Proven Strategies to Market Online Courses in 2023

Growing demand for online courses has made it possible for artists to market their skills and establish successful enterprises. But developing an online course business entails much more than just producing a top-notch course; you also need to become an expert at marketing it.

Lots of creators with good courses struggle with marketing, frequently because they don't fully comprehend the online marketing environment.

This tutorial is just to help with the struggle on how to market online courses. To make things easier think of the whole process split into 5 sections: 

• ● Create a Marketing Plan
• ● Get More Traffic
• ● Build Your Email List
• ● Engage Your Audience
• ● Sell Your Course

We'll delve in-depth into each of the five sections to assist you get started.

Create a Marketing Plan

You need a clear marketing strategy with a focus on the traffic sources and content areas listed in order to promote an online course successfully.

1. Create a Buyer Persona.

You should develop a thorough grasp of your target audience before launching any marketing initiatives.

Planning your content strategy, selecting your primary marketing channels, determining the appropriate price point, and optimizing your sales copy are just a few of the many things that depend on knowing your target market and creating buyer personas.

Prior to anything else, you should be familiar with your target market's demographics, purchasing power, interests, and important pain points.

Therefore, to get as much information as you can about your ideal consumer, hang out in niche-relevant Facebook Groups and discussion forums, speak with your potential customers, look at data surrounding your niche.

Additionally, developing this understanding will be much simpler if you already have professional expertise in the subject area of your course.

2. Create a Unique Value Proposition

The basis on which your course brand is formed will be your distinctive value proposition. Your value proposition should explain to your audience exactly what you're giving, how you're unique from the competition, and how they'll profit from it.

Smaller firms must prioritize having a crystal-clear value proposition since it will aid in persuading customers to choose you over rivals. It may also assist you in developing a more focused specialty and a sales pitch that is more pertinent to your intended audience.

For instance, let’s consider you have a course on Mobile Application Development. So, your unique value proposition could be that you’ll take your students from zero to hero. And with this you can target students even with zero knowledge on the topic.

3. Determine Your Primary Marketing Platforms

You won't be able to initially take use of all the key marketing platforms and techniques. Therefore, it's crucial to specify your goals and choose the primary marketing channels for your company.

And this would depend on a number of variables, such as your consumer profile, your niche, your level of competence and comfort when developing various forms of content, and your budget for creating courses, to mention a few.

If you're talented at making videos and want to use a free traffic source, for instance, you could want to continue concentrating on Youtube.

On the other hand, you can run paid adverts on social media websites like Facebook if you have a marketing budget and want to see results sooner.

4. Set up a Content Strategy.

You must develop your content strategy after determining your main marketing platforms. You must first decide which subjects and issues are most likely to attract your audience's interest.

Additionally, you must be aware of the types of topics that will perform best on each platform if you plan to advertise your online courses across several channels.

For instance, you can generate material on trending subjects while keeping Pinterest and Medium in mind, but for Google, you'll need to find more specialized subjects that you can rank highly for.

You should also consider what kind of content will be most effective at each level of your sales funnel.

For instance, you could want to write blog entries to draw in new readers, use Facebook live to interact with your audience, and most likely use a webinar to market your course.

In the following sections, we'll dive into more details regarding these issues.

Increase The number of traffic

Gaining traffic is the most important phase in any marketing strategy, and you won't see any benefits unless you can attract new customers to your funnel.

This section will discuss some of the best traffic-generating tactics you can employ to market your online courses while also assisting you in hone your focus.

5. How to Increase Traffic 

Google has the potential to be one of the best sources of dependable, cost-free traffic for your website if you can learn the technique of search engine optimization(SEO).

However, getting results from Google will take time, so you will need to plan and carry out your SEO efforts well in advance of when you anticipate to see any results.

You must first choose themes with less competition that are relevant and around which to develop high-quality content. Additionally, by writing guest posts for other websites, you'll need to advertise your blog and gain links from them. There are a ton of SEO-related tips available online, which you could follow.

6.Blog promotion on Pinterest

With Google probably coming in second place, Pinterest is one of the most well-liked methods of bringing free visitors to a site. In contrast to Google, Pinterest allows you to search for topics that are more popular and with more speed.

You must produce intriguing, text-filled photos that you may utilize to pin your blog posts in order to advertise your website on Pinterest.

7. Launch a YouTube channel

Creating a YouTube channel is a very popular strategy to sell your online courses and grow your audience.

You can choose and target low-competition keywords in order to grow your Youtube channel at first. Additionally, Youtube SEO is still a lot less competitive than Google, making it possible to grow an audience here very quickly.

Furthermore, if your material is strong, you can gain traction on Youtube even in extremely competitive sectors (without SEO). The Youtube algorithm rewards long, interesting videos and promotes channels and videos with higher watch times.

Additionally, you should provide appealing thumbnails and intriguing titles that encourage viewers to click on your videos. You can also encourage your users to share and subscribe to your channel, which will enhance your channel's visibility.

8. Create a podcast

According to research, more than three times the typical annual household income, 45% of US podcast listeners have an annual household income of more than $250,000.

So, if you're making a premium course, beginning a podcast is one of the finest methods to attract customers with lots of disposable income. You should syndicate your Podcast in as many locations as you can, such as Spotify, Soundcloud, Google Play, and Apple Podcasts, to increase its visibility.

Additionally, by asking your listeners to subscribe, share, and post reviews, you may increase their engagement with your content and your visibility on podcasting platforms. You can also work with other Podcast hosts, invite them to your show, and receive invitations to theirs.

9. Reuse Your Content

Reusing your best-performing content will let you increase your presence while putting out the least amount of effort possible. You can only produce a finite amount of original content in a given amount of time.

Using a blog article as the screenplay for a podcast episode, YouTube video, or even a Facebook Live is just one example. Similar to this, you can turn your Reddit and Quora answers into blog entries or scripts by using them.

In addition, you can republish your blog content on sites like Medium and Linkedin Pulse, which is a trustworthy additional method of obtaining free visitors.

High-quality content creation is the most crucial thing you can do to gain visibility on Medium, as editors there frequently curate content and expand its reach.

10. Participate in discussions on Reddit and Quora

Another tried-and-true strategy for getting free traffic with little work is to participate in debates on Reddit and Quora.

When it comes to Reddit, you can search for subreddits that are pertinent to the subject of your course and start participating there. You can provide helpful articles, answer questions from others, and include a helpful link to your website without being overly promotional in your posts.

With Quora, you may find questions about the subject of your course, respond to them with in-depth responses, and include a link to your website in your responses. Furthermore, if your responses are valuable, they are more likely to be upvoted, viewed, and ultimately, earn more traffic.

11. Run a Paid ad campaign

One of the quickest ways to attract highly relevant visitors to your marketing funnels is by using sponsored advertisements. Google, Facebook, and Youtube are the most widely used paid ad channels.

With Google Advertising, you may display ads on blogs and websites via the Google display ad network or show search ads at the top of the search results page. With search advertisements, you can explicitly redirect traffic to users looking for certain keywords in your niche to a blog post or directly to your course sales page.

You may target users with Facebook advertising based on factors such as their location, interests, age, career, and even past purchasing patterns. Additionally, you can present them with several advertisement formats, such as picture, carousel, and video ads.

With Youtube, you may target particular Youtube channels or even videos in addition to showing ads based on keywords. Additionally, you can focus on YouTube users based on their Google search patterns.

In addition to these, there are a number of additional websites where you can display advertisements, such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Reddit. Depending on your industry and the nature of your company, you may choose one of these.

Enhance Your Email List

Getting website visitors to sign up for your email list is the first step in converting them into customers, and we’ll describe how to do that in this section.

12. Construct a Lead Magnet

Lead magnets are one of the most common strategies for doing this because they are a great method to entice website visitors to volunteer their email addresses and help you grow your email list.

Delivering a top-notch lead magnet will also assist you in establishing value and early trust with your audience. You can attempt so many various lead magnet concepts. As your lead magnet, you can use a checklist or an eBook. For instance, free guides convert quite effectively as a lead magnet.

To make a lead magnet that is even more tempting, you may bundle your free information as a mini-course or even an email course.

13. Design a Content Upgrade

While basic lead magnets are effective, you may use a tailored content upgrade in your blog posts to gather email addresses.

A content upgrade is uniquely created for each blog post, as opposed to a lead magnet, which is the main distinction between the two. They frequently convert better than standard lead magnets as a result of this.

Additionally, content improvements are typically fairly easy to make. If you have a lengthy piece, for instance, you can provide a PDF version so that readers can access it later. Alternatively, you could have the audio from your podcast transcribed and sell it as a content upgrade.

14. Making Interactive Content

Another extremely efficient technique to create leads and qualify them at the same time is through quizzes and interactive tools.

You may also employ interactive tools like calculators and chatbots in addition to quizzes to encourage consumers to subscribe to your list. For example, you could give off your course outlines and use that to get their email address.

15. Use several forms of opt-in

Not only do you need a relevant lead magnet or content upgrade to create your email list, but you also need to grab your audience's attention and convince them to subscribe to your list using an opt-in form.

There are many different sorts of opt-in forms available right now, so you should experiment with them all to find which one suits you the best. You can use a slide-in form that appears from the side, a form on the sidebar, a bar at the top, or a full-screen opt-in form. Alternatively, you could add a popup at the top of a page or a fixed opt-in form to the bottom, etc.

Using a variety of opt-in form forms on your website pages is another option that won't annoy your visitors.

16. Apply the Best Practices to Your Opt-In 

You should employ tried-and-true best practices in addition to experimenting with various opt-in form designs to increase your email sign-up rate.

A clear call to action and visually appealing forms are the first thing you'll need to build, therefore we suggest using one of the templates offered by your opt-in form solution.

It's also crucial to display your opt-in forms at the appropriate time. As a result, you may employ timed popups that display after a user has visited a page for a predetermined period of time or exit-intent popups that appear just before a user leaves the page.

In addition, to decrease user friction, you can design multi-step forms with Yes/No buttons at the initial stage.

17. Website Content Customization

One of the most effective conversion marketing strategies involves creating a customized landing page for each visitor.

You can offer individual visitors their own headlines, copy, and even photos. And to further enhance personalisation, you may even present various lead magnets to various guests.

Based on the user's origin, such as a certain domain or a Facebook Ad, you can tailor your landing page. Alternatively, you might add personalisation based on the person's Google search query or whether they are on your email list.

And here comes Ezycourse’s site builder, a very sophisticated drag and drop site builder. Create any kind of website easily without any prior coding knowledge. Ezycourse’s ready-to-use 100% editable templates will help you design a stunning, sleek website, customized to fit your preference and your brand in no time.

18. Develop a newsletter referral program.

Once you have a starting email list, you can set up a referral program to entice your audience to tell their contacts about your email newsletter.

You can entice them by providing a free mini-course, ebook, or discount on your paid course.

Get Your Audience Active

One of the most crucial elements in your funnel is audience engagement, which is essential for boosting course sales later on.

We'll go through some of the most well-liked interaction tactics in this part.

19. Make an introductory email series.

Welcome emails have an open rate that is 86% greater than standard emails, according to research. Therefore, establishing a relationship with new users can depend on whether you send them a ton of emails soon after they sign up or if they become chilly.

Additionally, if your welcome emails are able to add value to your subscribers' lives, they will get to know, like, and trust you, which will make the selling process much simpler.

20. Regularly Distribute Useful Content to Your List

In order to maintain their interest in your brand, it is evident that providing content with your audience on a regular basis is essential. Your regular emails should contain valuable educational information rather than merely advertisements for your course.

So, if you own a blog, a Youtube channel, or a podcast, you can email your followers to distribute new content. Additionally, you can include links to webinars and Facebook Live events in your emails.

You might also want to tailor your email content, add a storytelling component, incorporate interactive elements like quizzes and surveys, and invite consumers to reply to your emails in order to increase the engagement of your emails.

21. Divide Up Your Email List

Another excellent strategy to increase audience engagement is to segment your email subscriber list and deliver relevant material with each segment.

In your welcome email series, for instance, you can ask visitors to select their hobbies or difficulties and then send relevant content with them in accordance.

Additionally, you can divide them apart based on the user's point of origin for signing up, whether or not they clicked on a link, participated in your webinar, or have already purchased your course.

The premise behind segmentation is that by delivering the appropriate emails to the appropriate recipients, you can increase email engagement and lower unsubscribe rates.

22. Check the Efficiency of Your Emails

To preserve email deliverability and the overall ROI of your marketing efforts, keeping track of data like your email open and click rates with email marketing platforms can be essential.

For instance, if you don't periodically purge individuals who hardly ever interact with your emails from your email list, a significant portion of your emails may end up in spam folders. And this may negatively affect the deliverability of your emails.

Additionally, you may test the subject lines and language in your emails to increase interaction by using analytics like open and click rates.

23. Form an Online Community

To increase audience engagement, you should think about establishing an online community in addition to email marketing.

Generally speaking, there are two approaches you can use.

You may therefore create a community on your own website by using a dedicated community platform like EzyCourse Community.

In addition, you would also like to use Facebook Groups, where your target demographic is more likely to be present and where engagement will be a little easier to generate.

24. Target Your Visitors Again

Retargeting allows you to display adverts to subscribers on your email list who haven't opened them recently. Additionally, by consistently interacting with people through customized adverts, you may build brand recognition, which boosts your overall conversion rate.

Additionally, if a customer from your email list returns to your website, you can display a purchase CTA rather than an opt-in CTA.

Retargeting allows you to display advertising to visitors to your website who may have already visited but have not joined your email list.

Additionally, you can modify the adverts you display to users according to the actions they made or the amount of time they spent on your website.

Sell Your Course

Your marketing process's final and possibly most important step is turning leads and visitors into customers. We'll discuss some of the best sales conversion strategies you can employ in this section.

25. Create a Personal Brand

To increase course sales, you must build a personal brand that positions you as someone who can add value.

You must tell a gripping story that encapsulates your professional background or life experiences if you want to develop your own brand. Additionally, you'll need to include eye-catching visuals that convey your individuality.

You can also promote your brand on your website, social media pages, YouTube channel, and other platforms.

26. Make Your Sales Content Engaging

You must get your fundamental sales message right before writing the sales text for your website, emails, or webinars. Simply expressed, you should be able to summarize in a few phrases the benefits of purchasing your course for potential students.

Your sales message should explain things like the precise problem you answer for your users and what distinguishes and adds value to your solution.

The truth is that you don't need to write with a lot of style or flair to master your sales material. And all that is required is to state the benefits your course offers as succinctly and plainly as you can.

27. Establish Social Proof

Before purchasing your course, people want to know if others found it helpful. Therefore, one of the key elements that will determine the success of your course is social proof.

You can post student reviews on your website, YouTube channel, and in emails, among other locations, to demonstrate social proof. Additionally, to make your case even stronger, you could ask a few of your students to use their smartphones to record and send a quick video testimonial.

28. Run A/B Tests

Your email subject lines, email copy, landing page, Facebook advertisements, or any other component of your sales funnel are unlikely to be great the first time around.

Therefore, one of the simplest things you can do to increase conversions is to run A/B tests for various levels in your funnel, and any good sales funnel software will enable you to do that.

Additionally, when doing A/B tests, you should select the trials that have the best chance of having an impact with the least amount of work by remembering the 80/20 rule.

29. Develop a Webinar or Video series 

One of the most common strategies for selling an online course is to produce a sales webinar or a video series and distribute them to your email list. Most of the top course developers employ one of these two strategies.

Prior to making your sales pitch during your sales webinar, you should try to provide lots of value and establish trust. A live sales webinar can be held, as well as recorded and made accessible to your audience for later viewing.

Additionally, if you want to use a video series to market your course, the first few episodes can be very informative, and the final episode can include your pitch.

30. Make an Unstoppable Offer

You can add items like templates, action plans, worksheets, and other content around a topic relevant to your main course topic as bonuses. You may also include access to a closed Facebook group or offer group coaching calls.

In addition, you may group your courses together if you have a number of them and offer a lesser course as a bonus along with the bigger course.

31. Scarcity will increase conversions.

One of the best persuasive strategies for raising the perceived worth of a digital product is to introduce scarcity.

There are a number of techniques to establish scarcity now so that you can promote an online course.

First, you can make your course available for a brief period of time and then close the cart. Additionally, you can give users who register for your course ahead of time a discount.

32. Provide a money-back assurance

If they haven't heard of your company for a long time, some prospective customers could be hesitant to buy your course.

You should provide a money-back guarantee and pledge to reimburse any user who is dissatisfied with your course in order to allay their worries. In the online course industry, where there are no shipping costs and typically low refund rates, it is a pretty common practice.

We’d typically advise creators to provide a 30-day money-back guarantee with no questions asked, but if you're selling a high-ticket program, you might want to shorten it to 14 days.

33. Give a Payment Schedule

Offering a payment plan for your course is another easy approach to increase your conversion rate. If you sell a premium course, you must do this because some customers might be hesitant to pay a significant sum up advance.

In addition, you can charge a little bit extra if a payment plan is chosen instead of a fixed upfront price and include a payment plan as an additional option.

34. Send Abandoned Cart Emails

A survey found that across all industries, approximately 70% of shopping carts are abandoned. Therefore, one of the most efficient strategies to increase your conversions is to send a promotional email to consumers who arrived at your payment page but didn't complete the transaction.

To entice recipients to act quickly, you might include a discount, an exclusive bonus, or even a limited-time offer in your abandoned cart emails.

Additionally, you can adjust your sales pitch to address potential user concerns, which should persuade a few of them to enroll in your course.

35. Establish a program for affiliates

Incentivizing other content producers and influencers to promote your course by setting up an affiliate program is one of the most well-liked strategies for marketing online courses.

You may, for instance, request reviews of your course from blogs and Youtube channels to benefit from their audience reach and the goodwill they have established.

Create a joint venture with other producers who have a substantial email list and enlist their help in promoting your course in exchange for a share of the profits.

The best part about joint ventures and affiliate marketing is that neither requires any up-front cash outlays because you only pay affiliates when a transaction occurs.

Most of the best course designers provide some kind of affiliate scheme for.

Summary

As you can see, there are a variety of tasks you must schedule for online course promotion. We've made an effort to make the entire marketing process simple.

The first step is to decide on your traffic sources and content strategy based on your target audience, skill level, and financial constraints.

The next step is to decide which approach will work best to get visitors to your website to subscribe to your email list. Additionally, you'll need to provide content frequently, keep an eye on your email campaign results, etc. to keep your audience interested.

In order to sell your course, you must employ best practices like developing your sales message, coming up with additional ideas, using social proof, etc.

We hope you enjoyed the article and it’ll help you to market your courses.