Real, interactive and authentic stories form the cornerstone of Simplilearn’s marketing

Simplilearn, the global e-learning platform founded in the year 2009 by Krishna Kumar in Bengaluru, specialises in offering digital skills training to businesses and individuals worldwide. It provides an extensive range of certification programs and online courses in disciplines, including Cloud Computing, Cyber Security, Digital Marketing, Data Science, Project Management, and others. The organisation is in partnership with renowned universities, top industry bodies, and corporations, designing and delivering practical training through live online classes that feature the top practitioners in the industry, global leaders, and expert trainers.

After learning new skills through Simplilearn, almost 85% of the learners have got new jobs and promotions. It has emerged as one of the leading players in the e-learning industry, with its unique Learning Management System, free audio-video resources, practice tests for free of cost, a global network of expert trainers, and a 100% money-back guarantee. The organisation started as a blog where Krishna Kumar shared his expertise and knowledge. It initially had a small community of learners. When the blog started receiving attention and gained popularity, Kumar decided to transform it into an official e-learning platform that would offer all-encompassing training programs in numerous digital domains.

Simplilearn has come up with a campaign showcasing the journey of three learners and how they upskilled themselves with the platform’s help. The campaign is a great move at building trust and credibility for the brand and motivating and inspiring future learners.

In conversation with Adgully, Kashyap Dalal, Co-Founder & COO, Simplilearn, speaks at length about the latest campaign that involves real learners sharing their success stories about how they made the transition and how that would help the brand build trust and authenticity over a period of time.

What is the core thought behind the new campaign by Simplilearn?

The last six months have basically been about how we want to change our narrative and build on the entire business that we have created. And one of the things that was internal, was a lot of excitement around how we make our real successful learners as the heroes and build the entire narrative around them and their stories, their life journeys, and what they were able to achieve through some of our programs. And that is the cornerstone of this entire campaign, where this is the first creative that is coming out as part of this entire vision that we have. The larger thought internally is more around learner advocacy. This is not just about a brand video campaign, but it’s a 360-degree marketing approach that we are taking – whether it is our social media communication, our YouTube channel which has 7 million views every month, a couple of million subscribers as well as a lot of the communication that we are putting out in terms of credibility drivers for our programs and so on. That’s really what this campaign is all about – it talks about the life of the learners, what they were able to achieve, the kind of transitions that they were able to obtain, and what were the specific things about the program that made it very easy for them to go through this journey. Whether it is pivoting a career or whatever they were doing – how did they reinvent themselves? That forms the core of the campaign.

This will be a series of communications that you’ll see moving forward. Every couple of months there will be new stories that will come out on different programs, different user personas, different kinds of people, and their journeys of what they achieve.

Which creative agency has conceptualised this campaign?

We’ve been working with Wonder Labs. The Wonder Labs team has been part of the initial brainstorming and the entire brief that we gave to them. On top of that, they were able to build and innovate to make these learner journeys come alive in a more engaging way in the creative that has been put out.

What are the expectations from this campaign?

The expectation of this campaign is really to stand out in the market as an extremely enabled voice and be very authentic, be real rather than trying to create any hyperbole. A lot of creatives that we have seen in edtech as well as in other areas is that marketing communication is thought of as an area to make extravagant claims to stand out. We are taking a different approach of how do we make it real. It is about real people, real journeys, there are no actors involved there. It’s not an actor who is saying that I got this much hike. It is about real people, their names, the companies they are working with, their journeys.

When people look at this entire video, they can go to LinkedIn and search for these people and learn about their journeys and what they have done in life. Thus, making it real and standing out as a voice of very high credibility, which people can relate with. That is our approach to break the clutter and stand out as a brand.

What is the message for future learners?

The message for future learners is the approachability of the brand. When they see real people like them who have gone through this kind of transition, our user insight is that in the entire skilling space, the biggest challenge is inertia. Majority of the people want to do something are thinking about doing something, but they keep pushing it off saying ‘I’ll do it after six months, after one year, I’ve got some personal commitments or job-related work right now’. But when they start seeing the stories of people like them, who have achieved great outcomes, it should help them break that inertia and challenge them, saying that if this guy could do it, I could do it as well. That’s really what we expect from future learners – they should look at these guys and get inspired. They should have that confidence that if these people could do it, I can do it too, and also realise what are the specific ways in which Simplilearn can help them in their journey.

The campaign creative talks about the journey of these three people and also the three-four things that Simplilearn’s programs could do to make it a very easy journey for them rather than them struggling and getting stuck at different places. The larger cut of the new film is about 90 seconds long and there’ll be shorter edits, where we’ll take individual stories and make them easier to drive through the media plan. So, it’s going to be a film, and one of the innovations that we are doing this time, given that the concept is of real learners, is that we are also doing a lot of live sessions.

One of the CTAs at the end of the film will be ‘Learn to Live’ from these learners and get into a live call. We will do a lot of Zoom calls and a lot of webinars, where these learners are going to talk about their journey and also answer questions from the audience. The idea is to make this extremely interactive, real and authentic, so that people can interact with these learners in real life. It’s not just a recording, it is a live interaction extension as well of the brand campaign.

How did the idea of the campaign come about and how have the learners of Simplilearn benefited from it?

The root of the idea was to have a more internal focus. Keeping the marketing part aside, the number one goal that we have as a company that we took about a year back was learner success; everything else comes as a by-product. If our learners are successful, automatically the business will do well, people will come, we will get more direct traffic, we will be stronger as a brand, and so on. So, the focal point is learner success. And given that there was so much work happening internally to make our learners successful, focus on completion rates, focus on minimising drop-offs, and help learners where are they getting stuck. And in that entire journey, this entire idea came about saying how do we extend this to our marketing communication? That is the real focus of everything that we are doing as a company – that is, making our learners successful. I think that’s the best message to take out there through marketing as well. Therefore, this entire thought of learner advocacy that is the background to it. That was the kind of focus that was going into making learners successful and all functions were involved in that.

That kind of became a springboard for saying that let this story itself be the hero on the marketing side as well and we take our learner success stories outside and build more traction around that. Rather than talking about different ad creatives either with brand ambassadors or any other creative clients, we want the learner to be the hero. Our learners want to highlight their stories.

So, how does this benefit the learners? I think that obviously when we create a marketing advertisement or a video, there would be few learners who would get showcased. We urge our learners to share their success stories, and a lot of our social media channels continuously keep talking about it. The user review section on the Simplilearn website has thousands of stories of people who’ve done successful transition. They speak about their previous role and company and what their new role and company are after Simplilearn’s programs; how they have overcome challenges, their personal side to the journey, and much more. We give our learners a platform to share about their experiences.

How is Simplilearn leveraging digital media and technology to promote the campaign?

Our entire campaign is going to be digital. The entire thought is to keep it real, interactive and authentic. We feel that digital as a channel is way more powerful because it immediately allows people to see the ad.

Potentially there could be actions coming out of it that somebody might want to go on LinkedIn and check out these profiles, and find out that they are genuine. As I mentioned, we are going to do live sessions with these learners so somebody could click on it and register for a live session to hear more, and ask questions if they want to. Again, sharing and spreading the word in the network would be an expectation as well.

As a result, the media plan is going to be more around using a lot of our digital properties. For example, as I mentioned, our YouTube channel has a couple of million subscribers, and 7 million views every month. So, that’s a huge platform where we’ll be using this creative pretty strongly.

Other channels like Facebook, Instagram, etc., will also be part of the mix. Apart from this, we would also be looking at retargeting, where a lot of people who come to the platform are considering some of our programs. They would see this creative as part of the retargeting approach, because anybody who’s considering purchasing our program, that’s a great point in time to show them these authentic, real stories and help them make a decision. Because they would look at these learners and feel more confident that they are in the right place and can attain similar success.

We are excited about what we can achieve with this approach over the next 3-6 months, because this one creative is just the starting point. I think the true force of this approach is to do this consistently over a period of time, say over the next six months we might have 1,012 different creatives covering different programs, different learners, personas, and so on. At the end of the six-month cycle, it will create a 360-degree impact where you have so many people over time who realise that this brand always talks about real learners and therefore, it will help us in building trust over time. We look forward to sharing more outcome information.