Creating, Advertising, And Publishing Your Online Course
Educators, trainers, entrepreneurs, and all kinds of experts can offer online courses to learners through an online course platform, providing an innovative teaching and learning experience with tools that make both processes more enjoyable. When creating online learning, your goal is to provide education that offers high-quality learning and an interactive online space that delivers an excellent customer experience. Here are some concepts to keep in mind for publishing your online course successfully.
White-Labeling Your Online School
White-labeling is an approach in which you can advertise your online school. This helps to make your brand stronger since you can keep control of how you present yourself to your audience. Your school will use your own domain name, feature your own logo and color theme, etc. Having your school white-labeled can help you personalize it and make it even more custom-made especially for your potential learners. Your school will work as a seamless extension of your existing website/web presence and help you grow your brand attracting more loyal students – or else customers, instead of sharing your brand and school with others.
How Does White-Labeling Help Grow Your Brand?
White-labeling can help you grow your brand’s name in the following ways:
- It helps boost your brand’s visibility
White-labeling your school will not only increase public awareness of your brand but will also help you grow the number of your learners. - Strengthen client loyalty
Every time a client visits your white-labeled school and sees your brand attached, they will immediately associate it with quality and professionalism, leading to the increase of their loyalty towards your brand. - It’s up to you
Apart from white labeling your domain name and your e-mails, there are so many options for you to select how your school will present the essence of your business and the efficiency of your courses.
How To Setup A White Label Online School
With LearnWorlds you can transform your school and services to a course that reflects the ethos and ‘personality’ of your business. You can get this with white-labeling:
- Get your own custom domain
With LearnWorlds, white-labeling allows you to use your company or business website domains to customize the URL fully to something like “mycompany.com”. - Create personalized, branded emails
You can completely customize the communication systems of your school with addresses and names from your own company. This also means that you can create a custom “reply to email” address such as “[email protected]”. - Work on your own logo
Having a logo automatically grants your brand with an easily recognized visual identity. By placing it in all the relevant places you give people consistent exposure to your brand and strengthening its value.
Audience Segmentation Basics
Segmentation is the breaking of the audience into groups of similar characteristics. When writing up your course’s content, you can use segmentation to set the tone of your marketing messages, find subjects of interest for your potential clients (such as emails, blog posts, online courses, and more), and plan your content strategy.
Using A Customer Persona
Your customer persona can be a powerful instrument in your marketing efforts. A customer profile includes a collection of characteristics, demographics, attitudes, and behaviors that create a fictional “average” character for a group of your audience.
Using your customer persona effectively requires that you consider the following:
- How to find/approach my audience?
- What should I write?
- Would this page make sense for my audience?
- Would someone buy my course?
When you finish answering these questions, go back to your persona and see it as a real person (naming your persona can help). So for example, “Would ‘Mike’ or ‘Sarah’ buy my course or read this blog?” If the answer is yes, then you are going the right way; if it is a no, then you will have to rethink on how to talk to them.
Exploring The Buying Lifecycle
The buying lifecycle is the second stage of your segmentation, and as you would expect it’s a bit more advanced than the previous one. This can be used to find out at which stage of the buying cycle your customer is, but it’s not essential that you do it immediately. So, here it goes:
Credit: LearnWorlds
- Awareness: Are you trying to reach out to someone who doesn’t know about you?
- Assessment: Is he/she comparing my product with my competitors'?
- Decision/Result: Is he/she ready to buy?
- Loyalty: Is he/she a loyal repeating customer or unsatisfied/leaving?
Combining the information you have from your customer persona and determining the appropriate stage in the buying lifecycle you can be more confident about the message you create. For more effectiveness, you can also test different messages to a number of your customers and then create a process around their response for similar ones.
Selling Online Courses From Your Own Website
Now, in order to sell your course, you will need to setup the online course platform and make it sales-ready. At this point, you need to be reminded that a very important factor in all your marketing efforts is your personal brand. Investing in a strong personal brand is what makes your sales premium because it gives greater incentives to potential customers, showing them that you are providing a service that’s worth signing up for.
When using a premium online course platform, you will need to white-label your brand as much as possible. Generally, it’s a good idea to use your logo, brand’s colors, and your email. That way, you differentiate from a massive online course marketplace and place yourself into the premium course category.
Creating A Winning Landing Page
A landing page is your first point of contact with your customers and serves as the ‘homepage’ of your online academy. Since this is essentially your welcoming page, you want it to be as attractive as possible and make potential customers fall in love with your business at first sight. When implemented right, you can collect precious leads and then convert these into your students. Unbounce offers some useful information on landing pages and explains the two types of landing pages; click-through and lead generation in more detail.
As LearnWorlds, we offer a page builder you can use to create your ready-made, beautiful landing-page zones, templates, and components that help to unleash your creativity and marketing processes. With LearnWorlds there is no need for expensive third-party tools to setup your landing pages. We’ve got you covered, so if you want to let your inner web designer do wonders follow our proposed instructions.
Stay tuned for our next article to learn how to make your online school and courses attractive and sound!
Also, if you want to learn more about how to successfully sell your online courses, download the eBook The Ultimate Guide To Selling Online Courses.
