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Features

Published April 2008

Metrics for Marketing Learning Programs

  

  Chris Moore

Marketing is simply an organization’s effort to get the right product in front  of customers at the right time, at a price they’re willing to pay. When it comes to employee development, learning leaders should apply a similar approach to ensure learners get the information they need, when they need it.

Management guru Peter Drucker defined marketing as “so basic, that it cannot be considered a separate function. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer’s point of view.”

Marketing is about the entire organization’s efforts to get the right product in front of the right people at the right time, at a price people will buy. Most product markets today are customer driven, meaning that if you can’t deliver your product to your target market on the right terms, your customers likely will turn to a competitor whose offering better meets their needs. As a result, consumer marketers attempt to measure almost everything about their customers: their needs, habits, preferences, budgets and more. Marketing plans driven by customer research and measurement are much more likely to achieve their stated goals.

In learning, we have a long way to go to catch up to the consumer marketers, given recent research findings from learning consultancy Corporate University Xchange (CorpU). Only 13 percent of the 288 organizations surveyed used quantitative metrics to measure employee awareness of learning offerings, according to the 2008 edition of CorpU’s annual benchmark study of corporate universities and learning departments. Additionally, only 25 percent of survey respondents used a formal marketing and communications plan to structure promotion of their key learning initiatives.

“It’s surprising that there still aren’t more who measure the marketing of their learning programs,” said Sue Todd, president and CEO of CorpU. “Many times, the organization is trying to shift the responsibility for learning and development to the employee, and the marketing and communication you need to make that happen often get overlooked. The best learning programs we see always include a formal marketing and communications plan.”

A generation ago, training departments published pages and pages of course catalogs and schedules, mailed them out to employees via interoffice and snail mail and then waited for the phone to ring with managers and employees inquiring about and signing up for one or more courses. A lot of advance planning went into this process because, once the catalogs and schedules were printed, it was costly to make revisions. Success was measured in terms of minimizing change and adherence to the set schedule.

However, today your learning catalog is online, and making a change usually is as quick and cost-effective as pulling out your keyboard and tapping the keys a few times. Built-in catalog capabilities such as audit trails easily can track the number of catalog and schedule changes over periods of time.