There is a major difference between being just another course seller and creating a brand as an online instructor. If you want to develop as a creator in a sustainable way, you need to grow yourself as a brand. And believe me when I say, people just love brands and the sense of reliability that comes with them! 

If you are a course creator and trying to grow a brand, this is the ultimate guideline for you. You will learn how to grow a brand and the importance of brand awareness.

Excited? So, let's get started without any delay!

What is a Brand?

Simply put, a brand is actually a unique identity of a company for the consumers. It can be a product, service, or concept that is recognized by people and differentiated from other products.

I am sure you are familiar with the phrases “Just do it”, “Finger lickin’ good” or “The happiest place on the Earth”. Yes, those are the slogans of famous brands like Nike, KFC, and Disneyland. These are so symbolic that people can instantly connect with the brand. Every brand should have some specific traits that will represent them. It can be logos, fonts, colors, slogans, etc.

Apart from those big industries or companies, an online course creator can individually become a brand. For example, Kyle Simpsons, and David Malan are brands in online teaching for courses like ‘You Don’t Know JS Yet’ and ‘Harvard CS50’. Your service, course contents, and course design will represent and grow your brand as a creator. 

Importance of Building Brand Awareness as a Course Creator

We believe numbers speak louder than words. So, here is an interesting statistic for you. Did you know that 81% of global customers need to trust a brand first to consider buying their product? That shows how crucial brand awareness is in any business. 

Brand awareness simply refers to the familiarity consumers have with a product or service. People will be significantly more motivated to buy your courses if they are somehow familiar or connected with you or your content. You can become more known to the customer base by applying strategies like advertisements or social media campaigns. 

If you earn the trust of the users once, then there shouldn't be any problem selling your courses in the future. As your brand will be based on the identity of your company or product, it will attract the target customers mostly. Based on the establishment of your brand you can impose premium pricing, earn customer loyalty, and solidify your market position.

In the following part, I will discuss how you can grow a brand and sell courses online easily. 

Also Read: 20 Best Online Course Platforms in 2024 (Detailed Guide)

How to Grow a Brand from Scratch

Growing a brand from scratch might seem challenging and messy. However, following the correct rules and adapting strategies will make the process easier. Building your brand is one of the most important aspects of any company to grow. 

To build your brand, you first need to maintain the basics. What group of audiences do you want to serve, what type of products or services are you going to offer? Establish your objectives and values. After that, you need to create the identity of your branding. The first thing that people will notice about your brand is the name and logo. So, it is very important to select a suitable name and logo that will represent your brand.

Additionally, your brand will consist of assets like: 

• Course Content

• Landing page, overall course design

• Voice over

• Visuals

• Marketing content and influencer partnerships
  

These assets are long-term investments towards your branding. Carefully designing and crafting them will provide a strong foundation for your branding. After building your brand from scratch you should adapt to new strategies to grow your brand.

Now, we will go into detail about the top strategies to know how to grow a brand in 2024. 

Top 11 Strategies to Grow Your Brand as a Course Creator

It is necessary to understand which strategy will be more useful and effective for you. You should apply them to achieve success. I have gathered the top strategies you can use to build your brand as a creator. These strategies will surely help you to create brand awareness and as a result, increase your sales volume. 

1. Being consistent with the quality and design of course contents 

Consistency is the gateway to gaining customers’ trust and loyalty. Consistently providing quality content will make them believe in you and your products. Eventually, they will get used to your content and become your loyal customers. And trust me, no other marketing strategy works so well for expanding your brand as a loyal customer. In the long run, this is very crucial to a sustainable business plan.

Being consistent in product or content design also develops an identity of yours which ultimately increases brand awareness. For example, if the videos of your courses have inconsistent intros and outros, and messy color grading then, it will take a long time for the consumers to connect with your brand. 

But you can easily make your users feel connected with your content by organizing your videos or courses using consistent and relevant intros, some well-built landing pages, the same background or maybe using consistent accent colors to represent the brand. These types of details make your content unique and help you to build your brand from scratch.

2. Personalise courses based on the demand of the learners

You have probably heard about the term ‘market research’. Identifying your student’s needs and preferences is crucial for becoming a successful online course creator. You can start by surveying potential students to understand their preferences and demands.

Another good idea is to engage in social media and learning communities where your audience interacts to gather insights. You can also analyze existing online courses in the market to familiarize yourself with diverse delivery styles as well as assess the niche’s market demand.

After that, you need to choose and utilize a learning management system like EzyCourse to create personalized learning experiences. EzyCourse enables you to design high-quality, customized courses with dynamic modules, integrated learning assessments, personalized white-label mobile apps, and an amazing option for building a learning community.

To ensure more engagement and effectiveness you need to align your course content with the specific needs and preferences of your audience. 

3. Writing blogs regularly

Writing blogs about your course can be really effective in selling your course. Blogging is really a great way to promote your courses to your potential customers.  

In order to choose the right topic for your blog creation, always prefer ones that are related to your course content. When you make blogs on the same topic as your courses, every reader on that blog will be your potential student. The writing will attract only those who are interested in your courses. It is an amazing way of marketing that not only helps you filter the audience and market your courses but also helps the user by providing informative knowledge. 

Always remember to update your blog sections regularly. It will show the visitors that you are active in business. On the other hand, irregular blog sections make a negative impression on your company. If you start writing blogs on your website and then pause writing for a few months or even years, your visitors might think you are not active anymore. This might cause you to lose potential customers.

Utilize the best SEO practices to rank your blog higher in search engines. Keep these practices in mind -

• Do proper keyword research

• Use LSI & supporting keywords

• Structure your content properly

• Use the right meta title and descriptions

• Try long-tail keywords

• Add alt tag for images 

• Add videos to your blogs

These are a few tactics that help your blog to rank on search engines. You can also read this helpful blog on Writing Blogs That Rank on Google.

4. Email Marketing 

Have you ever wondered how important data is in this era? Data is the most useful tool in the digital marketing world. And one of the strongest datasets you can have is an email list. 

Email is a great medium to run brand awareness campaigns. It comes with so many perks, such as customizable templates, tailored messages, editable signatures, and so on. You can use email to tell your customers about your course contents and updates, notify them about upcoming offers and vouchers, and send them a link to your blogs that they might be interested in. 

When a customer is subscribed to your mailing list, you can tailor messages to different groups of people based on their interests and personalities. An effective email should have some essential elements such as:

• an interesting subject line to hook the receiver 

• a nicely crafted template, 

• appropriate CTA (Call to action) buttons 

• a signature of your branding
  

And the best part of email marketing is that you can easily monitor and analyze how your emails are performing. You can easily monitor how the users are interacting with your emails and use the statistics to refine your emails for better results. 

For more details, check this guide to email marketing: What Online Course Creators Need To Know About Email Marketing

5. Social Media Engagement

Social media is the new hub for marketing. A good social media presence has become a must-have for all of the successful startups and creators. Media like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, X, and LinkedIn produce a lot of leads and traffic which can be converted into potential customers for your company. 

The importance of social media is so high that building a decent social media presence is nothing extraordinary. But not having one will put you behind your competitors in terms of reach and acceptance. In order to become a brand, you should have an active and organized social media presence. It is the most potential source of lead generation and conversion for your business. 

The first step in building a social media appearance is to set up your creator profile appropriately. Use a strong bio to reflect the category and quality of your content. 

The different communities of social media are the perfect place to market your course content, as they have very specific types of users. For example, a community about programming will have members who are all interested in programming; a community about science will mostly have members who are related to or interested in the scientific community. So you need to find the right community for you and promote your content there. 

6. Starting a YouTube channel

YouTube is another popular source of organic traffic. Just think, if you ever have a question or query about anything, what do you do? Well most of the time, we ask Google. But for a significant number of cases, we go to YouTube as video tutorials or infographics are very easy to understand. No wonder that it is the second most popular search engine after Google. YouTube has become a very reliable source of information with quality content creators making amazing content that adds value to users.

Suppose your course is based on digital marketing. You can open a YouTube channel and upload some basic but useful content about digital marketing there. 

In both your channels and videos, you should mention clearly your premium course and what you are offering to them. A link to your website where they will find detailed information should be provided. Then users who searched about digital marketing on YouTube might find your channel and learn about your course. If they like your video, they will surely check your website. 

That is how you can convert traffic from YouTube to your website. It is a very reliable strategy and doesn’t need a lot of cash to start. And on top of that, you can grab some extra money from YouTube revenue by building a successful content channel. 

7. Arranging events or webinars

As a course creator, people will love to hear directly from you. Introducing a face works magically for any brand. People just trust faces. And when you directly speak with your potential students, they will feel a sense of reliability and comfort.

This is why organizing events or webinars is a fantastic way to boost engagement. Online events and free webinars attract a significant number of users with actual interest in the topic. And interacting with them directly makes it easier for you to convince them about the content you provide. You can pre-register users to join the webinar which will provide you with valuable leads.

Live and pre-recorded both types of webinars allow you to interact with your users directly. You can answer any question of your customers, demonstrate the features of your website, show them some basic chapters, introduce new products to them, and create hype. Don’t forget to record the webinars always and later upload them to your website in the future for other users to see. 

Fortunately, EzyCourse lets you manage events along with your online course.

8. Occasional offers and deals (Referral coupons, bundled discount, strike-through price)

Who doesn't like offers, right? They are very appealing to the users. Giveaways and deals come with some long-term benefits such as increasing brand awareness, expanding the customer base, and developing customer loyalty. 

Strikethrough prices are a strategy where the original price of a product is shown next to the discounted price. It shows the customers that the worth of the product they are getting is higher than the price they are paying. And as we mentioned before, people just love a good deal!

Furthermore, launching a referral program will cause your existing users to recommend the course to their friends and relatives. It also effectively expands the dimension of your brand. You can launch some interesting types of contests to increase the hype of your content. Discount vouchers, giveaways, and coupons can be offered as a prizes for the contest. 

Another way of creating a good deal is to bundle some closely related courses. You can sell the whole bundle for a discounted price and also provide the option for your students to buy single courses from the bundle at the original prices. In this way, students have an option to buy multiple courses at once.

For example, suppose you have five courses related to machine learning priced at $90 each. Now, you create a bundle with all of these five courses and sell them for a discounted price of $370. In this way, students who are interested in machine learning have the option to buy this full bundle at $80 less price. This is an effective way to develop your customer base and grow as a brand.

9. Providing a pre-order option

Pre-selling a course is a safe strategy to estimate the revenue your course might make. It is also a safeguard for avoiding the unfortunate event where no one buys your course. 

Let me tell you an interesting fact. Did you know that you can still earn from your course even if you haven’t completed all of the content yet? Some platforms like EzyCourse let you publish a few chapters from your course and give you the option to upload the rest of your course later. This feature is called dripping. It allows you to partially upload the course content and publish the course for sale. You can upload the rest of the course at a scheduled date of your convenience. 

You can also provide your users with early access to your course. For example, you can make an offer that the first 30 persons to share the course will get a chance to early access. You can allocate them with additional perks like discounts and priority support. 

10. Student support forum / Community 

Client service is one of the most important parts of growing a brand. It affects the long-term impression of your brand. 

If a student gets good support from your website or course, they will most likely return to your platform and become loyal to your website. They will also recommend others about your course and thus increase your brand awareness. On the other hand, any bad experience for students can lead them to immediately terminate your service. Unsatisfied students can spread negative reviews about your website or course which will affect your brand awareness. So, you should have a dedicated forum or community satisfaction is really important for any brand and a content creator is not an exception here.

Also read: A Complete Guide to Building Your Online Learning Community

11. Monitoring and analysis 

Here is a bonus strategy for you! You already know the importance of data in marketing. Everything is data-driven nowadays. A strong monitoring and analytical tool is very important to monitor your growth and the performance of your campaign.

Monitoring the performance of your brand awareness activities and campaigns is necessary. It helps you understand which strategy or activity is effective for your brands. Based on the analysis, you can change campaigns, tweak something if necessary, and decide your next step accordingly to achieve ROI. You will need some statistical and monitoring tools for this. There are some analytical tools available online like Google Analytics. 

How to Grow a Brand as a Creator with EzyCourse?

As a course creator, you will need a platform that is suitable to create and sell your courses effectively. And here we will tell you why we recommend EzyCourse. 

EzyCourse is an all-around LMS platform that lets you grow your website and build your brand. EzyCourse lets you apply all of the top strategies to build a brand as a course creator. The platform offers amazing features like a strong and intuitive course builder, quizzes, community, digital and physical product selling options, a powerful video player, SEO-friendly video library, a search engine, and so on at a very reasonable price. 

Additionally, EzyCourse assists you with branding by providing marketing features like real-time analytics, blogs, drip-to-pre-sell courses, deals, magic checkout stats, pop-up features, email automation, gamification, and so on. 

You can monitor the performance of your marketing campaigns and analyze the nature of your customers using real-time analytics and magic checkout. Or, if you want to write blogs to make your users aware of your content, you can do it using the blog feature of EzyCourse. Even if you have an unfinished course, you can use the course drip feature of EzyCourse and upload the first few chapters. You can start earning even before publishing the whole course. EzyCourse also lets you create communities to increase engagement and build customer loyalty. These features are extremely helpful to grow your brand as a course creator. 

Final Words

All in all, brand awareness solely depends on how you represent yourself. If you haven’t started to build your brand yet, now is the best time. So, what are you waiting for?

Sign up for EzyCourse and launch your first online course with ease. Building a brand is made easier with the platform. If you are still unsure about it, just try the free trial or book a demo with our team and explore the endless functionalities for absolutely free!