How to Market Your Online Courses Successfully
When you create your online course, your main goals are to attract new students, share knowledge, and earn money from your digital product. Building an excellent and engaging online course is the first step to success.
The second? Reaching your target audience.
After all, no matter how hard you work crafting the perfect course, you can’t get new paying students if they never even hear about you. This is why marketing your online courses effectively is extremely important.
It has been estimated that direct advertising alone accounts for at least 12% of sales, while a Harvard Business Review study found that businesses that prioritized marketing saw a sales increase of 280% compared to those who didn’t.
In an industry that will soon reach $1 trillion in value, it is vital to promote, market, and advertise your course to stay ahead of the competition. Whether you’re a business veteran or an online educator with little knowledge of marketing strategies, you can take a few key steps to strengthen your understanding.
By learning the importance of course descriptions and understanding how to use the power of social media, email, and affiliate marketing, you can quickly boost sales and grow your community.
Understanding Your Target Audience
As with anything, you must first research before implementing marketing strategies. The first step is to analyze, examine, and understand your target audience.
This is vital for ensuring your marketing efforts are practical. Understanding your target audience helps you focus your efforts on more relevant marketing methods and ensures you don’t waste time or resources on strategies that don’t fit your intended students.
You can even take this research one step further, and use your new understanding to tailor your course content.
How Do I Gain an Understanding of My Target Audience?
There are several different ways you can conduct your research. Assuming you have your course created and operational, there are several strategies you can use that help you use what you have, rather than conducting general market research.
Here are a few ideas:
- Engage in Online Communities: Join relevant forums and groups related to your course topic. Talk to people and take notes on key pain points and common questions, as these groups likely contain your target audience.
- Conduct Surveys: If you already have students in your course, conduct regular surveys to gather feedback on your course and information on student backgrounds. This helps you build a picture of why they joined and enjoyed your course.
- Use Platform Analytics: If your Learning Management System has analytic data tracking available, you can use this to see trends in user engagement, helping you identify core backgrounds or similar interests that your students commonly share.
- Analyze Search Trends: Tools like Google Trends allow you to quickly identify popular topics within your niche alongside associated searches from users. This helps you identify who is searching for your topic and what else these potential users search for.
- Use Social Media Insights: For those courses with a social media following, your presence online is a valuable resource, as many social media platforms allow you to view follower and viewer data. This allows you to spot trends such as location or age demographics, showing you who your target audience is.
Planning For the Future With Customer Personas
Collecting all this data and information is an excellent start, but to truly get the most out of your research, you need to organize it.
First, create customer personas to see who your target audience is more accurately and efficiently. Start by identifying and noting key demographics such as average age, location, education level, and occupation. Then, add any common pain points or challenges your audience has.
Crafting Compelling Course Content and Descriptions
With a good basis of research established, the next step is to optimize what you already have.
Before you start generating new leads, it’s vital that all your touchpoints, from social media profiles to host pages on eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, are optimized to convert visitors into customers. Assuming you have crafted high-quality course content that engages users, you must convey this across all public platforms.
To write the perfect course descriptions, you must:
- Start With a Hook: Grab attention and draw readers in by starting with a question or compelling opening statement about your course.
- Highlight Benefits: Avoid using any fluff and highlight all the best parts of your course, such as certifications, key knowledge, and other things students will gain.
- Create Urgency: You want visitors to buy immediately — once they leave your page, there’s a good chance they won’t return. Include a Call to Action and encourage readers to sign up immediately with links or even discounts and limited-time offers.
- Include Case Studies: Social proof such as glowing reviews or success stories help convince visitors that you’re trustworthy and reliable.
- Be Concise: Avoid unnecessary jargon or complicated words to keep readers on board.
Throughout your descriptions, highlight vital aspects such as using multimedia to stand out against competitors.
Utilizing Social Media Marketing
One of the best and most cost-effective ways to promote your course is through social media platforms, especially if you’ve already laid the groundwork by establishing a following. Each platform requires a different approach for maximum success, and some platforms are more tailored to specific course topics than others.
Start by creating a dedicated page for your online course and joining relevant Facebook Groups to engage with the community.
You can use Facebook Live to host Q&A sessions and offer free mini-lessons. Enticing people in with snippets of free content will encourage them to join your course to access everything. Consider creating your own Facebook Group to build a new community around your topic and course.
To achieve the most reach and success, start by sharing visually appealing content, such as infographics related to your course content, to showcase your course and draw users in. Use other app elements, such as Instagram Stories and Reels, to share tips and small elements of your content. You can also collaborate with other educators in the same niche to increase your reach.
LinkedIn favors longer-form content, so to market your course, aim to share long-form articles that demonstrate expertise and authority on your topic. Target industry-specific groups that relate to your course for better engagement, and you can also use LinkedIn’s professional targeting options to conduct paid advertising.
TikTok
Aimed towards the younger generation, share short and engaging educational videos related to your course topic to gain a following. You can help boost your success by using popular music and participating in relevant trends. You can advertise your course from here, encouraging users to sign up for more in-depth content and learning.
For any platform, posting consistently and regularly with a clear strategy is key. Try not to stretch yourself too thin, and using your target audience research, choose platforms that align with your target audience.
Leveraging Email Marketing
With the correct email list, email marketing remains a highly effective tool for promoting online courses, and offering instant access to potential customers.
Email marketing typically offers high ROI, alongside the ability to segment and personalize messages for specific audiences, and slowly convert tentative leads into sales. At the heart of this marketing strategy lies the email list.
Building Your Email List & Campaign
Offer a lead magnet, such as a valuable free resource, that readers must sign up for with their email addresses to help build your list. You can also include sign-up forms on social media and use exit-intent popups on your website to capture more addresses.
You can begin segmenting your audience to create more tailored email marketing with a list established.
To maximize conversions, keep your emails concise, mobile-friendly, and filled with valuable information. Always include a CTA to encourage readers to join your course.
Partnering with Influencers and Affiliates
To quickly increase your reach and establish credibility, you can also partner with influencers in your niche. This helps you quickly address your target audience exactly where they’re already engaged, and it also gains you endorsements from trusted influencers.
Research various influencers in your niche, comparing their content, viewership, and audience demographics to ensure they align with yours. You can start with smaller collaborations and work your way up to larger influencers, pitching them the value of affiliate connections.
Utilizing Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is one of the best ways to inject an instant boost into your website visits and course sign-ups. It is also a good way to get the marketing ball rolling before you develop more organic and sustainable leads.
Most paid advertising campaigns use Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, YouTube Ads, or LinkedIn Ads, depending on the ideal audience. For example, LinkedIn ads are suitable for targeting professionals, while Google ads help you target people searching for topic-related terms on Google.
Establishing Your Campaign
Start with a small budget to test strategies and maximize ROI before you invest large funds. You can use tracking pixels to monitor conversion rates and test different ads to find the best ROI. Use attractive visuals, and create a clear and instant value proposition in any ad copy. Throughout your campaign, routinely test different ad elements to optimize performance.
Analyzing and Optimizing Your Marketing Efforts
Whatever marketing method you choose, analyzing and evolving your campaign is crucial. By tracking and analyzing your marketing campaigns, you can quickly identify areas for improvement, thus making them more effective over time.
This helps use your resources more effectively, while ensuring your marketing campaigns remain effective.
Make sure to monitor:
- Conversion rates
- Website traffic
- Social media engagement
- Email open and click-through rates
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Tools such as Google Analytics are excellent for this, however you can also gather feedback from current students to determine which marketing channels brought in which students.
Conclusion
For the best marketing results, you must conduct deep research, use multiple strategies, and constantly evolve your marketing approach to bring new students to your course.
Of course, before you can market your course, you need to create and manage it. To help you save precious admin time and craft a truly successful course, consider using a Learning Management System (LMS) such as Tevello available for Shopify stores. With an intuitive dashboard and a range of features, such as community-building tools and certificate creation, Tevello is the perfect platform for managing your online courses.