10 tips to promote your online courses and gain more students

Promotion is at the heart of a successful online course, especially for entrepreneurs or up-and-coming freelance course creators. If you don’t already have a large platform or an online community of followers, you will need to work a lot harder to showcase the new course that you have created to your prospective students.

For you to gain more students, people should know exactly what you are offering. It also helps depict your brand's unique value proposition. For this, all it takes are a few simple marketing tactics to get your new students and target audience interested.

Creating a course is step one. If you are still in this process, check out some good tips for creating a signature online course. If you’ve already created relevant content, take a moment to feel proud of the countless hours you put into building your entire course from scratch. 

The important thing now is that all that hard work doesn’t go to waste. If you don’t work towards promoting online courses as aggressively, it is unlikely that very many online students will hear about it. 

Did you forget to put together all the marketing strategies to sell online courses? Don’t worry. Whether you’re creating online courses to be able to work from home, or simply have a passion you want to instill in others, this article has you covered.

Importance of Promoting Your Online Courses

Online courses have value in themselves, but it’s essential that they reach their intended audience. Otherwise, nobody will be able to benefit from them.

However, the internet is full of countless strategies and advice on how you can best promote your online course. Navigating the huge number of articles and tips might look daunting, especially when marketing theories and complicated approaches are thrown into the mix. 

Instead, take a look below at 10 great, easy-to-follow tips on improving your marketing strategy to gain more students. If you’re working in a team to promote your online course, make sure you are optimizing your support team’s productivity.

10 Simple Tips On How To Promote Your Online Courses

1. Produce informative yet entertaining visuals
2. Multi-channel content marketing
3. Provide your audiences with sample mini-courses
4. Create a clear course page on your website
5. Showcase your best reviews
6. Create bundle courses
7. Build an email branding
8. Invest in paid ads
9. Start your own community
10. Network with like-minded people

Let's deep dive for a detailed understanding of each of these insightful tips-

1. Produce informative yet entertaining visuals

What you write to market your online course content is important. But visuals play a huge part in helping create awareness and catching the eye of potential students, and should not be underestimated. Make sure that your website, landing page, social media- Facebook page, youtube videos, and other channels are highly organized, optimized and aesthetic. If your content looks professional and is visually stimulating, this can play a huge role in helping you gain more students.

Pick images that relay useful information about the core values and key selling points of your course. This way, you will visually reaffirm to a prospective client that you are selling something they will want to buy. 

And don’t forget about videos. They are a great way to capture your target audience's attention. Therefore, a video marketing strategy is an excellent way to promote your course.

2. Multi-channel content marketing

Next, make sure you are exposing your content to a wide, highly targeted, audience. To do this, you need to market across multiple platforms and channels, so that as many people as possible are exposed to your online course and quality content.

To become successful online instructors/course creators and gain more students, do not just rely on a single medium to communicate with your existing students and also future students. Spread out your efforts, publishing more courses on places like Udemy, StackSocial, Learnable, and other teaching marketplaces. Also, communicate with people via multiple social media platforms, social media ads, and community tools. Your voice needs to be heard everywhere.

And make sure you keep your marketing strategy be it via search engine optimization, paid advertising campaigns, google ads, affiliate program, or social media marketing strategies right in place. Additionally, evaluate pain points while you create content and support with visuals consistent on all of these channels. This will make your online course seem legitimate, leading prospective buyers into trusting you and your brand.

3. Provide your audiences with sample mini-courses

This will drive the user's curiosity to test out the uploaded Mini-Courses on your course sales page. This will give your target audience an idea of how your courses and online classes will run once they have enrolled, helping them to understand what they are investing in.

Some people may be hesitant to pay for your full course, especially if you are only just starting out and have few positive reviews. Offering a free mini-course will drive curious users to test out your content. It also works as a free lead magnet at times. This will make them more likely to pay for the full thing later on.

At the end of the mini-course, make sure you include a message advertising and encouraging students to purchase the full course. A personal and meaningful conversation or message telling them what they will learn if they do, and all the perks you are including in the actual course.

4. Create a clear course page on your website

When organizing the content you are selling, everything should be clearly set out and easy to follow. Details of your online courses should be succinctly labeled so that your students don’t have a hard time picking or finding the right one. 

Choose a readable font and background, and organize your information in an intuitive way. Your students should never feel lost on your course page.

Lastly, consider adding an online booking system to your website to sell courses more efficiently. Facilitating a good user experience for your customers will make them more likely to subscribe to your content again, and speak favorably of your course to others.

5. Showcase your best reviews

Make sure you are encouraging all of your current students to leave positive reviews on your site. Most potential customers or enrollees rely on proof from previous customers to convince them into investing in your course. Harness your very best reviews and make sure they are clearly on display on your course page.

And on a related note, make sure you listen to the reviews and feedback you receive to improve your course. Workplace optimization is a great way to improve your business's interactions with customers. By engaging with customers to fix problems they have with your product, you will seem approachable and professional. 

Always invest in customer support. If you have a team of people working on customer service, ensure that you have a skills-based routing system in place. It will help you ensure that your customers are being helped by the most qualified individual for the needs of your client.

6. Create bundle courses

Bundles and package deals are a great way to get customers to invest in some of your bigger online courses with certificates, by enticing them with lower prices. Offer the first class for free, or at a discounted price, to induce students into giving your courses a try. 

Publish your discounts on deal listing sites to increase your reach and speed up revenue. Moreover, consider adding discounts on class packs and class bundles, as well as family packs or referrals, to gain large numbers of students quickly. 

Lastly, by creating a sense of urgency (this deal ends today!), prospective customers are more likely to act fast and think later, driving up numbers.

7. Build an Email Branding

Email marketing is one of the best marketing strategies to reach interested and potential students. Reach out to your existing contacts via emails, newsletters, and those who are familiar with your courses. They could provide you with new leads.

For prospective customers, you will often need to email repeatedly before they feel encouraged to buy. Consistency is crucial, as it builds trust. Send helpful, informative emails using email software like ActiveCampaign or ClickFunnels to intrigue the student into considering the full course.

However, this can be quite time-consuming. Automating email communication can help you simplify the people you are looking to reach. Like an outbound contact center, strong email branding can reach large audiences, slowly converting prospective clients into customers.

And never forget to include a link to your courses within every email you send to potential customers and subscribers. Readily accessible information is the key to successful conversions.

8. Invest in Paid Ads

Paid ads such as Google, Instagram, and Facebook Ads have a proven track record of increasing brand awareness, as long as your target audiences are properly targeted.

In other words, sometimes you have to put money in to make more of it. Running paid ads can be an excellent way to promote your online courses, as even one small Facebook ad can make a huge difference.

Of course, whether or not you do this will depend on your budget, so make sure you can afford to pay for ads in the long run. You don’t really need to know about the inventory turnover ratio formula to figure out whether you can incorporate ads into your marketing plan either. But make sure you do a bit of math to calculate if you have the budget for this kind of promotion.

If you do, the benefits are many. Ads are easy to track, highly targeted to your market audience, and really fast at getting results.

9. Start your own Community

Next, make sure you build up a community around your courses, engaging with other course makers and the students who are most likely to purchase and use your content. If you become known within these spaces, people are more likely to see you as a professional, reliable source. This will help them make the ultimate decision to invest in your brand.

Some great places to look into are Facebook groups, Quora space, and starting your own Youtube Channel. These, and other community-building tools, can help you increase user engagement, thereby promoting your product to large groups of people.

10. Network with like-minded people

Use partners to leverage your marketing endeavors. You can do this by harnessing a community of professionals with similar goals, where you help each other to promote your businesses or promote your course.

One way of doing this is by making the most of customer stories and reviews, as relayed above. But you can also guest post and guest blog on other professional websites, in exchange for them doing the same for you. This will increase your reliability as a professional source, as well as improve your SEO and build digital trails that lead back to your course page.

If you plan to set up an affiliate marketing strategy, make sure you keep in mind that there will be a standard affiliate commission. This needs to be competitive and motivational for your partners, whilst also remaining cost-efficient for you.

Key takeaways

Many of these tips are very easy to implement into your marketing strategy. And doing so will only ever benefit you and help you gain more students for your online course. The main thing to remember is that any choice you make should be based on proper planning and knowledge of what you most need to focus on. 

Have a clear strategy in place, to try and reach as many people as possible with a concise, aesthetically pleasing, and effective promotional strategy.

If you'd like to learn more about how Omnify can help your online course, check it out for yourself with a FREE TRIAL and start optimizing your business today!

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