Skip to content

← Back to Blog

Why Your Audience Matters

Your audience matters more than any aspect of your training process. But how often do you consider them when designing your learning content? Discover how Coassemble can help you engage your team in the platforms they use most!

31 Mar 2021 by Rocco Brudno

The most powerful and crucial part of developing online courses is your audience. Should you produce online courses without taking into account the individuals consuming them, you’re already guaranteed to fail. Creating an effective process that enables success means you need to focus on your audience.

Traditional training silos online courses in a separate environment from where your learners engage. Our course creation software helps you share knowledge with your audience where they engage the most. With online courses that are easily shareable, you’ll be able to:

  • Accelerate your online training course delivery;

  • Expand the access your audience has to the knowledge they need; and

  • Measure analytics on every interaction, from any learner, anywhere.

This guide equips you with the knowledge to identify your online course audience, seamlessly integrate training into their workflow, and boost online course engagement. Get ready to learn everything you need to know about why your audience matters.

Why your online course audience matters

Coassemble has always believed in the benefit of creating an online course that has a positive impact on learners. Everything we offer is to create a better end-user experience. That’s why we’ve built our online course creation software so anyone can create engaging content and easily share it.

Directing your attention towards your online course audience when creating content not only helps you gain valuable insights but also ensures the success of your endeavor. Consider the following scenarios: you wouldn't typically send your:

  • Sales team a set of content marketing courses;

  • Product team leads capture strategies; or

  • Customer base internal policies and procedure documents such as employee disciplinary actions forms.

Recognizing what your learners need can help you decide what the best knowledge to share will be to get the results you want. Some easy signifiers that can help you group your audience into learner personas:

  • How long have they been with your organization?

  • Are they entry-level, mid, or senior staff?

  • What are the struggles in their day-to-day?

  • What role do they serve in your organization or team?

  • What knowledge do they have already?

  • Are there platforms they engage with frequently?

Once you've started recognizing commonalities within your audience, you can start creating learner groups. This lets you share an online course with them where they work, where they play, and anywhere in between. You accelerate this process by sharing knowledge with a team lead and encouraging them to share it with their staff. For customers, you can share with smaller groups and ask them to pass enrollment links along. And by knowing who your audience is, you can start delivering online courses where it’s most effective.

Pro Tip: If you want to get a jumpstart on building your learner personas, check out our article on learner-first models

How learning in-the-flow of work builds employee engagement

Since traditional training began transitioning to online training platforms, keeping learning sharing separate from work was always standard. You had one space for training and another space or platform where everyone communicated and worked.

Being able to share online courses where teams engaged with most (i.e. Slack, Intercom, Hangouts, etc.) just wasn’t an option. But that’s exactly where the best training can and should be delivered. Our CEO Ryan has worked with our customers to consult on the best options for delivering training. He found that many of their teams were already sharing knowledge internally. Rather than setting up a separate training space, Ryan suggested some ways to deliver training where learners engaged most.

Understanding how knowledge is already shared internally helps you locate key areas your team would benefit from training. Learning in-the-flow of work is all about training right when your team needs it. Look out for cues such as:

  • Being stuck on a specific task.

  • Having difficulty entering info correctly.

  • Interacting directly with customers.

  • Communicating with team members.

Any of these can become learning moments if you can deliver training to your team right then and there. This is where accessible online courses can shine brightest. Instead of directly delivering training, you can send team members a course when they need it, so they apply that knowledge immediately.

Learning in-the-flow of work is fastly becoming the latest learning trend according to this article by the Harvard Business Review. The ability to complete training inside other platforms also standardizes how training can be fulfilled in a workday. Learners can also pursue learning they believe to be beneficial to their role, allowing for autonomous learning.

The power of social learning with online courses

As innately social beings, humans can rapidly share knowledge in social settings, exceeding even standard training processes. With many teams already sharing knowledge internally, creating training content for social learning can benefit teams and companies. Social learning also saves trainers a lot of time by empowering teams to train each other internally.

Also known as peer-to-peer training, the idea behind getting your team to train each other isn’t new. But providing tools and leveraging your training platform to benefit this style of knowledge sharing can make or break this powerful learning experience. Brandon Hall Group found that “it’s clear that one-time formal events have poor knowledge retention rates. Connecting learners so they can share their insights and experiences helps mitigate that retention loss.” By enabling the space for your team to learn from each other, knowledge retention can dramatically improve.

Leveraging online courses to provide social learning tools creates a focus on the learner’s benefit (the most important aspect). According to the Learning Technologies Awards 2019, almost half of all organizations believe their culture does not support social learning. What’s the case though is that social learning isn’t being recognized for what it is—teams fostering and building relationships. If your culture supports strong, team-oriented dynamics, then chances are you already have social learning practices occurring with your staff.

You can encourage social learning by creating fun activities like sharing an online course with coworkers or pairing training buddies. You can share enrollment links with pages for customer reference groups. You can even drop an online course in a LinkedIn post. The point is to make it fun, engaging, and rewarding for your team to use. Whatever you think will strengthen your team’s relationship will most likely help with their social learning practices.

How self-enrollment can increase accessibility

One of the most powerful aspects of shareable online courses is the ability to self-enroll as a learner. This removes the friction point that separates direct training from social learning. You’ll still have insights into each learner’s interaction and progress, but you won’t have to administer the enrollment process. Self-enrollment also allows learners to actively pursue their learning, enabling autonomous training moments.

Ensuring your content is mobile-friendly or amplified through mobile use is another way to open your training accessibility. Giving your learners the option to learn through a mobile device means they can learn when convenient for them. This provides more room for autonomous learning and social learning by giving learners more options for their training.

A more engaged audience

With these practices, you can better understand and train your learning audience where they are engaged most. Making an online course easily accessible and learning in-the-flow of work is going to be the new standard—why not get ahead of the curve? Start sharing knowledge with your audience, encourage social learning, and enable true peer-to-peer training to succeed.

If you want to try out creating and delivering engaging content with an all-in-one online course creation tool, give Coassemble a try! Whether you want to build a course from scratch using our Course Builder or edit one of our pre-built templates, our platform is free to try — and we're pretty sure you'll like what you see.


Build an engaging course for FREE!

Try Coassemble and transform your online training today.

No credit card required.

Related Tags

You might also like

How To Make an Online Course with Bespoke or Legacy Content

Learn how to make an online course with bespoke or legacy content in minutes with this helpful guide from our online training experts!

How To Deliver Online Courses

This guide is loaded with tips and tricks for delivering online courses like a pro, and you can dive right in today! Whether you're a seasoned online educator looking to level up or a newbie ready to rock your online class, we're here to help you make your online courses engaging and awesome.

How To Make Online Training More Engaging

Want to create your own online courses but aren't sure how to make them engaging? Our team have three proven methods to help you understand how to build interactive content that your learners will love!