You have set up your classes’ infrastructure, hired the best possible faculty, tried to make the teaching material comprehensive and easy to understand??? There’s just one problem. Your setup is completed, but nobody knows about it.
If you forgot to create a marketing strategy for your course, don’t feel bad. You’re definitely not the first person to start a business before they created a plan to market it. DigiSWOT has got you covered.
We are here to tell you ways to market and increase your sales and enrolments.
Okay, let’s dive in…
1) Identify your unique value proposition
Research some of the existing classes offering similar courses so that you have a good idea of what is included in those courses and how they are presented. The goal here is to determine how you will differentiate your course from your competition. What areas of your topic will you cover that your competition missed? What value can you add to your course that is not included in the others?
Identify your unique value proposition (aka a differentiator) and include it on your course sales page and in your marketing messages. Plus, when people ask “how is your course different from XYZ?”, it helps to have a good answer.
2) Talk About it on Social Media
Regardless of which social media platform you use for your business, you should start announcing some teaser information about your courses early on.
But remember, as you’re growing your social media following, don’t make all of your content posts about yourself and your course. Use your various social media channels to deliver quality content to get your target audience interested in your course.
By consistently posting quality content on social media, you’re training your audience to check in with you on a daily basis. One easy tip is to create a private Facebook group for your students. It’s a free solution to build a community on a platform most people already use. Then as people in your group start connecting, they’ll tell their network about your class.
3) Run a Weekly Webinar to Connect with Potential Students
This is a great option for promoting your classes online. A webinar is usually 45–60 minutes with a structured formula, you just need to nail your webinar script once. Then you can fine-tune it over time and even release pre-recorded webinar sessions throughout the week. Plus, when you start getting more attendees in your audience, the size of the webinar will add some valuable social proof to your presentation.
4) Pay for Ads to Promote Your Course
It’s true what they say. Sometimes it really does take money to make money. And learning how to promote classes online is no exception.
Because in total honesty, running some paid ads can be one of the best ways to advertise your class. This will, obviously, depend on your budget, but even a simple Facebook post boost can go a long way. There are a few benefits to using paid ads over organic content marketing. Paid ads are:
· Faster at getting results
· Easier to track in terms of success
· Highly targeted to your buyer persona
The downside? They take away from your overall budget. So you need to make sure you can afford them before taking the risk.
In the end, don’t forget to research which platform is best for advertising while taking your audience into consideration.
5) Find Non-Competitive Partners in Your Niche
It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. In this case, that’s definitely true. Try reaching out to your professional network to help you figure out how to promote your class. Other professionals in your industry can become customers to give you more valuable feedback, testimonials, or even a nice shout-out on their social platforms.
Plus, you never know. Reaching out to other non-competing experts in your field may lead to partnerships for future courses you design! But regardless of future products, influencers in your niche can be one of the best ways to advertise a class online.
6) Guest Post on Blogs/Webinar
If you’ve ever worked on SEO to market a product or service, then you know the importance of guest posting. You can totally do the same to promote your online course. Reach out to blogs or podcasts to see if they need some free help.
The mere fact that you already have the class and faculty means you probably have some reputation in your niche as is. Finding opportunities to provide quality content for other people in your field of business shouldn’t be too complicated.
After all, you’re proposing the ultimate win-win situation: they get free content to publish for their audience, and you get free promotion for your online course.
So, if you’ve been wondering, “How can I promote my online class?” it might be time to let someone else’s blog do the publicity for you.
7) Create a “Teaser” Mini-Course
This strategy takes a little effort but is well worth it. Creating a free “mini-course” is a great way to give people a taste of the value you’re offering.
Most software as a service (SaaS) companies offer free trials of their product. The problem for you, though, is that your product is knowledge. That means that if your students are fast learners, they could purchase the course, learn the material, and return it before their trial expires.
So that’s just no good.
But creating a “mini-course” allows you to accomplish the same thing in a responsible way. Your students will get to experience a bit of the value you’re offering while learning how deep the topic you’re teaching runs.
Now we know what you’re thinking, “How does giving away a course for free help me figure out how to market my class? Won’t they just take the mini-course and run?”
You’d be surprised. If you build your mini-course the right way, you can use it to show the depth of your topic. By the end of the free course, your students should have learned just how little they actually know about your niche.
From there, selling your online course will be a breeze.
8) Offer a Discount for Your First Round of Students
Offering a discount for your first round of students is the perfect solution to how to market your class. This accomplishes two things really well:
· Generates tangible revenue for your courses
· Creates a system in which you can gather feedback and testimonials early on
These are two crucial components to your class’s success. Seeing money coming in at the early stages of your business launch is helpful in paying for your tools and your advertising costs (if you’re running paid ads).
You can even offer a discount for those who join your class early on. Early bird discounts are an awesome solution for how to sell the courses.
Some marketers even pre-sell their course at a discount before finishing the syllabus to see if there’s really a need.
But more importantly, getting students enrolled early on helps you generate testimonials that may convert other hesitant customers. Using testimonials or other trust signals on your site can lead to higher conversion rates and more enrolments.
9) Create a Website
We’ve already discussed why you should use a coming soon page, you also need to create a landing page dedicated to selling your online course.
Here are the top 5 things you need to know to create a website:
· Speak your audience’s language
· Create a value proposition
· Handle objections
· Make your copy scannable
· Develop a clear offer with an enticing call to action
10) Build Your Email List
We decided to save the best for last on this one. Because when it comes to digital marketing, we firmly believe that having a large email list is the best way to go for several reasons:
· Email is consistently delivered straight to your audience’s preferred device
· Email use is still crazy popular compared to other platforms
· You’re at less risk of losing your audience due to a platform shutting down, suspending your account, or just waning in popularity
· Everyone on your email list has already shown interest in your content or product
· Messaging via email is way easier to automate
For all of these reasons, and more, we think email marketing is far from dead (despite what some marketers will say).
Now that you are armed with 10 marketing tools to promote your classes online, it’s time to implement what you’ve learned. But remember, it takes time to implement and test each of the marketing tactics listed above. You have to commit to implementing a few of them and measuring the result. Figure out which ones are working for your business, which ones are not and keep coming up with new ways to stay a step ahead from your competitors or you can just hire DigiSWOT to do all the work for you while you concentrate on teaching the students.
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