How to Create a Timeline for Marketing your Online Courses?
Whether you are a passionate entrepreneur looking forward to making a hefty income out of your digital educational product or a 9-5 employee who is trying hard to make a brand, investing in interactive online courses is always worth it. Once you know that you are ready to teach the online course, it is time to move ahead and plan things. If you feel that there is too much work on your schedule right now, then don’t be surprised, because most course creators go through similar experiences.however if you plan and break the chunk of tasks into multiple manageable chores, everything will fall into the right place.
Once you have developed the content structure of your course you can begin by:
- Creating a customer persona
To connect with the learners more personally, you would have to go beyond research to develop a customer persona. A customer persona is nothing but data about a representative sample of customers by analyzing which you would be able to deduce facts. After extracting this information, you would be able to know the social media platforms they spend time on, the type of posts they like. - Running a podcast
To create initial awareness about your online courses and virtual school, you can either opt to get interviewed in someone else’s podcast or run your podcast, whatever seems appropriate to you. Nowadays various podcast hosting platforms are available where you can share about your course platform and topics and gradually develop a pool of listeners who might get converted in the short run as well.
Through this, you are going to educate your listeners in a real-time scenario and connect with them as an expert in your course topics. Always encourage listeners to post their questions, and then you can conduct a Q&A session before ending the discussion. - Throwing action-oriented challenges
Believe it or not, most learners love to get their hands on exciting challenges as it helps them to implement the knowledge they have derived from your courses in real-life scenarios. You can post these challenges and events on your social media pages to create awareness. For example, if your course focuses on designing a DIY logo, then your day one action can be pinning logo inspirations on Pinterest, and day five can involve creating a moodboard. Through this challenge, you can give a taste of your course offerings to the enthusiastic learners.
The Best Marketing Strategy for Selling Online Courses
Here are some of the tips on selling online courses, some specific to marketing channels while others are generalized. You can do most of these quite easily without using the solutions of any marketing agency.
Facebook Can Give You Advertising Tips For Selling Online Courses
Social media is a thriving industry, and it holds incredible opportunities for businesses. To make awareness about the existence of your eLearning platform as well as about your newly designed courses, you should try connecting with learners on various social media platforms like Facebook and even Instagram. If you find an initial interest of learners towards your courses, then start by building a Facebook community of your eLearning platform. But don’t let it sit idle while you are bringing changes and improvements into your business and instead reflect everything on the community. This will lead to a hike in customer engagement because you are sharing updates regardings your offerings with your customers. Post trending topics and encourage them to comment and share their opinions and also share it within their network if they find it useful. This way, you can also garner the attention of other students who have not yet joined your community, but if your posts are engaging, they might turn out to be potential leads as well.
YouTube Is An Effective Channel For Marketing Your Online Courses
These days every online course is creating its online presence, what sets you apart from the huge lot? For this, you will have to nail your digital presence, and the first step to accomplish is creating a Youtube channel. By making your way to Youtube, you can make videos illustrating the USPs of your online courses in detail. For this, you can make the most of storytelling because often informative content powered with a soothing voice and exciting visuals attracts our senses. After that, we end up watching the entire video. Now if potential learners come across your videos and get to know about your innovative courses, the chances of them signing up with you become quite high. You can use it as your TV channel which only you can use to promote your course and even share industry insights closely related to the subject matter of your courses.
Include Blog As A Course Selling Strategy
Do a bit of research, and you would find that the fate of numerous eLearning websites have changed for good just after they started a blog. Do you know that according to a source, businesses with blogs can generate about 67% more leads than the firms who don’t own blogs? This can be possible because the companies can convert the subscribers of their blogs to their loyal customers. You can build your blog on WordPress, but if you are not willing to pay the fee associated with it, then you can try out medium as well where you can post your blogs for free.
Through the blog, you cannot only promote your courses but also share knowledge and educate the masses regarding various topics. You can begin by starting a blog with a course topic and share its importance in the industry. How learners can earn a considerable amount of job opportunities after completing it, all with facts and statistics.
Email Marketing Is Known to Increase Your ROI for Online Courses
Although most of us tend to overlook the power of email marketing when it comes to formulating an effective marketing strategy for selling courses, it can bring you more revenue. Refer to this article of Salesforce, and you would find that if you invest $1 in email marketing, you will earn $38 just with it.
If you want a boost in your ROI, you should not skip this no matter how primitive this strategy looks to you! To begin with, you should have your email list ready to send the newsletter and product launches. Always remember to keep the email sign up form simple and user friendly because if a learner finds your signup form to be lengthy and complex, he/she will skip signing in. Also to capture attention and send your users into a jovial mood, choose colourful templates for your emails but make sure that their funkiness doesn’t reach over the top.
Also, to increase the number of subscribers, you should enable signing into your emails from multiple platforms so to offer numerous opportunities to users.
Use ebooks For Marketing Your Online Courses
One of the best ways to ensure that the content of your courses reaches the right audience is by publishing an ebook on eCommerce platforms like Amazon. This way, you would also be successful in scaling up the interest level of learners towards your courses. Publishing an ebook is super easy these days, and most course creation tools offer functionalities for creating ebooks as well. In case you want to proceed without the assistance of such tools, you can self publish your ebook in such a few simple steps in Amazon Kindle in both paperback and digital formats. If you get stuck somewhere, you can approach the Kindle team for help.
Free Courses Is An Effective Course Selling Strategy
If you are looking forward to launching your eLearning platform anew, then you would have to offer glimpses about the content, interactivity, and visual features of your course to your customers. Often learners hesitate to invest in a course which is being introduced by an entirely new platform. So to attract new learners, you can either offer a mini-course or an en email course, which involves sending over the course contents via email. If the learners develop a liking towards the quality of your eLearning courses, selling online courses becomes easier.
Infographics Can Increase ROI For Online Courses
It has been found from various studies conducted in the past that on average customers will read only 20% of your blog posts but they will check out every image you have added and that is the magic of infographics! A source says that infographics content are 300% more shared than other forms of content. This means that if you couple your blog posts with compelling infographics, you can reach a greater audience. But to retain subscribers always remember to create your infographics and not copy it from elsewhere. You can sign up on Canva to create infographics, and the best part about Canva is there is a free version as well. The infographics with vivid pictures and funky texts and graphics would force your readers to go through your blog posts, and if your content impresses them, they will hesitate to sign up with you.
Quora Is Useful In Giving Tips On Selling Online Courses
When it comes to marketing your online course without spending much, you can look for opportunities in Quora as well. In Quora, you would find users posting questions about a range of topics from education to fashion. If you find users asking queries about something related to the courses you are offering or the subject of it, then you can go forward and answer it like an expert. And in your answers, you can also create awareness about your eLearning platform, followed by your course topics. Then you can post links to your website to increase the chances of readers visiting your platform. This would result in a hike in the number of visitors on your website, which automatically increases the probability of you gaining more potential leads without spending much effort.
Retargeting Is A marketing Strategy For Selling Course
Now, what if the learners who have visited your profile once or a couple of times, don’t buy your courses? You will have to remind them continuously about your courses and content so that they make their way into your website and complete the transaction! You can accomplish it by retargeting. Do you remember the ads that follow you around all over the web, no matter which websites and platforms you navigate? These are retargeting ads, and they are pretty effective. Creating such ads is simple enough, and you can set a custom audience to view your ads. Retargeting is a great way to add more subscribers to your email list and generate more sales from it.
Utilize Offline Advertising for Marketing Your Online Course
No matter how digitized our world has become, offline advertising still has some merit which you should not neglect. Signs and banners always remain in trend because they excite people by making them curious. If you can identify an area from where you might get a large number of learners, then you should go ahead and put these banners strategically. Business banners are affordable, but when it does a commendable job in boosting the ROI for online courses. You can giveaway handouts or flyers in public places to keep your brand in the minds of pedestrians who might go home and check out your website!
Use UpSell As A Course Selling Strategy
To broaden your revenue opportunities, you should apply the techniques of upselling as till this day it is a useful course selling strategy. Upselling involves offering your customers with an upgrade or an addon along with their purchase so to provide them with more benefits while enjoying an increased revenue yourself. So, to do this, you can adopt various ways, including displaying related products like ‘customers also searched for’ or luring customers to buy an add on by saying it is a ‘limited period offer’.
Instagram Can Be Used For Marketing Your Online Courses
Do you know that out of the total number of Instagram users? About 80% of users follow at least one business? Why not grasp this opportunity and make a business page on Instagram. You can post customer testimonials and videos on Instagram by using tags and filters appropriate for businesses like yours. And Instagram users are generally receptive to stunning visuals. You can make a short promo clip about your courses lasting no more than 60 seconds where you can talk about the USPs of your course.
Going Live on Social Media
Creating webinars and offering short tutorials on social media platforms are great for marketing your course topics, but are you ready to take the next step by going live on Facebook and even Instagram? As not many people do that, you can set yourself apart from your competitors by making most of the Live video feature to talk and interact with your audience. This way, they would be able to get to know you better and put trust in your business.
Round up: Understand your top-performing marketing channels
You would have to identify the top three or five marketing channels in which your business is performing decently and then develop marketing strategies to improve your business performance.
I and my team research various e-learning platforms and can help you choose the right toolkit to get you started. I am just a mail away, so reach out to me if you want to tap into the power of online learning business. mail: [email protected]