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Sep 29, 2020 Justyna Brownbridge

4 Ways To Promote Your Social Selling eLearning Content Internally

After days of successful internal negotiations, you’ve received the budget sign-off for your social selling eLearning content. The final version of the content was sent to you, you uploaded it to the internal learning system and you are finally ready to roll it out.  

An important milestone was reached - you are halfway towards activating your employees on social media!  

The next big step and the one that will determine success is promoting the content internally. 

Fortunately, you already have some strong skills you can rely on. 

You are a marketer! 

As a marketer, it’s most likely part of your job requirement to know how to select, engage with and nurture your audiences. Most probably you also know how to shape persuasive messages focused on value and benefits. 

Rolling out your eLearning will be no different. You need to persuade the potential learners that this content is worth their precious time, which means adapting the marketing mindset and strategy you would use for external campaigns. 

Here are our top tips for promoting your eLearning course internally (from the first-hand experience of what’s worked for our clients). 

 

1. Position It As A Learning Experience That The Users Have Control Over

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The biggest “sell” for a well-designed eLearning is that it’s active, not passive learning. Instead of asking your employees to take the time away from their normal place of work to attend a face-to-face training (which is not an option right now anyway) and then wait until they come back and apply the knowledge into practice (providing that by then they haven’t forgotten it!), eLearning content offers learning in the flow of work. 

What does it mean? 

It means that by deciding to enrol in your eLearning courses your learners will take control over when they learn and how. 

They will have a choice to pick the most suitable time and place to learn. They will be able to pause the course at any point to e.g. immediately start applying the newly gained knowledge into practice. They will self-manage a big chunk of their learning experience. 

This approach also means that they’re much more likely to retain that knowledge

“Active learning, not passive [learning] makes it impossible to sleep through a class.” 

Eric Mazur, Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard, The benefit of interactive learning 

 


2. Involve Management In Promotion 

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Promoting your eLearning can be enhanced with the input from the top. If management sees the value in it, then they’ll most likely be much more effective than you in persuading their teams to enrol and take an active part in their learning. 

At the start of the process, they will not have a lot of case studies of how it's benefited others within your organisation. At this stage, they will need to think about painting a bigger picture of why it will work and you, as a marketer could help shape this persuasive message. 

Bear in mind though, that not everyone will buy-in completely. 

Luckily, they don’t have to. 

To kickstart this process, you could simply work with management on organising an eLearning trial with a few members of their team. With this type of learning, you could easily track who’s enrolled and completed the training. If those team members then see a lift in their engagement figures or their connection and InMail response rates (which often happens!), you’ve built your case.  

 

3. Use Case Studies To Convince The Masses 

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Once your existing eLearners have seen an improvement in their social media results, promoting your eLearning’s impact on others becomes much easier. We know that case studies are the most influential content for customers and it’s no different from would-be learners.  

Here’s how to turn a typical Hero-Pain-Agitation-Solution-Results case study into one for your employees: 

  • Hero. Who are they in the organisation? What are their goals and ambitions? What can you say to make other learners relate to them? 
  • Pain. How have they been recently struggling with generating sales online 
  • Agitation.  What other methods have they tried? How much time did it take? What frustrated them about previous attempts? Why weren’t they working? 
  • Solution. Why did they decide to try your social selling eLearning program? What did they like about it compared with other training methods? 
  • Results. How has the eLearning impacted their social media engagement rates, the quality of their network and sales conversations online? How quickly did they see results?  

 

4. Create The Buzz Using Your Internal Communication Tool 

As we know from social selling, the most trusted content is that which is created and shared by your employees or subject matter experts.  

So why not use your employee advocacy tools to create an internal buzz for your social selling eLearning?! Here are a few ideas to get you started:  

  • Sharing a post that has received high engagement rates  
  • Sharing when a key prospect has just engaged with a learner’s post 
  • Calling out best-practice examples 
  • Any leads that have come through social selling 
  • Statistics on before and after InMail response rates 

As with most aspects of marketing, once people start seeing results, it will create a snowball effect. Soon you should have a tribe of social sellers logging in to your eLearning tool without prompting! 

 

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About Tribal Impact

Tribal Impact is a B2B Social Selling and Employee Branding Agency.

We're a team of social media strategists, trainers, coaches, content creators and data analysts who are passionate about helping our B2B customers develop and scale their social selling and employee advocacy programs.

Learn more about us here.

Published by Justyna Brownbridge September 29, 2020
Justyna Brownbridge