Well, after successfully overcoming the challenges and coming up with a game-changing eLearning course, there are still a few things that you need to put into consideration.
One of them, which is very important, is to think about the best way to market and sell it to your target audience. Surely, many people think marketing and promoting one’s eLearning courses is a very easy thing to do.
However, the fact remains that there’s more to it than meets the eye. For you to make good sales out of your eLearning project, there’s a need for you to have better marketing tactics in place.
In this article, we’ll be sharing with you everything that you need to know about how to market and promote your eLearning courses for better sales.
5 steps to marketing and promoting your eLearning courses
1- Know your target audience
The very first thing that you need to do to achieve a better sale with your eLearning course is to get acquainted with your learner. Before going ahead to launch your course, you must research and get to know your target audience/learners.
In case you don’t know, marketing begins immediately when you start designing your course. That said, for you to market your course, you need to create it by having a specific learner persona in mind. Doing that enables you to get into your learner’s minds, delivering exactly what will connect with them.
The first thing to do to create a learner persona is to make a thorough analysis of your target audience. The essence of that is to get relevant information regarding their needs, demographics, challenges, and what motivates them.
Next, you need to convert the outcome of your research into a buyer persona. Speaking of this, it involves knowing their media habits and making it a part of your eLearning course. Furthermore, it also includes knowing their preferred platform and device for accessing your course.
2- Treat your online course the right way
Another step to market and promote your eLearning course is by treating it exactly the right way. The “right way” in this context means treating it like a product launch. No doubt, many people believe that an eLearning course is different from other digital products.
However, since it’s something that you create, promote, and sell, we can still consider it as a product. That said, one way to market any digital products is by creating a coming soon page for it. This approach, though not common, is very effective and allows you to build hype around your product launch.
Furthermore, you can consider teasing your target audience about the upcoming eLearning course. For instance, long before the release of any movie, there’s always a trailer telling more about the movie.
The same thing happens before the launch of a book – you’ll see social media posts regarding it. You can also follow a similar approach for your eLearning course. Apart from helping to excite your learners, creating a teaser for your online course can also help to remove the doubt in their minds regarding the essence of your program.
3- Garner and use sincere feedback
Feedback and recommendations are two essential ingredients for a better marketing campaign – that’s why you must take advantage of them for your eLearning course launch.
The truth is many of your target learners will want to wait for proof that your course provides the exact results that they are expecting. Since that’s the case, you must harness the power of feedback and endorsement to attract more people to purchase your eLearning course.
One way to go about doing that is to first use a focus group to collect sincere feedback on the value of your online course. These people should be able to constructively criticize your content, giving you advice on what needs to be added to it to make it better.
Improve your eLearning course using this information and then launch it. After that, ask a few of your satisfied learners to write recommendations for your course.
4- Run a marketing campaign
One factor that often scares people away from running a massive marketing campaign for their new product launch is budget. Well, you don’t need to worry about this as there are lots of small things you can do to raise awareness about your eLearning courses.
First, you can consider sending out newsletters and emails regarding it. In case you have a marketing team, you can also make use of their expertise.
5- Avoid using text-heavy promotional material
In case you don’t know, the term “To Long Didn’t Read (TLDR)” also applies to promotional materials. As such, for you not to bore your learners with your material, you should avoid too much text and paragraphs.
Since the promotional material only includes information that will help build excitement about the course, ensure you make it short and precise. According to a study by the Social Science Research Network, about 65% of people are visual learners. As such, ensure you create your promotional materials using a mix of graphics and videos.
