How to market an e-learning course

Designing online courses suitable for responding to a training need and the preferences of your students is not enough. You must also be able to reach the students by planning a sales strategy right from the beginning. All this, without neglecting the most modern marketing tools like the use of social media.
Here are some of the strategies you can use to market your online courses.

1. Build your own e-learning website

Online presence is essential, either for specialized e-learning companies or for freelancers offering online training courses.
The website has long since ceased to be just a showcase with the goods or services on display. Through content marketing (i.e. sales techniques based on creating content that interest your target), you can convert readers into users of your online courses. Content marketing involves writing articles that report key words, i.e. the terms most searched by potential customers: “e-learning”, “online courses” are just the most obvious examples. In the design or purchase of the site it is essential that it is also responsive, suitable to be supported by smartphones, one of the tools closest to users.

2. Use social networks to promote online courses

In 2018, no sales strategy can work without social media. It's not just about being on social media, but about choosing the right tool to get to the right target. For example, you can use YouTube and Instagram for younger people, LinkedIn for professionals and companies, Twitter for the media world. Social media are easy to access from your smartphone and the study of consumer habits helps to understand at what time of the day you have to post some content.

3. Diversify the tools for the promotion of online courses

Videos, gaming and images have not only become essential parts of an online course, but also support the sale of e-learning products. For this reason, in addition to a nice article that introduces an online course, you need to think of other tools that can strengthen its action. A podcast and a short video are ideal for reaching a moving audience, perhaps on its home-work way. Unpaid pills or micro-learning can be used to incentivize a potential student to enrol in the course. Also in this case, the mobile phone is one of the most widespread supports.

4. Create an editorial plan

Online presence is more effective if there is an integrated strategy for sharing content on your site or on social media. An editorial plan is used to organize the publication of articles, videos and podcasts. Calendaring also plays an important role because it helps promote the right course at the right time. If online courses are offered in the cloud via an LMS (learning management system), they can not be tracked by search engines. This is why a coherent editorial plan organizes content on its website and on social media so that users can find the course they are looking for without difficulty.
All the strategies for the sale from the website to social media to the editorial plan with multimedia contents, to be really effective, must be adapted to one of the most used tools all over the world: the smartphone.