You may be thinking that Yarno microlearning campaigns are just for customers, but you’d be wrong. At Yarno we love learning, too. And every couple of months we roll out an internal Yarno campaign to upskill, embed, and refresh the knowledge.
Each team takes it in turn to create campaigns, and this time it was marketing's turn! We decided to approach this in the same way a customer would and worked with Yarno's content team to develop an internal campaign on our marketing strategy and processes.
What is a microlearning campaign, exactly?
The easiest way to understand the appeal of running an internal microlearning campaign is to first consider the benefits of running a microlearning campaign.
According to Josh Bersin, on average, the modern worker only has 24 minutes each week to dedicate to learning and development — which equates to roughly 1% of their working week. That’s not very much time, especially if you’re trying to learn a new subject all together.
Microlearning is learning delivered in small, bite-sized doses. This means there’s no major time investment on the learner’s part as they can consume the content on the go, anywhere and anytime. If you're trying to close a skills gap, learners need to enjoy and be engaged with the learning content in order to actually, y'know, learn. This is why microlearning is so appealing to businesses and learners alike — and that includes ourselves. (Psst… check this article out if you want to learn why microlearning is better for your learners).
Team marketing was excited to work with Yarno's content team to gain a first-hand experience of what it’s like to be one of our customers!
Content workshop
The process started in the same way Yarno's content team kicks off every campaign: with a good ol’ action mapping session. At Yarno, we’re big proponents of Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping formula, which takes a visual approach to training design. It is designed to help those who use it develop strategies that measurably improve the performance of the business. In our case: the humble multiple-choice quiz.
The timing of this campaign also coincided with our annual ‘Yarnoversary’ get-together. The Marketing and Content Teams took advantage of the opportunity to meet in person and run a session that, for us as a remote company, would usually take place over Zoom. Check us out in action below!
So, using Cathy Moore's Action Mapping formula, we collectively identified and agreed:
- The campaign's target audience
- Yarnoers’ current level of understanding of what marketing does (!)
- The desired end result of the campaign (i.e. what we want people to do as a result of the campaign)
In essence, we were identifying business objectives that could then be used to focus the content, as well as provide tangible metrics that would help us gauge how effective the campaign was.
From this session, we identified five key topic areas the campaign should cover. These were:
- the marketing strategy,
- Yarno’s target audience, and buyer personas,
- blog writing skills,
- a Yarno elevator pitch,
- and marketing resources and processes.
Campaign creation
The next phase in the campaign creation process is to craft the multiple-choice questions. Jack, Yarno's content creator kicked this off with ‘Question Seeding’ – where, taking the topic areas identified in the workshop, initial ideas for questions are put to paper before they are drafted into questions and explanations and developed into the finished product. Although in reality, we didn’t actually use pens and paper (what is this, the 19th century?), we used a super handy tool called Trello that helps you manage projects.
For some customers, Yarno's content writers will go on to write the campaign questions and explanations in full, complete with appropriate memes, gifs, and/or video content, and share these with customers in our regular content WIPs for input and approval.
However, in this case (as is the case with many of our customers), the marketing team was writing our own content! (Supported by the content team, of course). In this case, marketing was the elected subject matter expert (SME) and the content team would review the questions once crafted, making suggestions where required. Fortunately for us, we weren't just let loose! We were directed by Yarno's content creation guide, which helped us to develop:
- Questions that are relevant to the initial goals and objectives that were outlined
- Questions that are succinct
- Answer choices that require critical thinking
- Explanations that explain the correct answer in further detail
- Content that is scannable (easy for a learner to identify what information is there in a short amount of time)
- Content that is engaging (we always like to use gifs and memes where possible to bring things to life, in case you hadn’t noticed!).
We knew that we wanted to run the campaign as a Yarno embed campaign for two weeks, which would require us to write 20 questions. Using our campaign Trello board we shared the draft questions with the content team who provided the expertise to tweak where necessary. We also had a lot of fun creating short-form videos and researching appropriate GIFs!
Campaign Launch
Once the campaign questions had been ingested into the Yarno platform, the campaign was set up and tested, the teams were assigned, and the marketing team was ready to launch its first internal campaign! Exciting!
For two weeks, Yarnoers answered questions every day on marketing strategy and processes and were awarded points for correct answers and regular participation.
Results
Once the campaign was completed, the results spoke for themselves, and the Yarno team saw the following;
- 18.5% increase in performance from the first to the second attempt
- 100% overall weekly participation
- 74.43% overall performance and,
- The completion rate was 93% vs the 86% global Yarno customer average!
Yarnoers were encouraged to provide feedback during (via the in-app feedback function) and after the campaign (via our feedback tool, Small Improvements. There was an overwhelming appreciation of the context that was given to Marketing’s strategy, the small things that fellow Yarnoers can do to help Marketing, and how engaging the videos were that we included. We also received some really constructive feedback, mainly from Yarnoers wanting even more detail on marketing strategy and processes, so something to include for next time!
What’s next
The exciting thing for us at Yarno with our internal campaigns is that even once the campaign ends, the learning continues. Not only do we repeat the campaigns every 3-6 months to keep everyone refreshed on the subject, but we also roll them out to new starters so that they can get up to speed quickly with the subject in a way that’s fun, engaging, and — yes, you’ve guessed it — gamified.
I'd like to thank our content creator, Jack for his support and guidance on this campaign.
