4 Excellent Ways You Can Market Your Online Course
Having a marketing strategy for your online course is essential for its success, but creating a marketing strategy can be stressful, overwhelming and a lot of hard work.
How do you even decide which way is the best way to market your online course?
The online world is forever changing, which means you need to constantly adjust your strategy to stay relevant. Something that worked last year, or even last month, isn’t always guaranteed to give you the same result now.
So whether you’re refreshing your old gameplan or starting from scratch and wondering where to begin, we’re going to help you make a start by showing you four marketing strategies that you can use to market your online course.
Content marketing
The first tactic is all about creating informative and valuable content for your audience.
This can include:
• Videos
• Blogs
• Guides
• Articles
• eBooks
• Helpful resources
The main goal of content marketing is to create content that targets your audience specifically. It helps generate awareness and encourages them to engage with your brand.
The key to unlocking the perfect content marketing strategy is to understand exactly who your target audience is. From here you can create custom content that suits their needs.
If you haven’t already made a persona for your ideal client then we suggest you take the time to outline the key characteristics and pain points of your customer persona. This will really help improve your content marketing.
Ask yourself these questions when creating a customer persona:
• What type of person are they?
• What type of content do they like the most?
• Where do they hang out online?
• What problems are they faced with?
• What can you do to solve their problems?
Remember that when marketing your course with content you should always tailor it so it addresses the unique challenges that your audience faces.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is the perfect place to interact and engage with your potential clients. It’s here you can express your uniqueness as a brand and encourage your followers to check out your course. Plus over 3.6 billion people are using social media worldwide, so you don’t want to miss out on this marketing opportunity.
Focus on building up an online community and engage with them regularly and you’ll be able to build a loyal following. They’ll share your posts, interact with your content and eventually, they’ll consider signing up for your course.
Remember though, you don’t have to be everywhere at once. Being on every social media platform will spread you too thin and cause lack-lustre posts and poor results. Instead, identify the channel where your target audience hangs out the most. Focus on building a community there first before branching out to other platforms.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is another great marketing strategy that can help you get more people to sign up for your course.
What is influencer marketing?
This is a type of marketing that uses a popular internet influencer to advertise your course.
Influencers have a lot of control over their followers which means a couple of positive words from them about your course and you’ve got yourself a lot of interested parties.
The way it works is you offer an influencer a free trial of your course, they take it, review it and post about it online. This will get more people interested especially if they give it a positive review.
It’s important to remember to only work with influencers who are within your niche. Some influencers might charge a fee for their services but others might be happy enough with a free membership to your course.
Email marketing
As soon as you’ve started to get more people coming to your website and your social media profiles, you should start encouraging them to sign up for your email list.
You’ll have to provide them with something valuable in return for their email, otherwise there’s no incentive for them to sign up.
Offering free resources like:
• Guides
• Checklists
• Training
• A free trial of your course
These are all effective lead magnets you can use to capture an email address.
Now that you have their email you can start sending out promotional emails with offers on your course.
This will encourage them to sign up for your course especially if you offer exclusive discounts or deals for them. 80% of business professionals believe that email marketing increases customer retention so make sure you create an amazing email marketing strategy.
We hope you’ve learned a few things about successfully marketing your course online. If you’d like to learn more you can download our guide for marketing an online course here.
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LearnRight is an incredibly easy-to-use LMS. We have one of the largest online communities of online course creators and educational institutions.
Try out a free trial of LearnRight today.