a chance that you will stick to them because they have taught you so much.

The other industry that keeps investing in customer education is the banking industry - because it becomes imperative to teach their customers about the recurring phishing and other attacks that they are prone to. And when they teach, you listen, because it is your money! But, at the same time it keeps you engaged to the bank. After all, who wants to turn away from a good teacher!

Covid -19 made it a norm to some extent- since it became a necessity for almost every brand (whether consumer focused or B2B focused) to talk and educate their customers about Covid protocols. Important and serious messages came integrated as a part of the user experience in applications, with standard marketing communication and during physical interactions with a brand (for example, you can find the Covid protocols printed out in a poster when you visit your favourite hotel).

With the use of AI being used in marketing at an unprecedented rate - content itself is becoming more personalised and brand salience is being built not just by messaging but by empathising, educating and engaging at a regular rate. At this rate, customer education itself will become a key differentiating factor in your marketing messaging very soon. End of the day, marketing is about capturing a mind space for your brand (the product or service that you offer is an enabler in this case) and what's better than education as a method of capturing a mind space. If you are a youth-centred brand selling colas for example, it might make sense for you to connect to everything that can appeal to your consumers. Can free guitar lessons cut it? Can you teach them how to make their own Youtube videos and pose with your cola in their hand? Now you are not a cola anymore, you are a teacher who just happens to be the coolest one in the campus! And we know what popular teachers can do. (Don't believe me? Look at all the learners flocking to take Andrew Ng's courses in Coursera for a short glimpse of what kind of popularity a teacher really enjoys!)

Now that remote learning is the most used method to engage and educate any audience (more than a year of online learning has made it mainstream) maybe it's time to give it a try. You don't need to be an edtech firm to start with this. You can commission one, or reach out even to your HR departments and ask where do they get all their e-learning resources from. They might have the right agency working for them, churning out e-learning courses for your compliance training and plugging all of it in a learning management system that might just be right for your purpose.

I'm always happy to connect and hear your views. You can write to me at [email protected]