Marketing your online courses to a wider audience

e-Learning is a method of delivering training online that can be accessed by anyone who has an internet connection. With the increasing number of training providers around the world, moving classroom materials to online training interventions which has many benefits such as; it is easy to use, cost-effective, convenient, etc, e-Learning is in high demand. There are many more benefits to e-Learning which include flexibility to offer education at any time or anywhere to learners who are using smart devices. The amount of time taken with e-Learning is way less than that taken for classroom learning, this could mean that employees can spend more time applying their skills in the workplace than having to spend more time in developing their skills in the traditional way.

Now the question is, having developed or created online courses, have training providers thought of how to market those courses online to a large and broader audience?

There are many ways to market online training that include:

• Identifying your different selling plan
• Studying your audience before you create your course
• Promote your course via your blog
• On your sales page add learners’ testimonials
• Produce several courses and cross promote
• Request your students to evaluate your course
• Show how eLearning can save your Clients money
• Suggest a payment strategy
• Use Google AdWords
• Create a Facebook Page

We will be looking at the above ideas over the next few weeks, but to start with:

Identifying your different Selling Plan

A great place to begin is, to identify a selling plan for your courses, this will help you in the long term because you will get to know what your goals are and how you intend achieving them.  Research your competition for other courses similar to the ones you are offering, this allows you to know more about what they do, how they do it, how they are pricing their courses, what strategies they use to market and what it is you need to do differently in order to improve and offer a better Product. Planning can involve a financial budget but there are many ways to market online that are free and easy to apply, that’s where creativity and strategy come in.

Having a different plan to sell online courses can also give you an added advantage over your competition. After you have identified what your sales plan is about add the ideas to your course sale page, so your targeted audience can see the uniqueness of your course from all other similar courses offered by your competition.

Always give your audience a reason to go for your courses; offer them a reliable solution to their problems and promote the advantages that they can expect after successfully completing the course. Also include how your online material can help them compared to the traditional way of learning.