The present-day labor market is incredibly fast-paced, mobile, and nimble. In a situation like that people can no longer sit on the laurels of their formal education and are forced to constantly reinvent themselves and look for new ways to expand their skillsets.
So, it shouldn't come off as a surprise that the popularity of online courses which allow users to easily pick up new skills has grown at an exponential rate in recent years which is, by all means, good news for people in this industry.
However, this surge in popularity is also marked by the expansion of competitors that are also trying to tap into this trend. Let us take a look then at a couple of smart marketing strategies that will help you to overcome this hurdle and put your online learning platform on the mainstream radar.
Create a top-tier website and landing page
Aside from providing your website with the courses that will keep your business afloat, this powerful resource also serves as the main pillar as well as both starting and ending point of all of the marketing strategies you are going to use. Therefore, the website needs to be built with this underlying marketing purpose in mind – you should make sure the site is easy to navigate, presents all relevant information always within the reach, and uses resources that encourage visitors to engage in further exploration. These efforts should culminate in a landing page that will serve as a springboard for all later actions.
Start creating and publishing content
People looking for online courses are inherently interested in learning. Therefore, you will hardly find a better way to lure these people in and keep them coming to your website until they finally enroll in some of the courses than by offering bits of knowledge for free in the form of blog posts, visual content, infographics, etc. There are a lot of people who are immediately intimidated when they see the prices of online programs, so they gravitate toward free, less reliable sources of knowledge. Giving them tangible proof of your expertise will make them more comfortable to start paying for structured courses.
Use professional management platforms
The process of running an online learning platform goes far beyond simply releasing learning content and giving the students grades. Ensuring customer satisfaction, improving user experience, and using these insights in marketing endeavors, require a great deal of conscious data collection, predictive analytics, long-term product development, and platform management which are all things very hard to pull off on your own. That is why using some professional online program management should be an option you should strongly consider before taking any specific promotional steps.
Focus on a couple of high-performing products
Essentially, trying to promote each and every course in your portfolio will spread your resources too thin while failing to produce a significant mainstream splash. Instead of making this common mistake, you should identify a couple of products that are either generating a lot of traffic despite competition in the same sector or form a unique value proposition and focus solely on these courses until they start making tangible returns. When you set these foundations both exposure and revenue-wise, you can start giving stronger exposure to the products that are too niche or struggling to get attention.
Leverage the power of social media
In this day and age, running a successful marketing campaign and building a mainstream brand can't be imagined without a strong presence on social media. However, your social media outreach should go way beyond the traditional page setup, content release, and Q&A interaction with your followers. What you should do instead is to try to create an engaged learning community, encourage users to share their knowledge, help other followers, motivate each other, and invite new people to join their ranks. Like in the previous example, this strategy will be the most fruitful if you tackle one platform at a time.
Encourage referrals and repeat business
In this case, we only need to take a look at a recent survey that most SMBs earn more than half of their revenue exactly from returning customers. But, how can you motivate people to keep coming back for more when they finish the course they have enrolled in? Well, for a start, try to make them aware that learning is a lifelong process and promote the benefits of keeping their skill sets fresh. Also, you can offer various discounts for repeat purchases and referrals or even offer users some sort of subscription model. These efforts will create very strong foundations for the methods we have covered in earlier sections.
Provide social proof
Essentially, social proof presents a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of other individuals in an attempt to reflect some supposed correct behavior and become a part of the pack. As you can assume, this unconscious tendency can be used as a very powerful marketing tool. With that in mind, some of the most effective social proofs, at least in terms of online education, come in the form of expert social proof, celebrity (influencer) social proof, user social proof, and mainstream narrative (famous success stories). You are free to use any of these = assets at your own discretion.
We hope these six strategies will help you to use the growing popularity of online courses to put your learning platform on the map and allow you to fight off very aggressive and growing competition. Of course, being able to reach out to the masses won’t make your courses instantly successful and you will need to invest a lot of hard work to back your claims up. But, as long as you go in the right direction you have nowhere to move but forward.