Use Marketing Strategies to Captivate and Persuade Your Audience

At first glance, marketing and L&D may seem like an unlikely combination. But upon closer inspection, both fields share two core goals: getting people’s attention and influencing their behavior. Marketing involves captivating, persuading, and creating value—all of which are key to learning design. When done well, learning design grabs participants’ attention like a great marketing campaign and engages them emotionally and intellectually to make learning stick. In this innovative volume, marketing and L&D experts Bianca Baumann and Mike Taylor ask: How can L&D pros make learning programs more effective by thinking like expert marketers?

To answer that question, Baumann and Taylor explore the potential of marketing-inspired L&D, diving into essential marketing principles, strategies, and techniques and applying them to learning experience design to improve learning transfer. With a learner-centric perspective, the authors explain the science of marketing, how to use personas, and how to craft a successful learner journey. They cover effective writing, the use of powerful graphics, how to plan and execute a winning learning campaign, how to harness technology, and the all-important activities of evaluation and learning analytics.

L&D pros will learn new ways to capture their target audience’s attention and influence their behavior. Each chapter includes engaging stories from Baumann and Taylor’s work in the field, case studies, and definitions of essential marketing concepts and how they apply directly in the L&D environment, plus activities and tools instructional designers can apply immediately to transform their learning programs.

Bianca Baumann's profile page

Mike Taylor's profile page

Bianca Baumann is a seasoned learning leader and strategist with more than 15 years of experience working in L&D. She is passionate about consulting on effective, innovative solutions to serve learners’ and organizations’ needs. She has helped dozens of companies improve their learning programs, including onboarding and reskilling. Baumann speaks at international conferences and is a facilitator at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, where she teaches learning experience design.

Mike Taylor is a learning consultant at Nationwide and an independent consultant in instructional design, performance, and organizational learning. He has more than 20 years of experience developing and deploying learning strategies and technologies, and he’s a popular writer and speaker who shares his insights about how people learn best and how to make learning cool. Taylor teaches in Franklin University’s Graduate Instructional Design and Performance Technology program, where he uses his real-world experience to prepare students for success.