Designing and launching an online course can be hard work. Unfortunately though, that is only the first step.
Success in any business depends on how well you market your product. The more people you reach with a targeted product, the higher your chance of connecting with your audience and making a sale.
Why Content Marketing?
There are dozens of ways to reach a targeted audience with marketing. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is among the most popular strategies. But using PPC is a recurring expense and erodes your margins.
Organic marketing strategies such as search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing are a lot more profitable. This is especially true if your strategy involves publishing multiple courses targeting the same target audience.
Your website’s authority in your industry heavily influences your success with these techniques, especially in the online course business. There, the sole reason your customer buys your course is because they see you as an authority.
Content marketing involves producing text, video, and visual-based content to draw an audience. It will help you demonstrate your credibility among your followers. This credibility in turn helps with converting them into paying customers.
How to Build Content for Online Course Marketing
To begin with, you must establish a content marketing strategy that aligns with your industry and audience. For instance, the best way for violin teachers to showcase their expertise is through videos.
A YouTube channel is ideal for this purpose. Stocks consultants, on the other hand, will want to publish market research reports or participate in webinars to demonstrate their expertise.
Once you have established your strategy, the next step is to create content. There are two ways to do so. An active content creation strategy focuses on establishing a schedule for content delivery and following a routine while publishing content.
Passive content creation strategies involve repackaging existing content to fit your marketing needs. Let’s take a look at some of the most common active and passive content marketing channels, as well as how to deploy them while promoting your online course.
Blogs
Blogging can be an effective content marketing strategy to demonstrate your authority and build your brand. The first rule of blogging is to stick with a theme.
Stock consultants might, for example, pick their top stocks at the beginning of each day. Readers of this blog are thus likely to visit the blog every day for advice. Predictability is key to building a brand.
YouTube Channels
Businesses of all types have used YouTube video channels as a successful marketing strategy. YouTube is highly effective in industries where visual engagement is key to building authority.
In some ways, managing a video channel on YouTube is similar to running a blog. You must establish a theme and stick with it. Also, sticking to a schedule helps your followers come back to you on a regular basis. Building returning followers is critical to brand building.
There are a few other points to note while using YouTube to market your online courses. Given the sheer number of videos published on YouTube every day, retaining your viewers’ focus can be a big challenge.
Annotations and the video description fields are immensely valuable for nudging your viewers into following your channel or subscribing to your mailing list.
In addition to keeping your subscribers updated with your latest videos, annotations and description fields also help direct subscribers to a marketing pipeline where you can market your online course.
“Active” content channels such as blogging and video marketing help bring a targeted list of buyers to your course.
But you might also look at repackaging other content you have created for marketing your course. This tactic is especially useful for B2B businesses that invest in a lot of content creation beyond blogging and videos.
Webinars
Businesses create a lot of video content as part of their marketing efforts. Webinars are essentially cloud-hosted discussions on industry topics that are of interest to the customer.
A company’s learning management system (or LMS, for short) also hosts a lot of other educational videos to help with the employee onboarding system. You can repackage such videos into content to market on YouTube or through your company’s blog.
Research Studies
B2B businesses routinely publish industry reports and surveys that target their audience. Such reports can be an extremely lucrative source for promoting online courses.
The results from such research studies may be repackaged as infographics that you can embed within your blog posts. Or you can make them into videos for your YouTube channels.
Using Content for Marketing Your Online Course
Once you have content, the next step is to make use of this content to market your online course. There are a couple of different ways to do so.
Direct Promotion
Direct promotion works if you have content that directly addresses a topic you have explained in detail in your online course.
For example, if you have an online course about mutual funds, you could discuss them in your blog post. Then nudge your readers to buy your course in order to learn more about mutual funds.
Lead Magnet
Content marketing strategies such as blogs and YouTube serve as platforms to draw a targeted audience to your website. You can then funnel your audience into your mailing list or newsletter where you can promote your online course.
This strategy is especially useful if you have several online courses targeting the same audience. A mailing list helps your business market all these courses to the same group of customers.
Bonus Content
Some online courses can be hard to sell, particularly if they come with high list prices (usually over $100 per course). In such cases, you can make use of content to add value to your course material.
Research reports cost several thousands of dollars to publish and have a market price of several hundred dollars.
Your business can offer such reports as “bonus” content to customers who buy your online courses. Doing so raises the value of the product you’re selling and helps convert more customers to your online course.
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Thanks for sharing,
I want to ask if is possible to promote products using same way.
The laid down steps are the best strategy i have seen so far in ebook promotion. Because you are reaching the right audience once.
Nwancho Miracle would love you to read ..30+ Long distance relationship messages for boyfriend From The Heart
Thanks for sharing such a wonderful post.
Nowadays Content is the best way to attract your customers and It can drive more traffic and convert leads too.
That’s why content is the king of marketing.
Udit Khanna would love you to read ..Content Writing
A helpful Article Tricks to those who working in the world of Content Writing .Content is telling all about your Business to the Internet world.Now a days people want to know about everything through the Internet content and Blogging.
Thank you Akash forYour Useful Tips.
Great article Aakash!Really content is playing a main role in promoting online courses…..we are into Online IT training.Your article is very useful to me and i learned new things from your article.Thank your for sharing a nice informative article.
Literally speaking, i was looking for strategies on how to promote a course, i guess i came to the right blog! Thanks, Aakash this was superbly put together.
Interesting learning Aakash. I liked it very much… the way you began your speech was killer…. thats called the presence of mind. Great Post
and you step by the step guideline really likeable
Content Marketing is one of the most powerful tools and it really makes more impact when it is used to Promote Online Courses.
Hi,
This is nice post for content marketing promote online course and having right articles to see you here and thanks a lot for sharing with us.
Hello Akash
Content Marketing is indeed the best way to promote online course. Content is the king nowadays, It can either grow or decline the business depends on the quality of the content. I liked your stand on this topic. Thanks for writing it and sharing with us.
Cheers!!!
When building content solely for the purpose of marketing an online course, it has to be carefully done since there is a tendency that people will incorporate the quality of the content to the online course, and that’s crucial. Anyways, great points you have here.
Hi Aakash,
I was going through your post and l found it very interesting and very helpfull article. Thank you very much.
We appreciate your work.
Thank you,
Thanks for all your tips. I kind of just started doing affiliate marketing. I’m doing most of the things you mentioned. Thanks again for all the info.
I appreciate your post and its true.content is best way for promote your business.unique content makes business success.Hope it will help to my DJ business.Keep posting.
Cheers,
dave
Thank you so much for the article. I am always looking for more step to promote my online courses to help students for their better career. Your article helps a lot.
Blogging is no doubt the best way to promote your content. There are so many free blogging websites, you can submit your article there and backlink them on your website.
Hey Aakash,
I just love reading your blogs as your blogs are always different from others while most of the other website blogs seems to have copied content.
I have just started a tech website
, if you could give me some tips on how I can grow it would be very helpful.
Hi Raj,
The real key to growing a blog is relationships. Choose 5-10 blogs in your niche and comment there regularly and interact with the others in your niche in the comments.
Create accounts using the same username on the major social networks. Use them to share your content and other great content – especially the content from those 5-10 blogs you are commenting on.
Find those people on the social networks. Share and reshare each others content. Suggest you meet somewhere (Skype, Facebook, etc.) and talk about how you can grow together. Check out the post on Blogging Collaborations for tips.
Gail Gardner would love you to read ..WANTED: Bloggers Interested in Collaborating to Increase Their Incomes
Hello Aakash,
I have go through from your entire article and l found it very interesting that it engaged me to the entire article. The article is very well written clearly states the importance of content writing. Generally,people don’t take it seriously to the scope of content writing in driving the lead. I hope after reading this people will understand the content marketing and do it efficiently to get the maximum traffic on the website.
Thanks for such a useful article. For the brand, promotion Know Your Audience and Give Them What They Want Before you can create successful, engaging and overall great content, you’ve got to know your audience very well. One technique to employ in this regard is keyword research, aimed at discovering what your ideal customers are looking for.
Super post Aakash. Goodness I love blogging as a means to promote my 3 courses. Easy way to spread the word about your online course, in any niche. Trust builder.