Best marketing strategies to promote your online courses
So now you have completed creating your first online course power packed with several educational goodness which includes videos, worksheets, quizzes etc., Now your job is to find people who are interested in buying your course.
How do you get more enrollments to your course?
You may have worked several sleepless nights to build your online course which may include tons of work like editing, scripting etc., It is obvious that you need to develop a best marketing strategy to market your online course. Whether you're trying to make your first sale or your hundredth a marketing strategy is a must. Investing in marketing is always essential for your business as an edupreneur. By implementing best marketing strategies, you can effectively grow, reach and engage your target audience and get more enrollments to your course.
Below are some powerful strategies to promote your online courses
#1. Build a buyer persona
Understanding about your ideal student/customer is one of the secret weapon for success of any business. You need to develop a deep buyer persona about their requirements as this is the top priority.
A buyer persona describes who your ideal customers are, the challenges they face and the decisions they make. Generally, buyer personas are gathered through research and analysis. If you’re new to the concept of creating buyer personas there are lot of handy tools to help you out and can gather top level information like geographical location, age, designation etc., Either ways it can also be done through surveys and feedback forms.
You can try out the following once if you collect some useful information
- Social media platform where they usually hangout
- Write content that applies to them specifically
- Find out their interests and behaviour
- Identify their goals and pain points
#2. Create your own blog
Content marketing is a king of any online marketing strategy. The objective of content marketing is to create targeted content for your target audience and blogging has become a vital activity for content marketing.
You can very well attract your target audience through your blog. Start a blog on your course topic and try to create more useful and engaging content to your audience. Build brand awareness among your audience by sharing industry insights and how-to articles.
#3. Start a YouTube Channel
With over 5 billion videos watched per day YouTube is the next big search engine after Google. So leverage this platform to gain more exposure to your course. Start a YouTube channel and publish informative videos about your topic of choice at regular intervals. After uploading the video try to optimize it by adding specific keywords, title, description etc.,
#4. Share Customer Testimonials
Majority of the customers do their research before deciding to purchase your product. So, building a trust and creditability is crucial for any business.
Customer testimonials plays a vital role in buyer’s decision-making process. Try to gather feedback on your course which might influence others to buy your course. Add positive reviews to your course sales page from your existing students to attract more sales.
#5. Build an email list
An effective email marketing strategy will help to gain more sales to your online course. Before people decide to buy they need to hear several times from you and this is why building an email list is essential.
Once people subscribed to your newsletter try to maintain an active relationship with them through welcome emailers, course announcements, transactional emails etc., When you eventually promote your valuable and helpful tips about your course, your audiences are more likely to purchase it.
#6. Host a live webinar
Hosting a live webinar is one of the great way to sell your online courses. A webinar is a digital engaging tool which allows to directly interact with students and build a rapport with them. Try to share some of your contents for free on your webinar. This builds trust among your target audience about your course.
#7. Start a podcast
Starting a podcast about your course is a great way to gain exposure to your course. Record a podcast about your topic and add a valuable call-to-action to visit your website at the end of each podcast.
After carefully recording your podcast submit the same in several podcast hosting platforms. This way you can gradually build your learners who can later potentially become your buyers.
#8. Offer a free mini course
You can try out to give away a free mini course as most people would like to make sure that you have something of value to give out. At the end of your mini course you can add your course invite to your main course for students to dig deeper about the topic. This strategy helps potential students to make an evaluation to purchase from you shortly.