What learning and development (L&D) can learn from marketing data

- I'm sure you've had this happen to you. You Google an item such as a pair of shoes and suddenly, ads for that brand appear to follow you on your Facebook or Instagram page. Or maybe you make an online purchase and now you'll receive emails for things to compliment what you bought. How does this happen? Are they spying on you? Well no, marketers use data from what are called cookies. A cookie is a tiny piece of embedded code used to identify you and allows for the tracking of digital activity. Overtime, marketing tools analyze billions of interactions and learn more and more about our behaviors and our preferences. These online actions are refer to as digital body language. This is a term written extensively about by Steven Woods, former CTO of Eloqua. Basically, marketers are using the data generated from cookies and other web metrics to gather a variety of information about your digital body language. This could include what time of day or week you've visited a news website. Your downloads, shares and likes. Or whether you've logged on to Twitter on your mobile device or laptop. Once they know these patterns, they find ways to insert their content into your day to day habits. This increases the chances you will engage with their content. If you think about it, we used to do this in the classroom. As a teacher, you could see whether your student were paying attention. But in a digital environment, we no longer have that relationship. So how do we in learning, decode the digital body language of our audiences when we don't have cookies or the technology marketers use? Well, start with the data you have available. Look at the time of day and day of week they typically consume learning. Tuesdays at noon or weekends. Find out what type of media they prefer. Do they like to watch a video? Or read an article? These two pieces of simple data can help you decide when to launch content and what type so it aligns to their flow of work. Whilst engagement levels are not indicators of learning transfer, if your content is unappealing or cumbersome to navigate, you'll have a very low chance of achieving any learning outcomes. The more we adapt to our learner's natural online behaviors, we create positive learning experiences. Think about some of your existing learning content. How well do you think it aligns with your learners' digital body language? Are you creating frustration or removing barriers to learning?