Crucial eLearning Marketing Skills
Which eLearning marketing skills do you need to cultivate to maximize your reach and generate more leads? Becoming an industry thought leader is no small feat. It takes patience, perseverance, and plenty of targeted content. However, crafting the perfect content is about more than just self-promotion; you also need to address reader pain points and offer valuable insights.
So, here are a few essential skills every eLearning marketer should have to launch a successful content marketing campaign.
10 Skills Every eLearning Content Marketer Should Nurture
1. Creativity
It takes a good dose of creativity to tell stories and connect with your leads on an emotional level. You also need to know how to grab their attention and promote your product within the context of a story. As such, marketers must be strong lateral thinkers who can figure out the best conversion approach. For example, create a tip sheet to help prospects improve their compliance training course. This will be seen as a value-add contribution that addresses their needs rather than your own.
2. Organization
Organization is a broad umbrella that covers everything from planning to time management. Planning skills are tested when it’s time to create your marketing calendar, and can be improved by analyzing past results in relation to previous plans. This allows you to plan in advance for optimum performance, as your marketing campaigns need to be launched at the right time to achieve the best results. For example, you might improve the attendance at a webinar by posting an article the day before your online marketing event in order to fill the virtual seats.
3. Customer Empathy
Can you step inside the shoes of your prospects and get into their headspace? Successful content marketing is about building a rapport with your audience. You need to understand their buying needs and apprehensions to touch on all the key points. For example, what info are they looking for? How can you establish trust and build authority? Are there specific concerns or challenges you should include in your guest post or article?
4. Self-Editing
Editing your own work can be a somewhat cathartic process. You improve the quality of your content but identify personal areas for improvement in the process, namely common copywriting mistakes and grammatical errors. In addition, self-editing allows you to develop clear and concise marketing articles that help you become an industry thought leader. That said, you should still get a second pair of eyes to review and edit your content to shore up overlooked gaps.
5. Data Analysis
eLearning marketers need to make sense of the metrics and then use the numbers to their advantage. Thus, data analysis is another top marketing skill to cultivate. For instance, you may have to evaluate traffic stats, conversion rates, and social media metrics to choose the best topic or identify your target demographic to create meaningful content and improve click-through rates. A tie-in skill is knowing where to mine and manage Big Data for your eLearning content marketing strategy.
6. Flexibility
Even if you’re promoting a specific product or service, you still need to adapt to unique buying needs and pain points. Different demographics have different buying needs and expectations. For instance, you may have to create an article for each customer group that touches on distinct features or specs. This is another reason why empathy is so essential so that you can see things from the customer’s perspective, then develop content that’s personalized and results-driven.
7. Problem-Solving
Ultimately, every guest post you publish should help readers (AKA leads) solve a problem, whether it’s reducing their L&D expenses or bridging performance gaps for their geographically dispersed workforce. As such, one of the rules for how to be a good marketer is to overcome their challenges or, at least, give them valuable insights and tips so that they can use your product or service to do so. For example, give them 7 cost-effective ways to bring their team together during the COVID crisis using your video conferencing platform.
8. SEO Expertise
One of the most crucial skills for marketing is understanding the ins and outs of optimization. More importantly, you must know how to balance value-added content and subtle sales pitches. Site visitors probably won’t stick around if they feel coerced or that your content focuses more on promotion than pointers. For instance, you need to know which keywords to include and how to avoid oversaturation. Likewise, you must be able to create content that’s organic and readable.
9. Copywriting
Of course, eLearning marketers must have copywriting skills to develop engaging articles and guest blogs. What’s the ideal sentence length? How should you format content? Which key takeaways should you include? What’s the best tone to use for your target audience? These are all things to consider when writing marketing articles for your corporate training business.
For more tips, you should download our eBook on guest blogging!
10. Research
eLearning marketing professionals are adept researchers. In fact, there are two key areas where they need to excel. The first is knowing their target audience and using analytics to create marketing profiles; for example, understanding where certain groups sit in the marketing funnel. The second is researching niche topics of interest that fall outside the purview of your product or service. Are there specific trends or technologies you should know about before creating your article? Which references are reliable and accurate? The last thing you want to do is compromise the trust you've built. How do you sum up the info in your own words?
Conclusion
Considering all the above, there's still one key ingredient to increase the value of your content. Even the best content marketing specialist in the world wouldn't succeed without the right promotional actions! So, another secondary skill to develop is being social media savvy. You need to be able to promote your content through popular channels to reach your niche audience.
Fortunately, the marketing experts at eLearning Industry can help you launch a targeted promotional strategy, complete with social media outreach and subscriber newsletters. By teaming up with us, you have the opportunity to showcase your thought leadership and increase traffic to your site with our results-driven eLearning marketing solutions.
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