Marketing Tactics To Improve Your eLearning
Introduction: I’ve spent a large part of my career in marketing, and that means I’ve read through countless articles on how to properly set up marketing plans and individual campaigns. Most guides tend to focus on overarching themes and best practices. These are useful, but I often prefer to read tangible, actionable articles with new insights. Since I started working at Accredible, I’ve had to put myself in the shoes of individuals and organizations who are having to market specific online learning or certification programs. During this time, I’ve come across a few tactics that have shown to make a big impact for eLearning marketers, and thought I’d share them on a article here on eLearning Industry. Let’s get to it.
How Can You Generate New, Fresh Traffic To Your Website?
Learn To Automatically Recycle Your Content On Owned Social Media Channels
Just about everyone understands the importance of content marketing and it’s role in generating traffic to your website or landing pages. The majority of marketers in the eLearning space make the investment in content—whether it’s a blog, composing eBooks, or writing white papers—because it works to generate traffic and leads. However, most people never get the full value out of their content. Why? Because they post it once, and then never post it again. This is a travesty! You spent all that time and energy on writing quality content. Why should it only be posted once?
Sophisticated marketers find ways to repurpose their existing content over and over again.
I personally use and recommend Meet Edgar [1] - a tool to automatically re-share content to our various owned social media channels. This has helped us to drive more traffic to our blog, website, and landing pages; increase engagement with our followers; and generate more leads all while saving me hours of tedious work each month.
There are 4 steps to setting it up:
- Sign up and connect your social media accounts to Meet Edgar.
- Take the content you’ve already posted to your blog, and use it to create various tweets, Facebook, and LinkedIn posts.
- Categorize these posts and designate which social network they belong to.
- Set up a post schedule to determine what types of content are posted to what channels at specific days and times.
That’s it! Meet Edgar handles all the other work for you. Now, the content you already created, and continue to create, will get recycled, and keep paying dividends. Meet Edgar also comes with a host of other features and functionality that make scheduling and automatically posting content a breeze. I can’t recommend them enough.
Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Meet Edgar, nor am I receiving any benefits from this posting.
How Can You Improve Your Conversion Rates?
Focus On Optimizing Your Opt-In Form Fields
You probably (hopefully) spent a lot of time designing the look and content on your eLearning program’s opt-in page. That’s good! The question becomes how can you turn more of those visitors into leads? Improve conversion rates by limiting the number of fields in your opt-in forms using "smart fields".
In focusing on optimization of our opt-in fields, we saw a drastic improvement in conversion rates, and it’s now one of the first thing I recommend to other marketers looking to make high impact - low effort changes.
Here are your steps:
- Remove as many non-necessary fields as possible!
Only collect what you really need. Make sure the contact information you are asking for matches the amount of value you’re providing in your content. For example, the first form a new lead might fill out should only ask for the individual's full name and email address. The more times you ask them for form submissions, or the more valuable or in-depth your content is, the more details you can ask from your visitors. - Implement smart fields.
Smart fields use cookies to remember when the same person comes back to your site to download more content, and only shows them fields to collect new (and more detailed) data. The first time someone downloads content, we ask for their first name, last name, and email address. The second time, we ask for the email address, company name, and job title. The other fields aren’t shown, which means we can collect progressively more detailed information with the same number of fields (or fewer) visible to the visitor. - Send email follow ups with the content as a courtesy.
Some people collect the form information, and then send the user to a thank you page with the content. This is a good best practice, but you should also setup an automated email to send a permanent link to the content. This is great for when people forget to download the content or if they can’t remember the URL.
How Can You Increase The Number Of Referrals For Your Program?
Implement Digital Certificates
I’ve written extensively on how moving to digital credentials can help your organization leverage your certification program to increase word of mouth referrals. The challenge is how do you get them talking? One option is to email each person and ask them to manually refer people. This works sometimes, but most people don’t want to go through the hassle to do it. Another way is to offer an incentive program and leverage referral codes. This is another viable tactic, but it involves a lot of time and energy (and can cut into your margins).
We see a lot of people having success generating word of mouth referrals by simply adopting digital certificates.
How Does This Help?
1. It Allows Students To Share Their Success When It’s Fresh In Their Minds
No one wants to wait days or weeks to receive a paper certificate. Not to mention, unless they take a photo of their certificate and upload it to social media, they have no way to share their success. Chances are a paper certificate will end up in the trash or buried under papers on a desk. When you go with digital certificates or digital badges, they can be automatically sent out soon as someone completes or passes the course. At Accredible, we have integrations with various LMSs, a partnership with Zapier, and an API you can use in addition to our stand-alone dashboard for certificate management. In the end, students are much more likely to share their success when it’s still fresh in their minds, and cutting down the time that it takes to receive their certificates is the way to do that.
2. It Places You And Your Program Into The Social And Professional Network Of Every Student
People share their certificates on both social and professional networks once they complete an online learning program or class. Not only is the general exposure to your program a benefit, but it’s going into the feeds of like-minded people. Those are people who personally know your recent student and are more likely to also want to take your course.
3. It Lives On A Permanent URL And Links Back To Your Program Generating Free Web Traffic
Certificates and digital badges live on permanent URLs which means when someone adds it to their email signature or into their LinkedIn profile, you’ll continuously generate clicks back to your programs website. It’s like getting free link backs without having to pay for them. We even have a marketing dashboard that helps you quantify how much value your digital certificates have generated.
Conclusion
All of these tactics I’ve personally used and worked with. They aren’t completely obvious, but they work well and don’t take a long time to implement. You can get all three of these setup in a single day. If you’re interested in learning more about Accredible’s digital credential solutions, you can contact us here or sign up for a free trial account.
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