How To Market Your Online Course With Training Management Software
If your business currently uses training management software, chances are the main reason you implemented it was to make sure that your training business runs as smoothly as possible by handing over a lot of your administration tasks to the training management software. This will not only make sure everything that needs done keeps ticking along, but will also free up all your staff so they have more time for more important tasks.
However, there is so much more you could be doing with your training management software, and one such thing is marketing your online courses!
Let’s take a look at the top 5 ways you can use your training management software to market your online courses.
1. Sell Your Courses Online
The first, and most obvious, way to get your courses online is to actually sell them online! Right now you may simply have a list of the courses you run on your website, with customers completing the sale via email or on the phone, but actually selling your training courses through your website really is the way to go.
Having your course listed online is great for a number of reasons:
- You can create a page for every course you offer, which will include all the details about that course and will include an area where customers can add the course to their basket or book a place right on the same page. This gives customers the chance to make a decision and purchase from you straight away.
- All these pages will have individual URLs, meaning you can usually share the links to specific courses in marketing materials and on social media. Again customers will be presented with all the information about the course, and have the option to buy right away.
- Links to the specific pages can be sent in emails, whether for marketing purposes, or in response to specific requests to your sales team. Again this means that customers get a link to the exact information they need, and you’re presenting them with a chance to purchase right then and there if they want to.
2. Optimize Your Listings For Search Engines
Another key reason to list your courses online is the positive impact it will have on your SEO. Training websites which are up-to-date and contain accurate details are typically favoured by search engines when it comes to ranking. By having all your course details available to be indexed, your website should be rewarded with higher rankings!
When you enter all your course information on to your website, make sure you think about what is going to look best on search engines, and what sort of information your potential customers will be searching for that will lead them to your website.
If you’re targeting specific keywords, you may want to include these in the course listing. Also make sure you cover things like the specific qualification that will be achieved, the location of the course, the length of the course, and the study method quite clearly in your course listings, as these are the types of long tail search terms that people will specifically search for when looking for a certain type of training.
3. Create Course Guides
To help market your courses better, so you may want to create course guides for all your courses, which can be printed off if needed, but also sent to potential customers in a PDF format, so they can get all the information they need about a specific course without having to go to your website.
However, these could take a lot of time to create, and not every customer may be interested in using them, so you really need to decide if it’s worth the time creating them in the first place. However, with the use of training management software, you have the ability to create a course guide in just a couple of clicks, and without having to do any duplicate data entry.
All the information about your course is already going to be entered into your training management software for you reference, and so the information can be pulled through to your website. Some training management platforms come with the option to turn all this previously entered information into a downloadable PDF, which will act as a course guide.
This means you can create them whenever you need them, instead of wasting time creating a guide for every course you offer and then them never being used. It also means that you can be sure all your information is always up-to-date, as it will be pulled directly from your training management software.
You can then use these course guides to hand out or send to potential customers as hard copies, make them downloadable on your website so people can easily print all the course details in a more presentable format than printing a webpage, upload them to social media, or email them to potential customers so they can quickly see what your course offers without having to click through to your website.
4. Use Feedback
Collecting student feedback is an excellent way for you to measure your training offering, but it’s also fantastic for letting potential customers see how much past students have liked you and your courses.
First of all you can collect feedback easily by using your training management system. You can send surveys out from directly within the system, to whichever list of students you want to, whenever you need to (at the end of a course, after a semester, etc.) with automated communication triggers, and then pull all the results back into the system so you can analyse the results with your training reporting system.
All this makes the whole process a lot easier than manually sending out surveys and collecting the results! Then, you can use the comments you get back in your marketing materials to help market your current courses.
You can place quotes on your website, especially if they relate to a specific course as you can add them to course listing to really encourage potential customers. You can also share them on social media, or in marketing materials!
Just make sure you get the permission from the students you are surveying to use their quotes in marketing materials before you start!
5. Market To Previous Students
While you have a huge customer base of potential customers who have never bought from you before, there is also the chance to market to all the students who have studied with you in the past.
Perhaps the course they studied has a further qualification they can study towards, or maybe their qualification runs out periodically and they will need to complete the course again to remain qualified.
Whatever the reason, remarketing to students with your training management software is really easy!
You can segment past students into lists depending on what course they studied, or when they were a student with you, and then send them an email about another qualification they may be interested in very quickly and easily.
You can also set up automated emails to send to students to remind them that they’re qualification is about to expire, and how they can complete the qualification with you again. You may even wish to offer returning students like this a discount to encourage them to stay with you rather than moving to a competitor.