Do you want to increase sales for your educational center? Codify LMS marketers and methodologies have prepared effective marketing tools that will definitely give results.
In this article, we will look at the main directions for increasing sales for a training product:
- Steps before launching the course
- Ways to optimize the course structure
- Promotion through a personal brand
- Free methods
- Paid promotion methods
- Examples of effective sales funnels
First, we will discuss about the important steps that need to be implemented before the launch online course:
1. The image of the ideal student
Write down who is your ideal student. What are his goals? And what solutions can you offer him?
2. Unique course offerings
Include all your differences of course on your landing page, write posts on social networks and mailing lists. You will also have a clearly formulated answer to the question: “How does your course differ from other similar ones?” Tell about the results that students will receive after passing it, how they will be able to grow?
3. Interview the target audience
Find out what is bothering your target auditory, what problems they are trying to solve. The survey can be conducted in several ways:
- If you run your blog, YouTube channel, then you can contact your subscribers with a question about what they would like to get from the course, what information it would be great to include in it
- Conduct a personal interview with potential clients
- Make a newsletter and ask to fill out the form
4. Analysis of search queries
Imagine that you are going to find the information contained in your course. How exactly do you formulate a search query to find such information? Use Google Trends. Find keywords related to the topic of your course and include them in the title.
5. Optimize social media profiles
In all social networks, update your biography, reflect your professional activity and information about the course, put a link to your website and blog.
6. Build a customer base
Most people need a reminder to make a purchase decision. Therefore, having a contact list can be a very effective tool for your training center to create an effective sales funnel.
The database can be stored in an Excel or CRM system (Customer Relationship Management). The inclusion of a sales funnel in a CRM system will also help identify unnecessary processes in the sales chain and evaluate the overall effectiveness of customer interaction.
7. Connect Google analytics, Yandex. Metric to the site.
This task can be assigned to your digital marketer. Also, creating a sales funnel (see below) will help you see at what stage a large number of potential customers disappear.
Next, we will determine how to optimize the structure of the training product:
Offer a satisfaction guarantee
This is usually a money-back guarantee where anyone who didn’t like your course can request a refund within 30 days of purchase. This increases confidence in the course.
Installment payment
For example, if you sell an online course for 30,000 SOM/rubles, you can offer a payment option of 5,000 SOM/rubles per month for 6 months.
Translate your course into other languages
Translating the course into other languages is a great way to increase sales if your subject is international.
Multiple courses for cross promotion
Create several highly specialized courses with similar topics and inform that you have other related areas.
Offer discounts on a group of courses
Sell your courses at discounts, combining them into groups of 3–5 pieces. Everyone likes to buy cheaper. Therefore, by making a 20–25% discount, you will stimulate sales and sell not one, but several courses from one sale.
Create a free mini-course
Take some of the sections or ideas of the main course and make a mini-course out of them. Upload and distribute it for free, and at the end of the mini-course offer an advanced version with in-depth knowledge, which can be purchased separately.
Partnership with other online instructors
Find people who are experts in your niche (but are not direct competitors) and offer to conduct a joint webinar for your audience. You can also complement each other’s courses or combine them and sell courses in a package.
Ways to promote through a Personal brand
Promote the course on your blog
Your blog is a great place to promote your course, especially if you regularly publish free content related to the topic of the course.
Positive reviews on the website
Add some positive reviews to the sales page of your course, it will be very good if there is a video review. If there are no reviews for your course, you can hold an action — the first few who sign up take the course for free or at a discount in exchange for a positive review.
Add a link to your course in the email signature
Add a short description and a link to your course in the email signature, even if the recipient is not interested in your course yet, he will know about it and will be able to tell those who will be interested in it.
Live webinar, video and live broadcasts on social networks
Instagram Facebook, Instagram or YouTube live stream for people interested in your topic. It is advisable to plan the broadcast plan in advance. People who are already watching you, get useful information for free, see you as an expert in this field and may well become buyers of the course. You can add subtitles to the video to make it convenient not only to listen, but also to read.
Promote the webinar recording
After you have successfully conducted a live webinar, you can use this entry to sell more courses. Send an email to people who have registered for your live webinar, but did not attend it, and send them a link to view the recording.
Perform at events and meet in Meetup groups
Meetup groups are a great way to make a presentation for your audience. As a rule, a presentation should contain 80% of valuable content and 20% of sales.
Creating groups in social networks
Creating a Facebook group is great for personal branding because it helps you become an authority on your topic. And the Linkedin platform is a great way to create your community with an interested target audience. Linkedin is interesting precisely because it is possible to find and attract users on certain professional grounds.
You can also leave your comments in Facebook groups, Telegram, LinkedIn and forums that are related to your topic. You can find out in advance about the rules of the group, since direct advertising is usually prohibited in them.
Write your own author’s book
You can self-publish your book in digital format. Be sure to include a link to your course in the book and invite readers to visit the website or social networks. The book can be saved in PDF format.
Useful articles in your blog
Write unique articles on Medium or Yandex Zen that answer frequently asked questions of potential customers, as well as contain answers to their objections. At the end of each article, add a link to your course. You can add friends to potential customers on LinkedIn and invite them to read your article.
Third-party free services and platforms
Launch a YouTube channel
YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world after Google. Millions of people are looking for videos with the queries “How to do….”, and YouTube videos in the search are often higher than sites. Create a YouTube channel dedicated to the topic of your course and regularly post useful videos. Include a link to your website or course in the video description and use keywords.
Record a podcast
Everyone who listens to your podcast is a potential buyer of an online course. Share valuable tips, and at the end of each episode include a call to action to visit the website and learn more about your course. You can download the podcast on YouTube, in social networks, for example in the form of an interview.
Student reviews and ratings on Google, Yandex Maps, 2Gis
Reviews are of great importance when making a purchase decision. It is important for buyers to understand what they will receive and read the reviews of those who have already made an acquisition before and share their experience on public platforms and electronic maps.
Multilink in the Instagram profile header
It can be created via Taplink, Link tree or Deep link. A multilink makes it possible to place several links in one link: a useful article, contacts, website, WhatsApp, Telegram channel, lead magnet, etc.
Ask bloggers to review your course in exchange for free access
You can also promote the course on other YouTube channels. Find popular videos related to the topic of your course. Contact the owner of the video and offer him the opportunity to earn extra money on his video.
Share infographics on Pinterest
Create an infographic using the Canva service, which will reflect interesting facts, statistics or a step-by-step process on your topic. Then you can post it on Pinterest, where infographics are very popular. This will help attract traffic to the website with the course.
Lead magnet in exchange for contact details
Create useful free material that a potential client will receive in exchange for their phone number or email. Lead magnet is one of the most effective ways to build a high-quality customer base. The most effective types of lead-magnets:
- Checklists
- Guides/Manuals
- List of resources
- Cheat sheets
- Tests
- Video tutorials
Paid promotion methods
Buying ads on YouTube
Show ads for your course to people who watch videos with a similar topic. You can set up ads based on geo- and demographic criteria.
Write articles on information portals
Warm up the audience through a series of native articles in such portals as KAKTUS, Lemon, Economist. It is more profitable to buy the placement of several articles than one by one. For example, start with the points in modern education and ending with the inspiring story of a student of your course.
To use contextual advertising in Google Adwords and Yandex Direct
Let the target queries appear in search results and on partner sites in the form of images (Google Display Network and Yandex Advertising Network).
Instagram Facebook and Instagram targeted ads
Using Facebook, you can create ads targeted at people, taking into account their specific demographics, interests, behavior, location and retargeting — those who have already visited your site, but have not committed a targeted action.
Buy advertising banners
Find websites and blogs where your target audience is. Arrange for a paid banner placement with your course. Create a unique link for each site where you place banners so that you can track sales statistics and evaluate the effectiveness of such advertising. Test it for one month to understand how visitors to a particular site react to your ad. And after that, discuss options for long-term cooperation.
Connect autoresponders
This helps not only to answer frequently asked questions 24/7, but also to involve a potential client in an interactive game so that he leaves his contacts. You can connect auto-replies with Many Chat, Telegram bot, WhatsApp business and auto-replies in Facebook.
Quizzes in social networks
Through the Marquiz service, you can independently make engaging quizzes that can bring you additional high-quality leads.
Examples of effective sales funnels for your training center
If you really want to increase the sales volume of the course, you need to create a sales funnel. It will include several of the above marketing techniques that will work smoothly. This is a kind of customer’s path, after which a purchase decision is made.
Sales funnel examples:
The ability to correctly build a sales funnel, implement it into a CRM system and analyze the client’s path is the key to a guaranteed increase in profits.
Now you have learned about new effective ways of promotion. Determine which ones are best suited for your course and the target audience. And with the Codify LMS platform, you can scale the results several dozen times. Our platform combines the most important functions of both CRM and LMS systems. In it, you can manage the customer base and conduct lessons by checking your homework.
Follow the link and start a free Test drive of the Codify LMS All-in-One platform or get a Demo presentation: https://lms.codifylab.com/en?utm_source=medium&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=tools
