Promoting e-learning products or educational platforms can be a tricky thing, especially in 2021, with its unexpected events. In fact, the year 2021 has made the online education market more difficult for promotion since the competition has increased several times. Nevertheless, there are no impossible things in the world. Promoting e-learning can be an exciting and fruitful journey if you know the right algorithm.
1. Research your potential audience: create your buyer persona.
The most important rule of marketing is to start by learning about your potential clients and creating buyer personas in the first place. Of course, this rule remains true for promoting an educational platform or e-learning materials in 2021. In fact, it is way better to start researching your audience before launching or even creating your eLearning courses. The thing is that the research of your potential audience will help you to figure out the needs, problems, and requirements that your products should meet to become successful. Think of future users not only as learners but as customers as well.
- Make up some time to think over the concept of your product and how it can respond to the existing problems related to the learning process. Use the data of the finished surveys, conduct your own as well, use diverse marketing tools to analyze the demand.
- After that, differentiate the audience into detailed client personas. Try to imagine yourself in their place, delve into their lives, figure out their lifestyles, find out what they are passionate or worried about, what challenges they have to meet, and where exactly they are looking for solutions.
All this gathered knowledge will lead you on your way to customizing and creating rapport with your audience. You will be able to know how to position your products and make the audience sure that your brand offers wise and good solutions.
In all cases, one of the key principles in brand positioning is creating a persuasive statement showing that you hold a solution to the clients’ problems. Of course, it will take time to develop the right format of your e-learning courses and build up a collection of inspiring mottoes. The main criterion of good brand representation is the ability to clearly communicate how exactly your products address diverse types of clients’ needs. The easiest way to do so is to motivate your potential clients from the state of the end result of your e-learning courses, i.e., you need to inspire them by listing all the advantages they will get if they go through a particular course.
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2. Develop storytelling
To motivate your students, you need to be careful about the choice of your words. Try to use positive motivation instead of negative statements, even if they are true. For example, try to avoid negativity like “you fail to learn something because you lack regular practice”. By any means, phrases like this one are encouraging. Instead, try describing to your potential learners what their future success may look like and that it is not far away.
Furthermore, the right choice of words also involves wise storytelling. The right manner of storytelling helps you to present your brand with simplicity. Usually, telling someone a captivating story will capture their attention. Brand storytelling usually includes the summary of your vision, aspiration, the story of your brand, the unique concept of your company, etc.
3. Pay a lot of attention to SEO posts
Once the concept and storytelling vision is set, pay a lot of attention to developing your actual marketing campaign. The main component of any successful marketing is the presence of SEO articles on your platform blog. This is the essential strategic step since SEO articles create a constant flux of visitors to your website even if you do not run any other marketing campaigns.
To have successful posts generating traffic, make sure to follow these recommendations:
- Research the latest trends on the Internet and the most popular search queries using diverse marketing tools;
- Find out more data about the chosen topic and create an outline;
- Use the researched information about your target audience to adopt the most appropriate writing style and the manner of expressing your thoughts;
- Make sure that readability is your priority. Do not create articles to implement as many keywords as you can. Instead, focus on the ways to make the article useful for its readers. In addition, pay attention to the visual representation of your article: mind spacing, the size, and type of the selected font, etc.;
- Use only unique photos or illustrations;
- Promote your SEO articles with the help of crowd marketing and link building.
Keep in mind that your primary task is not ranking for a search engine. The only thing that really matters is creating value for real people, not to search engine indexing robots. We need to admit that ranking the first position does not always mean that websites can convert the major part of visitors into conversions or at least leads. Make sure that your meta description and meta title not only include keywords but also reflect the value that your articles may give to their potential readers.
Pay attention to 2021 trends in SEO writing: distance learning, online tools, interactive platforms, etc.
4. Run ads campaigns
The second step on your way to attracting more leads is to launching ad campaigns on social media, apps, and search engine ads. Keep in mind that this type of advertisement creates a temporary increase in visitors and converted leads. Once you stop running the campaign, you will lose this flux.
Another important aspect of running ad campaigns for eLearning courses is that the early launch is highly recommended. Start running your ads campaign several weeks before the start of your eLearning courses. This will help to make your digital content noticeable and make the targeted audience aware of this possible solution to their learning problems. In this way, you create teasers that immediately grab your potential customers’ attention. Of course, teasers often include a possibility for potential clients to save up some money thanks to an early bird discount.
Usually, these accounts are possible only for those who managed to close the deal within a specific amount of time: the first 24 hours, week, etc. Furthermore, if you use teasers, you will no longer need to wait for your customers to launch an online live course since they will be right on your waiting list. However, it is essential to point out that teasers and ads are two different things. Teasers do not provide all the details about your product; they only grab attention and highlight the value. Ads usually give more detailed information about the services and also often indicate the exact price.
At the same time, pay a lot of attention to the process of targeting. Use the social surveys and the obtained information about your buyers’ personas before launching anything. These details are crucial in choosing the right channel for the customer acquisition process.
5. Promote your platform with guest blogging
Ad campaigns and good SEO articles are not enough. You will need to boost your website ratings thanks to the presence of external links referring to your domain and subdomains. One of the easiest ways of achieving this is to promote your website with the help of guest blogging. This technique is basically submitting your articles to other webmasters and platforms to get links from their websites. In addition, guest blogging will help you to kill two birds at the same time since it is also a great opportunity to create some organic traffic.
In this marketing strategy, it is essential to differentiate websites that may give you high-quality links. Some possible sources for ghost marketing are the websites of influential bloggers, old and authoritative websites with similar topics orientation, high-ranking writing platforms looking for new articles, etc. To determine if a particular website corresponds to your needs, use marketing tools, such as Buzzsumo, SEMrush, SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, SeoQuake, etc. The sections that you will need are ratings (D/A, Alexa rank, SEMrush rank, Google index, Bing index), backlinks, age.
However, the authority of a potential link-giving website is not the only aspect that matters. It is quite possible that a random site with a high rating may not approve your article because its webmaster is not interested in posting any content referring to another website. Therefore, to boost your chances to get your articles approved is to aim for guest blogs or platforms with the option of submitting an article. It would be easier to find these websites using the following or similar search queries:
- Your targeted keyword plus the combination “write for us”;
- Your targeted keyword plus “contribute to our website”;
- Your targeted keyword plus “submit your article”;
- Your targeted keyword plus “posts Wanted”.
Last but not least, the essential requirement for this strategy is to be able to provide valuable and unique content for the audience of your niche. The mentioned condition is not a big problem for the sphere of online education since an eLearning course is basically the quintessence of useful content. Therefore, you only need to decide on parts of your course that can be used in ghost articles without revealing too much information.
6. Get influencers involved
It goes without saying that people are inclined to trust the recommendation of the people they respect or those who have reached credibility or considerable progress in a certain sphere. Therefore, sometimes it is more efficient to get recommendations or testimonials from this type of people than persuade potential clients with the help of a thought-through marketing message.
The most common method to make these people provide testimonials for your eLearning program is to give them free access and to ask for a review if they like what they are offered. As a rule, influencers feel appreciated and grateful for having such an honor. Of course, the main condition to receive praise from them is to make sure that your content corresponds to all the standards of online education. Furthermore, you need to be sure that your courses can impress these influencers, so ensure that you can stand out from your competitors in one way or another. Perfect influencers for your website might be managers, opinion leaders, bloggers, Instagram influencers, popular educators, and eLearning experts. Of course, the specialization of your eLearning courses will define more precisely whom you really need to target for this role.
In addition to that, it is possible to get valuable recommendations right from your followers’ or clients’ base. Build rapport with your learners to get positive reviews. In fact, it is also possible to create a program where your clients get different sorts of bonuses once they refer their eLearning course to a friend.
7. Use the power of email marketing
Email marketing is still a powerful marketing tool that not only helps you to keep in touch with the existing leads but also to convert them into clients and reach a new audience. To make email marketing work, it is required to send out emails and newsletters on a regular basis. At the same time, the quantity of these letters should not make readers want to unsubscribe from the list. Keep in mind that people are overloaded with information these days. Therefore, sending several emails a day may look annoying. Instead, the primary task of email marketing should be not to overbore your leads but to remind them of the value you create. However, what is even more important for effective email campaigns is having great content and matching visual components.
To hook your leads, use catchy titles and subject lines, compelling and easy-to-scan content, a message that resonates with the needs of your targeted audience. Hire professional designers for unique and attractive layouts if your finances allow you to do so. If not, there is a great amount of free downloadable templates that can come in handy.
Author: Anne Harrett is a successful PR manager of an online education company Pro-papers. In her free time, she enjoys cycling and playing table tennis. Anne is married and has two kids.
