Marketing Strategies to Promote Your LMS Platform

Reframing LMS Adoption

Here are seven LMS marketing strategies that can help you engage your audience and transform how your learners interact with your platform.

Marketers have a wealth of tricks up their sleeves when it comes to promoting their products and content. Think of your LMS as a product you need to sell, and your learners as your customers. Low engagement on your LMS isn’t the end of the road—it’s simply an opportunity for improvement. Reframing your LMS in this way allows you to focus on what matters most: the learners. It encourages you to shift your strategy, making learners the priority and addressing their needs with a customer-centric mindset. With the right approach, you can turn disengaged users into enthusiastic advocates.

 Tip 1. Understand Your Target Audience

Just as any effective marketing campaign starts with knowing your audience, your LMS adoption efforts should be grounded in understanding your learners. Who are they? What challenges do they face? And more importantly, what motivates them?

First, segment your learners based on job roles, industries, and educational needs. While demographics are essential, you must also go beyond that and focus on their pain points. You can gain valuable insights by conducting surveys or questionnaires to discover:

• What difficulties they encounter in their roles
• What skills they want to improve
• What their goals are

This information will guide how you position your LMS, allowing you to tailor your messaging and design learning experiences that truly resonate with your learners and solve their problems.

Tip 2. Find Your Influencers and Champions

Just like in marketing, influencers can play a key role in driving LMS adoption. In fact, research shows that 61% of consumers trust relatable influencers more than corporate messaging. This principle applies to your learning platform, too. 

Identify thought leaders and champions within your organization—people who can speak authentically about the benefits of your LMS. These influencers can include industry experts, internal educators, or even highly engaged learners who have experienced positive results. Their testimonials, case studies, or participation in webinars can build credibility and trust in your LMS.

Internal champions who actively advocate for your platform can drive engagement within teams and across departments. They offer lived experiences that make the learning experience more tangible and relatable, encouraging others to follow suit. Internal champions who advocate for your LMS based on their positive experiences can significantly impact adoption. You can even use them to help foster a learning community, where learners feel encouraged to share, participate, and grow together.

People are more likely to listen to other people rather than ‘business voices.’ Introducing new learning concepts or content can seem abstract, but hearing about someone’s lived experience can make it more enticing. If there’s a sense of ‘community’ in your workplace, which is likely, then learning can quickly become another pillar of that community. 

Your influencers can be rallied to spread the word, create intrigue, and collect feedback.

Tip 3. Prioritize User Experience (UX) Over Marketing

User experience (UX) is everything.

In fact, 50% of L&D professionals cite poor UX as one of the largest barriers to satisfaction with learning technology. To market your LMS effectively, you need to put design at the forefront, making sure the platform is easy to navigate, visually appealing, and user-friendly.

Think of UX as part of your marketing strategy—it reflects the quality of your LMS and affects how learners perceive its value. Ensure that the design is intuitive, with easy navigation and responsive layouts that cater to different devices. A great UX doesn’t just attract users; when your LMS is easy to use and enjoyable, it becomes a powerful marketing tool – users are more likely to recommend it and share their positive experiences.

Tip 4. Leverage Multiple Marketing Channels

To increase LMS engagement, use multiple channels to market your learning content—just as marketers use various platforms to promote their products.

• Email campaigns: Don’t underestimate the power of a well-crafted, targeted email campaign to drive engagement. Make sure your emails are relevant, personalized, and packed with value to encourage learners to click through.
• Social media: Take cues from where your learners are active. If your organization uses platforms like Slack or other internal communication tools, leverage those channels and use your champions to share team-specific content.
• In-app notifications: Consider using in-app notifications to guide learners through the platform and prompt action, offering timely nudges and reminders to complete courses or check out new content. Automated notifications can be set based on specific actions and previous learning content.
• Web banners and pop-ups: Banners on your intranet or within the LMS itself can keep learning opportunities front and center, acting as quick prompts to engage learners who may be too busy to actively search for content.

By using a variety of channels, you keep your LMS top of mind and increase the chances of learners engaging at the right moment. As mentioned earlier, be mindful of your calls to action (CTAs). Use compelling text to drive clicks. Remember, while you might send an email notification to users to complete learning, they may click on it and then click off due to being busy or just delete the email. Repetitive marketing messages keep your learning content in mind.

Tip 5. Take Inspiration from Social Media

Social media is a treasure trove of marketing strategies that can be adapted for your LMS. Take notes on how successful brands use social media to engage their audience, create compelling content, and drive interactions.

Break down your learning content into small, digestible pieces—similar to how social media serves up bite-sized content. Implement microlearning modules and “stories” that deliver bite-sized content, similar to Instagram or Snapchat stories, to maintain user interest and engagement. 

Use visuals, infographics, and short videos to highlight key features or courses. Engage your champions and encourage them to share content, blogs, videos, or discussion posts on Slack or your workplace intranet, creating peer-driven interaction that motivates learners to engage more.

Jump on trending topics. 

This could be linked to the latest Netflix release, e.g., campaign collateral resembling a letter from Lady Bridgerton, or collateral inspired by friendship bracelets from Taylor Swift. Find the relevance and draw it in to start conversations and stand out.

And don’t forget about gamification. Just as games and quizzes captivate people online, they can also be integrated into learning to motivate users and foster healthy competition. Research shows interactive learning overcomes barriers and improves learners’ motivation.

Remember, the key takeaway from social media is the ability to build a community and find your niche. Successful social media accounts thrive when they own their niche, creating a passionate community. The same applies to an LMS.

To build your community, you must establish authority in your area of expertise. Although you may cover multiple topics, consider how you can link these with a common thread. Engaging users in this community is simple—just follow social media best practices.

Other key social media features

• Likes and comments: Enable features that allow users to like and comment on courses, modules, and discussion posts. This fosters a sense of community and interaction.
• Create a community: Establish a safe space for learners to ask questions of colleagues. Creating spaces for learners to interact, ask questions, and share knowledge encourages peer-to-peer learning, leading to better learner retention rates compared to traditional lecturing methods.
• Sharing and tagging: Allow users to share achievements, certifications, and progress with colleagues. Tagging peers in discussions or content can increase visibility and engagement.
• Hashtags: Use hashtags within your LMS to categorise content, making it easier for users to find relevant materials and join conversations.

Tip 6. Make Your Content Easy to Find

Investing time and resources into learning content is only worthwhile if people can actually find and engage with it. To achieve this, you need to make your content as accessible as possible. A creative way to boost visibility is by using QR codes. For example, placing QR codes around the office or on newsletters can directly link employees to relevant courses or resources. You can even position them in key locations, such as by first aid kits to link to health and safety courses.

Or, if you’re hosting face-to-face learning, you could add QR codes to link learners to supplementary materials. 

The easier it is for learners to access content, the more likely they are to engage with it. Have fun with your marketing approach, where appropriate, to engage users.

Tip 7. Incentivize Your Learners

Incentives can go a long way in encouraging learners to engage with your LMS. Platforms like Duolingo have mastered this, using gamification to keep users coming back and having fun while doing so. You can achieve the same in your LMS. Incorporate similar elements like points, badges, and leaderboards to create a sense of achievement and competition among learners.

Adding gamification and tangible rewards, like certificates or recognition, can provide learners with the motivation they need to complete courses and stay engaged over time. Incorporate badges, certificates, or even more gamification elements to encourage continued engagement and completion of learning modules. Totara already offers badges as part of the learning experience. These badges are displayed across the LMS, so users can always see what they have earned.

By treating your LMS like a product that requires promotion and applying marketing principles to drive engagement, you can turn your platform into a vibrant, learner-driven hub that benefits everyone involved.