Writing Better eLearning Courses By Learning More About Your Audience
Are your online courses really as engaging as they could be? Your audience is your most important source of marketing material, but to get the most from them, you need the right targeting strategy.
Your website, social listening, and surveys let you learn more about your audience, and give you the tools to write better eLearning courses for them. Read the article 9 Tips To Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Custom eLearning Content to learn how to measure the effectiveness of your online courses.
1. Look At Your Own Data First
Your website is the best source of data you have to help you learn more about your audience. Your website’s reporting facilities tell you what courses are the most popular with your audience, along with the channels they use to find them. To be able to learn as much as possible about your audience, you must use analytics software alongside your website’s own reporting facilities.
Open Web Analytics is a free analytics software that lets you track how your audience uses your eLearning website. Open Web Analytics comes with some great features that help you learn more about your audience and write better eLearning courses:
- Page Views
Learn which courses are most popular with your audience, so you can design courses they really want to view. - Traffic Reports
Find out which channels your audience uses to find your courses, so you can create courses that meet the quirks of these platforms. - Heat Maps
Discover what parts of your courses your audience does and doesn’t look at, so you can write more engaging courses.
2. Social Listening Tells You The Questions Your Audience Is Asking
Concepts are crucial for eLearning courses. Concepts showcase your ability to locate problems for your audience and provide them with solutions. Your concepts are useless if they’re answering the wrong pain points, so social listening helps you to find the questions your audience is asking.
Social listening is about monitoring the places your audience is talking about, and then it is about looking at the topics they’re discussing. You need to look in a variety of spaces to really listen to your audience:
- Social Media
Using a tool like Mention allows you to set up alerts for key topics, so you can find out what your audience is saying on Twitter, Facebook, etc... - Q&A Forums
Searching through sites like AskReddit and Quora tells you what your audience is asking of its peers – people they trust ask much as friends and family. - Web Traffic
Keyword tools give you the figures on which terms are generating the most interest among your audience. A keyword tool like Ubersuggest helps you find out what issues your audience is interested in while showing how competitive these topics are.
How do the results of social listening help you write better eLearning courses? By showing topics your audience care about and establishing how difficult it is to get traffic for them – don’t waste time writing courses that cover the wrong topics.
3. Ask Your Customers How To Write Better eLearning Courses
In an age where data access is free and extensive, asking people for help can become a lost art. It’s all good and well making an assessment about what courses your audience wants, but what if you draw the wrong conclusions? A sure-fire way to improve your eLearning courses is to ask your customers how to write better ones.
You can speak to your audience in a range of ways, but surveys are one of the best ways to do so. Surveys use pre-set questions that can be transferred into quantifiable data; they teach you what your audience thinks about the topics relevant to your eLearning course business, making sure you have the tools to draw the right conclusions. Email is one of the broadest and simplest ways of speaking to, and surveying, your audience, and has an excellent ROI since you get $44 for every $1 invested, a return of 4400%.
MailChimp is one of the most highly regarded email tools - people love it. If you need to email up to 12,000 people, MailChimp is free to use, making it ideal for mid-scale surveys. If you have a large number of customers on your email list, Moosend is ideal for your surveys, as you get unlimited emails. Using the results of an email survey to write better eLearning courses is simple. So, do more of the things your customers like about your courses, do less of the things they don’t like.
You really learn how to write better eLearning courses by surveying your audience consistently. Regular surveys help you to make sure you don’t make the same mistakes you did in the past while reducing the impact of any transient issues affecting your audience; they may answer differently during times of economic crisis, political upheaval, or social anxiety. By using surveys, you ask your audience what they want to hear from you, giving you the tools to consistently write the right eLearning courses for them.
Anyone can write a course for themselves (you know exactly what you want to hear), but to make money as an eTeacher, your courses need to be ideal for your audience. Learning more about your audience is essential if you want your courses to strike the right note. Start making the most from your website, listening to your audience, and asking your customers how you can improve, and you’ll write eLearning courses that bring you long-term success.
