Awareness and Conversion: Diagnosing the Real Marketing Problem in Your Learning Business

In our annual learning business landscape survey, “limited marketing resources” shows up as a top challenge, and “enhancing marketing and outreach” is a top planned investment. When we dig in with our consulting clients, the headline “marketing problem” almost always fractures into something more specific: an awareness-conversion problem. And it’s typically weighted far more to one side of the hyphen than the other.

You can’t solve a “marketing problem” in the abstract. You can diagnose—and improve—your awareness and conversion dynamics, product by product, segment by segment. This article lays out how.

What We Mean by Awareness

Awareness is strong when a high percentage of the right people know an offering exists and understand the outcomes it delivers.

• Outcomes
  It’s not enough that people know there’s an offering. They need acute awareness—a clear grasp of how the course, program, or credential advances a specific problem, priority, or goal they have right now.

• Right people
  The right people must include likely learners and the decision-makers and influencers around them—employers, supervisors, credentialing bodies, talent partners, and sometimes the learners’ customers. If these actors don’t know (or can’t easily recall) your offering, you have a practical awareness problem even if your list looks large.

Vague Versus Acute Awareness

Vague awareness manifests as, “I’ve heard of that certificate.” Acute awareness sounds like, “That certificate maps to our Q4 upskilling plan for new supervisors and reduces time to productivity by eight weeks.”

Acute awareness is earned in two places:

1. Offer design
   The product must address a defined, validated need and produce outcomes the audience—and their employers—value.
2. Communication
   Those valued outcomes must be expressed succinctly and repeatedly where the right people already pay attention, following a credible flow from attention to interest to desire to action. (Catch our Leading Learning Podcast episode on the four-part AIDA formula here.)

There’s also a strategic constraint here: How many offerings can you reasonably make any one segment acutely aware of? In a noisy market, the honest answer is not many. That reality pushes you to segment your audience and narrow your catalog and promotional calendar accordingly.

What We Mean by Conversion

Conversion is the set of actions that move someone from awareness to ownership—purchase, enrollment, license, subscription, renewal, or employer adoption. People convert when perceived value meaningfully exceeds the total perceived cost (money, time, effort, and risk).

Five levers matter most:

1. Value equation (including time)
   Price isn’t just dollars; it’s time away from work, cognitive load, administrative hassle, and opportunity cost. Show how the payoff outweighs all of that—and, where you can, reduce those non-monetary costs.
2. Impact and usability
   Will the experience create measurable change in what the learner can do, and will that change be applied? Clear learning objectives, strong practice opportunities, and line-of-sight to workplace application increase conversion and renewal.
3. Signal strength
   What does completion signal to others, especially employers? A recognized badge, alignment to a standard, or integration with internal career steps strengthen conversion long before a prospective learner or organizational purchaser hits “Add to Cart.”
4. Proof
   Specific results, employer testimonials, before-and-after stories, completion and advancement data, and visible alumni outcomes lower perceived risk.
5. Friction (and fit) in the buying path
   Hidden fees, multi-page forms, account creation loops, confusing bundles, unclear dates—all of it depresses conversion. Enterprise buyers also need a different path (procurement, data, terms, etc.) than an individual with a credit card.

Gratification—the personal satisfaction of advancing, belonging, contributing—helps. But in professional learning, it’s rarely decisive without the five items above.

A Practical Awareness-Conversion Diagnostic

Work through the following for each key offering and audience segment, including the employers in your market.

Awareness Checklist

• Segment clarity
  Can you name the one to three highest-value segments for this offering (role, career stage, employer type)?
• Outcome statement
  In one sentence, can you state the specific problem or outcome this offering addresses for the segment?
• Acute awareness assets
  Do you have and use a short “outcomes card” (title, three outcomes in employer terms, time/effort required, evidence of impact) consistently across channels?
• Employer channel
  Have you explicitly equipped managers and HR to understand and advocate for the offering?
• Reach and repetition
  Are you running enough touches in the right places (e.g., owned list, partner lists, member newsletter placements, employer communications, events) to earn recall?
• Catalog focus
  How many offers are you competing with inside your own channels this month for this same segment?

Score each item as either a zero or a one. If you’re below four on an offering, fix your zeros before touching price or revamping the product.

Conversion Checklist

• Value articulation
  Is there a plain-English “why now” and “what changes after” above the fold on the product page?
• Signal
  Is there a recognized signal (credit, badge, alignment to a standard), and is it prominent?
• Proof
  Do you show specific outcomes (metrics, employer quotes, use cases) rather than generic praise?
• Path to purchase
  Can an individual enroll in three or fewer clicks? Is there a clearly labeled employer purchase path (invoice, seat bundles, data terms)?
• Pricing and packaging
  Are options simple (good/better/best or single clear tier) and matched to buyer types?
• Post-purchase clarity
  Is onboarding obvious (dates, access, time commitment, support)?

Again, score each as a zero or a one. A score below four signals conversion issues, and the zeros tell you where to focus.

Common Portfolio Patterns (and What to Do)

You’ll typically find four patterns when you plot your offerings by awareness (low to high) and conversion (low to high).

1. Low awareness and low conversion
   This issue tends to arise with new or neglected products. You either need to sunset or revamp. If these are strategic products, rebuild them, starting with audience need; otherwise, unlist, and stop the drip of internal attention.
2. High awareness but low conversion
   This is the classic “Everyone knows about it, but few buy it” situation. To address this, tighten outcome language and proof; remove jargon; simplify pricing and packaging; fix friction (fewer clicks, clearer dates, enterprise path, etc.); and strengthen the signal (e.g., alignment to a standard or a credible badge).
3. Low awareness but high conversion
   These are your undermarketed gems. Concentrate promotion on one or two segments. Reuse your success proof in your top-of-funnel communications. Add employer channel outreach and partner placements.
4. High awareness and high conversion
   These are your flagship products. You want to protect them and avoid cannibalization. Use them as anchors in your bundles and in employer subscriptions. Build intentional upgrade paths (e.g., from a course to a certificate to renewal).

Narrowing to Win (and Earn Acute Awareness)

If your calendar makes five different asks of the same audience in a month, none of them is likely to achieve acute awareness. Choose the one or two most strategic offerings per core segment per month. Everything else either supports those or waits its turn. Depth beats breadth.

Pragmatically, this means being much more targeted and intentional in what you do.

• Quarterly offer map
  For each core segment, pick no more than two offerings to forefront per quarter and a small set of supporting content or events that point to these forefronted offerings.
• Message discipline
  Maintain one outcome statement and one set of proof (testimonials, outcomes data, etc.) per forefronted offering for the quarter. Repeat. Don’t rewrite every e-mail.
• Partner alignment
  Coordinate placements with chapters, affiliates, and employers around the offerings, using shared outcomes language and proof.

Measuring What Matters

Move beyond global open and click rates to measuring what matters. Track a small, comparable set of metrics for each major offering and segment.

Awareness

For awareness, consider measuring the following:

• Reach to the right-fit segment (percentage of your list that is the target segment for the offering)
• Recall proxy (e.g., direct traffic to product URL, brand-plus-keyword search volume, percentage of segment that reports hearing about the offering at work)
• Partner/employer placements secured (e.g., in employer internal newsletters, chapter social media posts)

In general, you want to know that the people you need to reach are on your e-mail list. If not, make a concerted effort to get them there. You want evidence that people are aware enough of the offering to type it directly into search (rather than clicking a link presented to them), that they recall hearing about it (particularly in highly relevant places, like where they work),  and that others are helping to spread the word.

Conversion

To monitor conversion, you might look at metrics like these:

• The number of product page views compared to the number of checkouts started compared to the number of checks completed (for for sales to individuals)
• The number of employer inquiries compared to the number of purchase orders or contracts (for enterprise sales)
• Abandonment points (e.g., top reasons based on an exit survey or chat logs)
• Time to first meaningful activity (e.g., completion of the first module)

In general, you want a clear view into what happens after people become aware of the offering. Do they purchase? How smooth is the purchase process? What specific barriers do they encounter? Do they then move on to using the offering?

Signal and Impact

To help you with signal and showing the impact of the product, look to metrics like these:

• Completion rate and time to completion
• Comparisons of performance on learner pre- and post-assessments (where relevant)
• Manager-reported behavior change or improvements in performance metrics tracked by employers
• Learner self-reporting of job and/or career impact
• Renewal/upsell rate (e.g., course to certificate or certificate to renewal)

Pick a baseline, then aim for one meaningful improvement per quarter rather than chasing everything at once.

A 30-Day Action Plan

To help you make meaningful progress on an awareness-conversion problem in the short term, you need a plan.

Week 1: Selection and Framing

• Choose two offerings and two segments to focus on.
• Draft or refine the one-sentence outcomes statement for each (learner and employer versions).
• Using language that can be shared with prospective learners and their employers, create a one-page (or shorter) brief for each offering that includes the following information:
  • Outcomes
    Use one to three bullet points to state the expected benefits and results.
  • Time and effort required
    How much time and effort will be required to complete the offering? For example, “This course runs for four weeks total and requires approximately two hours per week. Live sessions are Tuesdays, from 1 to 2 pm Eastern, and learners are expected to spend approximately one hour on homework per week.”
  • Recognition
    What will the learner get that they value and others recognize? This might be credit, a badge, alignment to a standard, or steps in an internal career path.
  • Proof of impact
    Provide evidence that the offering produces results. This might be data on the percent of learners who report career advancement or positive job impact or employer endorsements.

Week 2: Awareness Upgrades

• Use the language from the outcomes brief consistently across Web site, e-mail, partner placements, and employer one-pagers.
• Cut any competing messages in your promotions calendar for those segments this month.
• Secure two employer or partner placements per offering.

Week 3: Conversion Clean-Up

• Rewrite product pages to put outcomes, recognition, and proof of impact above the fold.
• Reduce to three or fewer clicks to enroll
• Add or clarify the employer purchase path.
• Simplify packaging (one default option and a clear enterprise bundle).

Week 4: Proof and Follow-Through

• Collect or surface one employer quote and one outcome metric for each offering.
• Add brief post-purchase orientation e-mails specific to the type of purchaser (individual learner or employer), focused on what to do in the first 15 minutes.
• Set up a simple abandonment survey for anyone who begins but does not complete the purchase process. Within two weeks, identify and address the most common, high-impact barriers that you can realistically fix quickly (e.g., unclear dates or missing price information).

Pitfalls to Avoid

As you work on an awareness-conversion problem, beware of common missteps.

• Trying to solve awareness with more volume
  If the message isn’t specific and the catalog is too broad, more e-mails and posts won’t fix it.
• Treating employers as an afterthought
  Employer awareness and an enterprise path often move the needle faster than more consumer traffic.
• Pricing in isolation
  If the value story, signal, or proof is weak, discounting just burns margin.
• Redesigning before diagnosing
  Fix the bottleneck you actually have. Don’t rewrite everything because a metric looks bad somewhere else.

What All This Means

“Marketing” only becomes tractable when you diagnose the awareness-conversion mechanics of specific offerings for specific segments, especially employers. Most learning businesses can materially improve results within a quarter by narrowing their catalog focus, moving from vague to acute awareness, and removing obvious conversion friction. Do that consistently, and you’ll reclaim capacity for the deeper work—offer design, credential signaling, and employer partnerships—that makes growth durable.

About the Author

Jeff Cobb is a co-founder of Leading Learning and a co-founder and managing director of Tagoras, the company behind Leading Learning. He has nearly three decades of experience working as a consultant, researcher, author, and entrepreneur in the market for adult lifelong learning and has witnessed first hand how it has evolved over that time period. Jeff is also the founder and host of Learning Revolution, a site that supports entrepreneurial subject matter experts. You can find out more about him on the Tagoras and Learning Revolution Web sites.