You know the moment.
The mandatory training loads. The title slide appears. The learner opens a second tab. The audio plays into the void until the completion bar fills.
Whatever the course was meant to change, that Tuesday afternoon is not moving.
That moment is the problem. The course can be sharp. The SME can be brilliant. The design can pass review. And your learner can still leave unchanged.
Not because the content failed. Because we never earned attention. We never made the topic feel personal. And we never came back after the badge.
Marketing has spent decades working on those same problems. Not by being more clever about ideas, but by being honest about attention. People do not care until they have a reason to care. And lasting behavior change rarely comes from one exposure, no matter how good it is.
So here are four marketing moves that translate well into instructional design and learning experience design.
A caveat first: this is about the marketing layer. You still need learning science underneath. Marketing earns attention. Learning science helps make it stick.
1. Pick a Slice
Most audience analysis in instructional design stops at job title, department, and tenure.
That is not segmentation. That is a roster.
Marketers segment by behavior, motivation, and need. They do not try to reach everyone in the same way. Learning teams should not either.
Ask a sharper question: which 20% of this audience is driving most of the risk, cost, or outcome we care about? Build for them first. The rest comes second.
A jobs-to-be-done question can help. What is the learner hiring this training to do?
“Help a new manager survive her first one-on-one” is stronger than “target audience: new managers.” It tells the writer what to write. It tells the designer what to design. It tells the SME what to leave out.
The trade-off is real. Narrower relevance costs time. It can reduce reuse. It may get pushback from teams that want one course for everyone.
Name that trade-off. Do not pretend one course fits all.
2. Lead With the Payoff
Learning objectives are written for designers, reviewers, and compliance auditors.
Learners rarely care about them. When they do see them, they often read like a contract.
Marketers focus on the value proposition: the one clear reason this is worth someone’s time. Learning teams need the same discipline.
Lead with the payoff, not the syllabus. Promise a useful result, not a list of topics.
“Identify phishing emails” becomes: “Spot the email that could ruin your afternoon.”
“Understand the feedback model” becomes: “Have a hard conversation without making it worse.”
“Complete data privacy training” becomes: “Avoid the three mistakes that expose customer data.”
This does not mean overselling weak content. In fact, it does the opposite. When you try to write the payoff first, you quickly find the courses that do not have a clear point.
That is not a problem. That is a signal.
3. Earn the First Thirty Seconds
This is where marketing meets cognitive science.
Curiosity works because it creates a gap. George Loewenstein described this as the space between what we know and what we want to know. When people notice that gap, they are more likely to seek the missing information. His 1994 paper on the psychology of curiosity is still a useful foundation for this idea.
You can design for that.
Open with the problem, not the agenda. Ask for a guess before you teach the answer. Show four real-looking emails and ask which one is the trap. Then explain.
Break the expected pattern early, before the learner’s brain slides into autopilot.
But be careful. A flashy hook followed by a wall of text wastes the attention you just earned. Cognitive load is the guardrail. Hooks buy seconds. Good design spends those seconds well.
4. Design Beyond Completion
Marketers do not stop at “did they see it?” They ask, “Did they act? Did they keep acting?”
That is where many learning programs fall apart. They end at the LMS completion record.
Several behavior frameworks are useful here.
BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model says behavior happens when motivation, ability, and a prompt come together at the same time. If the behavior is not happening, one of those pieces is missing. In workplace learning, the fastest lever is often ability. Make the desired action easier. A one-click Report Phishing button beats a four-step form.
The COM-B model from Susan Michie, Maartje van Stralen, and Robert West makes a similar point at the system level. Behavior depends on capability, opportunity, and motivation. Training often addresses capability. But if the work environment does not create the opportunity or motivation to act, the learning will not transfer.
The EAST framework from the Behavioural Insights Team offers a simple practitioner checklist: make the behavior easy, attractive, social, and timely. It is a useful test for any reminder, prompt, or post-course message.
And the biggest lesson from marketing may be the drip campaign.
No marketer sends one email and calls the campaign done. Learning teams should stop doing the equivalent with annual training.
The spacing effect is one of the most reliable findings in cognitive science. Cepeda and colleagues’ meta-analysis reviewed 317 experiments on distributed practice. The finding is clear: people retain more when learning is spaced over time.
So replace the annual one-shot with a short, spaced sequence.
Same core content. Better timing. Less learner pain.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Take annual phishing awareness, the classic training everyone ignores.
The usual version is familiar. One module for all employees. It opens with a title slide, learning objectives, and an agenda. It ends with a quiz and a completion record. There is no follow-up.
The second-tab moment happens about eleven seconds in.
Now treat the same learning goal like a behavior campaign.
Segment first.
Finance and executives, who are often targeted for invoice and wire fraud, get a different version than general staff. People who clicked a recent simulation get a tighter track. You design hardest for the riskiest slice.
Lead with the payoff. “Last quarter, someone here almost wired money to a fake vendor. Here is the ten-second check that stops it.”
Now the objective has become a promise.
Earn attention.
Open with a live spot-the-phish challenge. Show four real-looking emails. One is dangerous. Ask learners to choose before you teach. The information gap does work that the agenda slide never could.
Design for the act, not the click.
Make reporting easy at the moment of need. Add a one-click report button. Use a simple norm, such as: “Most reports from your team come in within the first hour.”
Then drip the message across the year.
Send short nudges. Run periodic simulations. Keep one call to action throughout: when in doubt, report.
The core content did not need to change much. The framing, sequence, and follow-through did the heavy lifting.
That is the point.
Where the Analogy Breaks
Be honest about this part. It is what keeps the idea useful.
You can persuade someone to click. You cannot persuade someone into a skill.
Marketing tactics can earn attention, relevance, and motivation. They do not create competence by themselves. Practice and feedback do that.
Marketing also optimizes for action, and that can drift into manipulation. In learning, that is an ethics line. Use these techniques to reduce friction and earn time for something worth learning. Do not use them to boost completion numbers for content that should not exist.
The claim is narrower than “think like a marketer.”
Borrow marketing’s discipline around attention, relevance, timing, and follow-up. Keep learning science’s discipline around practice, feedback, transfer, and capability.
Use the campaign to get the learner in the door.
Use the science to make the next ten minutes worth their time.
If this kind of thinking hits home, you’ll probably enjoy our book Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D. It’s packed with practical, real-world ideas to help you make your learning clearer, sharper, and a whole lot more effective.