It isn’t enough to have a great course; you need smart, cutting-edge marketing to get eyeballs on it, get your hands on those potential student’s pocketbooks, and convert them into brand evangelists. This step-by-step guide will help you elevate your course marketing to a whole new level.
Harness the Power of Content Marketing to Build Authority
So yeah, while we might technically refer to ‘that post I wrote on responding to negative reviews’ as ‘content’, it’s actually something much broader: an entire ecosystem of content that positions you as a thought leader in your particular niche.
SEO-Optimized Long-Form Content to Drive Organic Traffic
Content is king. Long-form, SEO-optimised the king. Content that fills the needs of Google’s robots. Content is generated for organic traffic and search engine rankings.
A good way to leverage content marketing is by creating long-form content such as extensive guides, deep tutorials, and detailed how-tos. This is valuable to your visitor, solves his problem and, in turn, enables you to rank higher in SEO with a lingering feeling of goodwill, which makes him more likely to pay for your course in a few months’ time.
Advanced Tactic: Employ Ahrefs, SEMrush and the like to perform a content gap analysis. Here you identify the keywords and topics for which your competitors are ranking and then outperform them by publishing the best content for those keywords. You want to serve as the go-to for any information in your space.
Leverage Video Content for Maximum Engagement
It so happens that video is also a potent tool for education, with most social networks (YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc) prioritising this content in its algorithm. So if you can, create videos complementing your text, for instance, a video trailer of the course, instruction videos, or even a live Q&A.
Pro Tip: Use keywords in video titles, descriptions and tags for maximum SEO value, then transcribe your videos and edit the transcript text for a blog post or downloadable freebie.
Supercharge Your Email Marketing for Better Conversions
Email marketing is still one of the highest ROI outreach strategies to reach leads and convert them into paying students, but you need to do a bit more with email than just blast out promo-type campaigns to make money with an online course.
Hyper-Personalization Through Segmentation
One of the most powerful ways to personalise your emails is to segment your email list. Segmenting your list breaks it down into small sets of people who are acting in similar ways, such as buying from the same category or visiting the same web page. Sending an email to this smaller group that has been curated to match their interests will help you get better engagement, as your online course will be more relevant to them.
You will see that some subscribers will all take the same action in response to your email. For instance, new clinicians who purchase a calorie log to keep track of their weight loss may be interested in buying a blood sugar meter to track their diabetes.
Pro Tip: Take advantage of behavioural triggers afforded by tools with marketing automation capabilities such as ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp. You can create a trigger in which you send a specific email with personalised content immediately after a behaviour, such as downloading a lead magnet, attending a webinar, or clicking on a link in your email. This degree of personalisation can increase conversion rates considerably.
Automated Email Sequences for Nurturing Leads
Drip Campaigns, or automated email sequences, are essential if you want your leads to nurture over time, as they guide your prospects through your funnel from point of discovery all the way past the sale.
Pro Tip: Have several email sequences based on your audience segments. Maybe one for new subscribers, one for those who have shown interest in your course, and one for those who have added items to the cart but have not taken action. Every sequence should have some value, build trust, and ultimately lead the recipient to sign up for your course.
Dominate Social Media with Precision Targeting
Because of its sheer scale and ubiquitous but ever-shifting nature, social media requires a focused approach to using it successfully to promote your online course.
Advanced Facebook and Instagram Advertising
Social advertising on paid channels such as Facebook and Instagram has never been easier or more effective. Harnessing the power of these social media platforms can be extremely lucrative; some advertisers in Facebook, for example, can get as low as $0.01 of advertising cost per click. This is because Facebook’s powerful targeted advertising capabilities mean that you can create ads that appeal to highly specific audiences on the basis of demographics, interests and behaviours.
Pro tip: Using Lookalike audiences—an ability to target new users who are similar to your own students—within Facebook is very powerful in increasing the effectiveness of your ad. Get similar people to your existing students using retargeting ads to bring back people who might have visited your website or your Facebook page but who have not yet signed up. Eventually, when you arrive at the cart, it is quite common for users to abandon the process and shut down the browser without going through with payment.
Building a Community with Social Media Groups
Setting up a social media group around the course allows students to get together and help each other, and also continues to add value after the course is done. Private Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups help to build the community and enable your students to share their experiences and queries.
Leveraging User-Generated Content as Social Proof
User-generated content (UGC) is credible social proof. Encourage your students to tweet about their experience or tell their Facebook friends about your course. Create a branded hashtag so that they can share photos and images about their experience, and then retweet and share this content on your own social profiles.
Optimize Your Sales Funnel for Maximum Conversions
A sales funnel for your online course is what turns a prospect into a paying customer. You want what you do to inform and push the prospect down the funnel, from conscious awareness to enrolment.
Creating High-Converting Landing Pages
This is where your landing page comes in when talking about marketing your online course. Since this is where your prospects will either register for your course or not, you need to be absolutely sure that your landing page is primed for optimum conversion.
Implementing Upsells and Cross-Sells
One way to do so is to upsell and/or cross-sell. Say you are offering a course. You could sell a premium version of your course with a few more features, or you could bundle your course with other related products or services.
Pro-Tip: Use a product like ThriveCart or ClickFunnels so you can build a dynamic checkout page with relevant upsells based on what a visitor purchased before or what they were checking out. This can increase your revenue without having to acquire a new customer to make the sale.
Integrating Scarcity and Urgency into Your Sales Funnel
Embrace scarcity. Not only do prospects respond positively to incentives such as discounts, but our brains also tend to feel more urgency under conditions of scarcity—offering a time-sensitive discount on your services or, say, just five slots in your upcoming class. These two triggers can be applied in a broad way. Just think about the principles of basic persuasion psychology. You want prospects to do what you want them to do, right? You can apply leverage at every step of the journey with something called micro-commitments.
Premium Strategy: Use urgency in a one-to-one context with prospects through email or a display ad. For example, if someone has signed up to learn about your course but hasn’t yet enrolled, you can send them an email that reminds them about an expiring discount or that notifies them that there are only a few spots left in the course. 8†source 10†source.
Scale Your Reach with Influencer and Affiliate Marketing
When it comes to marketing your online course, influencer and affiliate marketing can be powerful forces for increasing exposure and driving new student enrolments—as long as you have the right strategy in place for utilising these channels and for partnering with the right people in sustainable, long-term ways.
Leveraging Micro-Influencers for Niche Audiences
Engagement and conversion rates are often higher with micro-influenc social media users with smaller but more engaged followings because their followers tend to trust them more. Micro-influencers are especially useful for reaching niche markets, where personal trust and credibility are especially important.
Sophisticated Hack: Leverage multiple micro-influencers, all operating within your niche. A distributed strategy utilises concurrent small, highly engaged communities that, combined, result in maximum reach while retaining a high level of audience engagement per person. You can use each influencer for a slightly different spin on your course or product, which helps you cast a wider net in terms of content and appeal to different sub-segments within your target market.
Creating a High-Converting Affiliate Program
An affiliate program can turbo-charge your enrollment in your online course by incentivising other people—individuals, companies, and institutions—to sell your course to their networks. But a high-converting affiliate program doesn’t consist only of offering a commission.
Bonus tip: Give your affiliates a complete toolkit for marketing your affiliate product and driving conversions, including: email sequences, banners, videos, long-form copy and detailed descriptions of the product. Pay a commission of at least 50% to attract top-tier affiliates, and run periodic competitions or bonuses for the top affiliates to drive them into doing even more. Use affiliate tracking software such as ShareASale or Tapfiliate to track performance and payments and give your affiliates real-time information on their efforts in marketing your affiliate product.
Optimize Your Sales Funnel for Maximum Conversions
Meanwhile, your sales funnel needs to be finely calibrated to reduce friction at each stage, from prospect to interested prospect to serious prospect to paying student.
Utilizing Scarcity and Urgency to Boost Enrollments
Scarcity and urgency are two powerful psychological triggers that can really juice up consumer behaviour. The use of scarcity (think of a limited-time offer) and urgency (think of a countdown timer, such as the one at the top of your Groupon emails) can get prospects off the fence and convert them into consumers more quickly.
Advanced Tactic: Use urgency and scarcity as early as possible in your sales funnel—and not just on your landing pages. For example, send personalized follow-up emails to a prospect after viewing your course page but not joining, highlighting dwindling availability or time-based discounts. Software like Deadline Funnel can automate and keep each prospect in a persona-based campaign with unique scarcity based on their engagement with your stuff. Deadline Funnel can do this.
Crafting High-Converting Checkout Experiences
The checkout is often the last step between a customer’s interest and a sale, so small mistakes can cause customers to abandon their shopping cart, something no website wants. That’s why it’s important to do it right.
Advance Hack: Lessen the steps to completing a purchase by reducing the number of clickthroughs a buyer has to go through in order to complete their transaction. Offer one-click upsells and cross-sells with checkout to increase the customer value average. Offer payment options, as well as payment plans and financing for courses that are on the pricey side, in order to lower the barriers to taking the course. Use checkout tools such as ThriveCart or ClickFunnels to build a seamless, high-converting funnel.
Building Trust with Testimonials and Case Studies
Social proof—testimonials from former students of your course who found value in it or detailed case studies of people who improved their skills with your help—can strengthen your position with prospects and thus boost enrolment.
Pro Tip: Give your testimonials prime real estate on your sales page and feature them in your emails and on your social channels. Video testimonials tend to be more effective, so if you can capture them, then use them. For your case studies, focus on the problem your student was facing, how you solved it in your course, and the tangible results they achieved in the end. This dramatises the benefits of your course as well as building trust.
Enhance Course Retention and Engagement for Long-Term Success
Retaining students is just as important as getting new students, but maybe more important, because if you keep people in your course, you get better results, better reviews and reputation, and the long-term success of your online course.
Implementing Gamification to Increase Engagement
Gamification, for instance, involves putting points, badges or leaderboards into your course. By taking this approach, you can make the learning process more interactive and fun. The resulting level of engagement and motivation on the part of learners will significantly increase completion rates.
Advanced Trick: Thanks to gamification tools such as TalentLMS or EdApp, you can integrate the above easily into your course. Start by designing challenges, quizzes, and interactive assignments that score points or grant badges to students as they complete tasks.
Offering Personalized Learning Paths
Different students learn at different pace and have varied learning needs. Providing individual learning programmes could better meet the different needs of your students, enabling them to learn more effectively, and memory could be retained at a much higher rate.
Adaptive learning technologies configure the course content and pace it according to the individual learner’s performance and preferences
Pro Tip: Offer personalized learning experiences by utilizing adaptive learning technologies, which configure the course content and pace it according to the individual learner’s performance and preferences. Adaptive learning systems, such as Teachable and Thinkific, have such features built in. And don’t forget to target low-performing students.
Continuous Engagement Through Post-Course Support
But once students have completed your course, your relationship shouldn’t end there. Perhaps more than any other medium, online courses represent the chance to develop brand loyalty by offering other courses that might pique their interest. It’s a no-brainer to keep them involved with your brand.
Final Strategy: Set up a post-course community or network for all alumni, either in a private Facebook group or a Slack channel. Share some exclusive bonus material with your paying alumni only, such as an advanced tutorial or insider information about your industry. You can even offer discounts to alumni on future courses to entice those who have already paid earlier. This is a great thank you for any alumni who want more from you.
Leverage Data and Analytics for Continuous Improvement
You should also embrace data-driven marketing, which means tracking the key metrics of your marketing activities and making adjustments to your tactics depending on the results. You will need to hone your strategies to keep your campaigns running smoothly and to help your course continue to grow.
Using Analytics to Track and Improve Performance
With these sophisticated tools, you can get perspective on every area of your marketing funnel, right down to last-click conversion and what has led up to it. You can track what works and what doesn’t.
Pro Tip: Track users on your website and landing pages with Google Analytics and Hotjar to see which channels, pages, or content pieces entice your potential client and what interactions engage them into taking action with appropriate KPIs (keyword: key performance indicators) like where your site’s traffic comes from, bounce rates, your conversion rates, heatmaps, and session recordings to see how users interact with your content and how you can make data-driven decisions in order to optimise your marketing funnel.
A/B Testing for Continuous Optimization
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is an effective way to enhance your digital marketing materials so that you optimise your conversion rates.
Master Tactic: Conduct A/B tests on the key elements of your marketing campaigns—like headlines, call-to-action buttons, email subject lines, or ad creative—using platforms such as Optimizely or VWO; measure which performs best and deploy the winner; rinse and repeat endlessly.
Predictive Analytics for Future Marketing Strategies
Predictive analytics is a form of modelling that predicts behaviour and purchasing patterns based on historic data. In this way, you’ll become better at predicting what your audience wants and needs and tailoring your marketing campaigns accordingly.
Cutting-Edge Strategy: Deploy predictive analytics tools, such as HubSpot or Salesforce, to track the habits of your best students and extrapolate emerging patterns that will enable you to concentrate your marketing efforts on the most lucrative areas, zone in on promising prospects, and, with some creative marketing spin, build new courses that appeal to emerging markets.
Conclusion
Want to market your online course more effectively than your competitors? You need to go beyond the basics and use a multifaceted approach that includes content marketing, email marketing, social media, sales funnel optimisation, influencer collaborations, data analytics, and more.
Just remember to keep learning and adapting as the digital landscape changes. Stay informed, experiment, and focus on your users’ needs, and you will eventually come out on top with an online course that is a go-to resource in your industry, getting you students from all over the world and sustainable growth for your business.