Using templates to create eLearning
By
Cath Ellis
If you asked a traditional training department to help sell more hamburgers, you would likely receive a list of bullet points, nutritional facts, and a logical breakdown of the meat-to-bun ratio. If you asked a marketing department the same question, you would get colour, emotion, visuals, and a story that makes your mouth water.
In this episode of The Learning Pro Live, I sat down with the brilliant Mike Taylor to discuss a hard truth: Marketers are better at engagement than L&D professionals.
We share the exact same goals, grabbing attention and influencing behaviour, yet our approaches are worlds apart. While L&D often relies on logic and “have-to” compliance, marketing taps into emotion and curiosity.
Here are the key takeaways from our conversation on how we can steal the best tricks from the marketing playbook to revolutionise learning.
One of the biggest differentiators Mike highlighted is how marketers use emotion as a hook. In the corporate world, we are competing with thousands of distractions every day. If your course opens with a dry slide reading, “In this module, your learning objectives are…”, you have likely lost the battle before it has begun.
Marketers understand that to get behaviour change, you first need attention. To get attention, you need to make people feel something, whether that is humour, empathy, intrigue, or even shock. We need to stop relying solely on logical facts and start telling stories that resonate with the human experience.
Would McDonald’s run a single TV commercial once and expect you to buy Big Macs for the rest of your life? Of course not. Yet, in L&D, we often build a single 60-minute e-learning module, launch it, and expect permanent behavioural change.
Mike suggests adopting a “campaign mindset”. Instead of a one-and-done event, think about how you can scaffold the learning over time across different channels. This might look like:
Marketers are masters of efficiency because they are forced to be. A TV ad often has only 30 seconds to convey a complex message and trigger an emotional response. In contrast, L&D often suffers from bloat, creating hour-long courses because we feel we need to cover everything.
We discussed the power of editing. By imposing constraints on ourselves—like a strict time limit or word count, we are forced to strip away the fluff and get to the core message. A succulent, focused message is always more memorable than a comprehensive, boring one.
A major engagement killer is the “sterile” scenario. I shared an example from my time working with police training. The original training scenario involved an offender politely opening the door and saying, “Hello officer, can I help you?”
In reality, that is not what happens. If we want people to learn, we have to simulate the stress, the emotion, and the messiness of the real world. Just as high-end TV dramas make us cry or shout at the screen because they feel real, our scenarios need to reflect the gritty reality of the job, not a sanitised corporate version.
Finally, Mike and I touched on the importance of curiosity. The tools available to us are expanding rapidly, from TikTok to Zapier to Notion. You don’t need to master every single one, but you should be curious enough to explore them.
Next time you see an Instagram ad that makes you click, or an email campaign that you actually read, pause and ask yourself: “Why did that work?” Then, figure out how to apply that same psychology to your next learning project.
Watch the full interview above to dive deeper into these strategies and hear Mike’s tips on the best tools to add to your L&D toolkit.
