Join our Impact Lab on May 22 to explore how to drive learner engagement, and set your program up for business impact before you even launch it.
Register now
Marketing meets L&D: Ashley Hinchcliffe on how marketing can drive learner engagement
Date created
April 4, 2025
Last updated:
May 26, 2025
|
5 min read
.webp)
Table of Content
Article summary
- Engagement starts before launch – L&D must identify their audience, define the problem their program solves, and craft compelling messaging before launch to ensure participation.
- Personalization drives relevance – L&D teams must use learner personas and targeted communication to make learning initiatives feel relevant and valuable.
- Branding creates emotional connection – Using consistent messaging and campaign-style communications can turn learning into a movement, fostering a culture of continuous development rather than a one-time event.
- Multi-touchpoint strategies sustain engagement – L&D should implement campaign-driven strategies, leveraging internal social channels, peer influencers, and diverse content formats to maintain engagement over time.
In today’s fast-paced workplace, employee engagement has become one of the most significant challenges for L&D teams. With distractions at every turn and competing priorities, it’s no longer enough for learning programs to simply exist- they need to actively capture attention and sustain engagement.
L&D teams are no longer just competing with other business priorities; they are competing for the focus and time of their employees. By adopting a marketing mindset, L&D professionals can transform learning into an ongoing experience that captures attention, enhances participation, and drives measurable business impact.
In this conversation with Ashley Hinchcliffe, Managing Director at MAAS Marketing, we dive into how L&D teams can break away from traditional, content-centric approaches and embrace strategic, marketing-inspired thinking to transform learner engagement.
What’s the biggest misconception about learner engagement, and how does marketing help shift that perspective?
The biggest misconception is that learner engagement happens after the learning is launched – as if people will just magically show up because it exists. Spoiler alert: they won’t. Engagement starts before the learning product is even built. This is where marketing flips the script. It teaches L&D teams to stop thinking like content creators and start thinking like product marketers. If you can’t answer who it’s for, what problem it solves, and why someone would choose it over scrolling LinkedIn during their lunch break...you’ve already lost the engagement battle.
L&D isn’t just competing with other priorities- it’s competing for attention. What marketing-inspired strategies have you seen work to break through the noise?
One word: relevance. Marketing works because it gets the right message in front of the right people at the right time. L&D can borrow from this with tactics like segmentation, learner personas, and campaign-style comms that treat attention like currency – because it is. A well-timed nudge, a bit of social proof, or a killer subject line can cut through a sea of corporate noise. People are human. And humans engage with curiosity, not compliance.
Can L&D teams adopt marketing techniques to enhance learner engagement?
Absolutely – in fact, they must. Marketing principles give L&D the tools to become more audience-led, more strategic, and ultimately more impactful.
Some of the most effective strategies we use include:
- Developing detailed learner personas to guide messaging
- Creating multi-touchpoint campaigns, not one-off emails
- Using strong internal branding to boost recognition and recall
One example: we worked with a client whose learning platform had just 8% active users. By applying a targeted, visual, email-only campaign grounded in newly developed personas, we tripled that engagement in just four weeks – hitting 24% active usage. No new tech. No budget increase. Just marketing thinking applied with laser focus.
Could you share a specific example where you’ve used branding, storytelling, or other marketing concepts to increase engagement with learning?
Yes – and one standout example is from our work with Capgemini. We developed a multi-channel internal learning campaign that reached 82,000 employees in just 12 weeks. How? We treated it like a full-scale marketing launch. We started with deep audience and business insight, then designed an entire campaign experience – visual identity, targeted messaging, staggered rollout – all rooted in consistency and presence.
It wasn’t a ‘launch and leave’ approach. We showed up regularly, and it worked. It even won an award for “Awareness Campaign of the Year” at the British Training Awards. This kind of marketing-grade experience isn’t common in L&D – but it should be.
Does creating a “brand identity” for learning programs help build emotional connections and foster a continuous learning culture? Have you seen this work?
Absolutely – and not just for aesthetics. A strong brand identity signals meaning and value. It tells people: “This is worth your time.” We’ve seen teams develop branded “learning movements” with rally cries, logos, and consistent messaging. The result? Recognition, recall, and (most importantly) repeat engagement. When learning starts to feel like part of the culture – not an interruption to it – you’re on your way to that elusive continuous learning loop. And branding plays a huge role in that transition.
How can L&D teams leverage technology, social platforms, or other channels to effectively market learning opportunities within their organization?
Think multi-channel, not mono-email. Borrow from how consumer brands operate: they’re where their audience already is. That could be your internal Slack, Teams, Yammer, WhatsApp, or the company intranet. Use snackable content – gifs, polls, short-form video, testimonials – and schedule it like a campaign, not a one-off announcement. We’ve helped clients build “internal social influence” by partnering with respected employees to share peer-driven content. When learning spreads peer-to-peer instead of top-down? That’s when the magic happens.
If you could make one bold prediction about the future of L&D, what would it be?
L&D’s future lies in behaving less like a service function, and more like a strategic growth engine. My bold prediction? The most impactful L&D teams will stop operating in silos and start thinking like marketers, product designers, and business partners – all at once. We’ve developed a model called the People Impact LoopTM that brings this thinking to life. It helps L&D teams close the gap between business need and human behaviour change by embedding marketing strategy, product design principles, and insight-led decision making across the entire learning lifecycle. Not just at the launch stage, but from the moment a learning problem is identified. This isn’t about surface-level engagement. It’s about building a self-fuelling system where audience understanding drives product design, which is supported by internal branding and campaigns, which in turn generates evidence of impact that keeps the loop turning. The future belongs to the teams who design with intent, communicate with clarity, and measure what matters. And those who don’t? They’ll keep flirting with failure.
Key takeaways for L&D leaders:
- Drive engagement before the launch: Don’t wait for learners to find your content. Begin with a deep understanding of your audience and their needs. Craft messaging that speaks directly to them, solving real problems and addressing specific pain points from the outset.
- Segment and personalize to boost relevance: Like marketers, L&D teams must create detailed learner personas and segment their audience. This allows for more precise targeting and enables you to design campaigns that feel personal and tailored, not generic or forced.
- Leverage branding for emotional connection: Build a strong brand identity for your learning programs. Use logos, slogans, and consistent messaging to signal value and make learning feel like a core part of the company culture. This approach fosters emotional connections with learners and leads to sustained engagement.
- Embrace multi-touchpoint campaigns : Use a multi-touchpoint strategy to keep learners engaged. Instead of a single email or announcement, create ongoing campaigns that interact with learners across different channels. A consistent, multi-channel approach increases the chances of cutting through corporate noise and keeping learners engaged.
In a world where attention is the ultimate currency, L&D teams must rethink how they engage learners. The future of L&D lies in building continuous, strategic engagement- treating learning as an ongoing experience, not just an isolated event. By applying marketing principles, L&D teams can create impactful, memorable campaigns that keep learners engaged, drive business impact, and foster a culture of continuous development. By embracing marketing strategies, L&D professionals can break through the noise and transform learning from a task into a movement, leading to lasting change and measurable success.
Ready to upskill your people & transform your business?
We offer a scalable employee training solution. It lets you continuously upskill your people.
Book a callJoin the Impact Lab Episode #2
.webp)
The Learner Engagement Playbook
Learn how to use marketing tactics to create engaging learning experiences employees actively seek out and increase training demand
Download
Join our next webinar to shape a thriving workplace culture
Learn how to spark genuine engagement, boost motivation, and shape a learning culture people thrive in—not tolerate.
Sign up now
No items found.
Ready to upskill your people and transform your business?
Book a meeting.webp)
Related articles
.webp)
Review by:
Jeroen Kraaijenbrink: How organizations can overcome the honesty gap
Senior leadership and boardroom teams invest heavily in commercial strategies to win market shares. Yet the most important and honest information driving strategy circulates in teams underneath, never making it to the table where decisions are made.Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, Executive Coach and Strategy Consultant at Kraaijenbrink Advisory, has spent years working on what he calls the honesty gap. We sat down with him to understand what the honesty gap actually is, where it lives in organizations, and why fixing it requires a leadership shift.How do you define the honesty gap?There's a narrow definition and a broad one. The broad one is: we have created organizations and systems where it's barely possible to be honest to yourself, about yourself, and honest to other people.Honesty isn't just lying. It's integrity, being authentically connected to other people and being aware of your own emotions and your own biases.The honesty gap, in a narrow sense, is the fact that truth and information don’t travel vertically upwards in a company. It's often hard to speak openly to your manager because it’s become rational not to. Many people have the experience: 'I've tried it once but then I was punished for it, or was ignored, so let it be, never mind.' That's the fascinating part: it's not good for people, it's not good for organizations and yet we somehow keep this system intact.Is it less about individual dishonesty and more about a collective culture?A lot of the most important information going through your company is between people and in conversations. You need to find a way to have an honest conversation, where the things that matter get on the meeting table, not just in the informal circuit. And I think that's pretty rare.A more systematic definition is that we're not using the collective intelligence of a company enough. We can radically improve it because we’ve made it rational to hide the truth and to keep things to yourself. A lot of it may not be intentional, but the very fact that someone is in a position above you automatically creates this tension: 'What do I show? What don't I show? Because my next performance appraisal is coming up.'Where does the honesty gap typically show up first, and who owns the problem?It starts with leaders. Solving it needs one leader at the top, the CEO at least, being open and reflective enough to admit that there is an honesty gap and that they are part of it. That's the self-reflection you need for any improvement and any change. Like in coaching: you need to be aware that there is stuff to improve. You don't need to be a perfect leader, but you need to be open enough to admit that there is an issue.You talk about the 'persona trap', what is that?You're stuck in a persona where you perform in a certain way within your company. You have a role, a position, a reputation, and that locks you into specific behaviors. The worse the match between who you are as a person and how you need to show up in your organization, the more inner conflict that’s created. Especially at the top, it’s a problem for many executives. They're supposed to be the people who know it all and be decisive. While if you're honest, you don't necessarily know everything, you’re uncertain and have anxieties.The inner core of the honesty gap is breaking the performance, breaking the acting you feel you must do. If you've put yourself in a role of being the strong, decisive, number-oriented leader, that's how you have to behave. But most people don't feel very comfortable in that kind of role because it's not who they are.Can you fix the honesty gap through individual coaching alone or does the system have to change?Part of it is a personal change, part of it is a system change. You can be on your own and be very authentic, but if the system doesn't change at all, you’ll struggle to break the honesty gap.What you need to do is work on the people, the culture, and the system. Ideally that has to include the top, because otherwise it stays at the level of the person being coached. If it's a team lead or a mid-manager, that person can partly create an island in the organization, a safe space for their team and their department. But still, the appraisal systems, objectives, and culture are company-wide. Why is this so hard to shift, even when leaders recognize the problem?We have normalized this idea that you have to be strategic in what you tell and what you show. You have to show up in a certain role at work. It's also the result of how we have separated work from life, which is a very unnatural thing. It's from the industrial age, because for any other species, work is life. But now there’s a split between work, with all the routines in companies, and then your private life. There's just one you, you're the same person at home as you are at work. The good news is that the honesty gap can be closed. While many companies have unintentionally created environments where people hesitate to speak openly, organizations prioritizing trust, authenticity, and psychological safety can unlock a competitive advantage. When employees feel safe to share concerns, ideas, and perspectives, collective intelligence grows, decision-making improves, and stronger relationships emerge across every level of the business.
Ready to drive impact together?
Close skill gaps, accelerate growth, and future-proof your workforce.
