Creating informative, engaging, and well-presented online courses is grueling work that takes more than a few sleepless nights. That’s why it can be devastating when they don’t sell. Learning how to market an online course will help you to sell more courses.
While profit may not have been the first thing on your mind when you started creating your online course, the reality is your business needs to make money to survive. We all do.
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Easy Solutions To Better Market An Online Course
A lot of hard work and consideration goes into creating an online course. In order to make sure that your efforts to inform and educate don’t go to waste, here are some surefire ways to improve your online course sales.
Make Sure People Know You’re An Expert When You Market An Online Course
There’s a reason why people with Masters and Ph.D.’s are the ones we look to for answers and not Joe Schmoe. Your expertise is what attracts customers.
Highlight any awards, certifications, and achievements you’ve experienced. Your achievements matter, especially to the type of ambitious and curious people who are going to be interested in your course.
Blogs, videos, FAQs, online Q, and A sessions, and webinars enable you to do this in a way your audience finds valuable and engaging. Utilize Youtube, Reddit, Quora, and written blogs to help grow your audience while emphasizing your expertise.
For in-person events, clean, eye-catching handouts for people to take home can add to this. Services that offer specific booklet printing for your business are invaluable and can add finishing touches that can emphasize this perception.
The more of an expert you come across the more likely they are to enroll and be willing to pay the prices you’re asking. Expertise is something that you can’t put a price tag on. And that’s fantastic news for your business.
Use Webinars To Show Off Your Content
Webinars are a great way to show off your course to people who don’t know about them but may be interested in the topics you’re covering. Think of webinars like digital free samples.
Offering the people who see your product a few free lessons, an introductory course, or some explainer videos about concepts you cover is a great option. The idea is to convey how valuable what you have to offer is.
It’s important to be comfortable in front of the camera and know how to present yourself and your content. You may want to consider using pitch decks to help frame your presentation. For instance, these pre-designed templates for presentations are a great way to streamline and structure the way you show what your courses can offer.
As much as 58% of marketers rely on Webinars for promotion, simply because of how effective they are at converting curiosity to sales.
You want your sample to be so enjoyable that they leave feeling satisfied, intrigued, and open to purchasing the full course.
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Clarify Your Target Audience To Market An Online Course
While you should have identified a target audience from the beginning of your course creation, it’s never too late to refine your audience.
Without a clear idea of who your target audience is, trying to appeal to them is going to be nearly impossible.
That’s where target audience personas (also known as buyer personas) come in.
It’s virtually impossible to know how to market your online course if you don’t know who your target audience is. The more detailed the better.
Your questions should be specific enough to help give you an idea of what’s important to your audience. Knowing that can help provide you with pain points and informed, compelling reasons why your audience should enroll in your course.
This will directly result in increased conversions and higher sales when it comes to the courses you’ve worked so hard to create.
Incorporate Testimonials And Reviews
There’s nothing quite like good reviews to get a course moving.
Social proofs like reviews and testimonials are the best ways to show that your course has value and that you’re a trusted expert. It’s your knowledge, teaching ability, and course content that people need to buy into.
Influencer marketing can have a similar effect. Influencers in your field can also be leveraged to promote your course if their audience aligns with your target market.
The more people are talking positively about their experiences with your course, the more likely they are to sell well.
Create A Robust Email Marketing Campaign
Email marketing has some of the best Returns on Investment (ROI) out there for marketers.
Effectively targeting your ideal customers ensures much higher conversion rates. Ultimately this can grow both brand awareness and authority.
Make sure to use attention-grabbing, relevant subject lines, and effective calls to action to ensure you get the best out of your email marketing campaigns.
Your brand and its courses should never be associated with the junk folder.
Break Up And Diversify Your Content
Content creation is the cornerstone of the online world. Once you’ve created content in one form, it can, and should, be turned into other forms of content.
Especially when it comes to the contents of your online course.
Use your brilliant, engaging, and informative content to create videos, infographics, and blog posts to market your course.
You want to position yourself as an expert and get as many eyeballs on your brand and the courses you offer as possible.
Take video content for example. Video is a great way to market an online course by showing off your expertise.
Humans are incredibly visual creatures, and as of 2022, as much as 82% of all internet consumer traffic is video based. If you don’t have any video content, your course is going to be much harder for your audience to find.
The more aware people are of your brand and what it has to offer, the more likely they are to register for the courses you offer. You could add your online course link in your video descriptions to advertise an online course.
Final Thoughts To Market An Online Course
Being able to offer a clever, clean, and curated online course is a sign of your success as an individual and a brand. If you’re offering online courses, it’s because you have something valuable and insightful to offer.
You have content that’s in demand and can help others.
When that course isn’t selling it can be heartbreaking. The six tips we’ve outlined will ensure your online course gets the reach, recognition, and sales it deserves.
Being able to help someone on the path to success while growing your business is incredibly rewarding. By taking into account the techniques we’ve listed, you’re sure to find that out, sooner rather than later!
What other tips would you add when you market an online course? Please drop a comment below.
She has 30+ years of experience in marketing/advertising with 11 years of experience in content marketing, social media, blogging, and SEO.
You can purchase her eBook about Twitter on Amazon.
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Hi Lisa,
Several factors account for why some courses don’t sell. This includes the course being too expensive, not having a clear message of how the product will help the buyer, poor marketing, being too broad, and the like. However, applying the right marketing approach can get the ball rolling and help you sell more online courses. Your tips are great and drive results when used correctly. Other hacks include creating compelling marketing copy that grabs readers’ attention. A persuasive content copy will incite visitors and readers to click and take a look, bringing them in as leads and potential buyers.
You also want to optimize the product for SEO to boost visibility and create lead magnets to increase your list of prospective customers while offering discounts to early adopters.
Hi Moss, Interesting about being too broad. How do you think that plays in? I like optimizing for SEO as well to sell the product even though it will take time. I had some success on Udemy and Skillshare but they have changed a lot and it may be time to sell on my own in the future. Thanks for your insights here Moss, much appreciated! Take care.
Hi Lisa,
I have an online academy with many blogging and marketing courses. However, I don’t use my Master’s Degree to advertise my academy since my degree is in education. I’ve never seen the relevance or the connection, so I don’t advertise it.
Hi Janice, I think it could not hurt to have it in there. That way people know you really know how to teach 🙂 Nice to see you hear, been thinking of you. Take care.
Hey Lisa,
Are you publishing way too often now? How many posts are you publishing on a weekly basis?
About courses, you might remember I have a course, on Quora Ads? I still have that one up (but I don’t promote it much).
I had a few more but I didn’t want to release those (since I wasn’t confident enough — Am I suffering the perfectionist Syndrome?)
I am happy that I am active on social, blogging regularly (3x per week), and so on.
But there’s so much more to do….Lisa.
Webinars — only possible if I get comfortable with videos. I also need to work more on videos for social, videos for YouTube, a few more courses that I planned.
If it works, it works.
Hi Ash, well almost daily but I do update some of those daily posts. So much content to update it’s like almost writing a new post. A few are sponsored too as you see in the footer section. Though I love to edit them and don’t accept all unless they make sense to be here. I didn’t remember that course on Quora, sounds interesting. I love Quora and haven’t done ads there. You can do a video without you being in it, with Canva or Zoom. I’ve done quite a few that way as well. Send me your link for the Quora course too.