Over the years our team at We Market Online Courses has developed a proven method to help businesses market and sell online courses.
While the details of every campaign differ, our 4 step framework below has proven to be effective in marketing and selling courses of all types.
Nearly all of the course creators that we work with aren’t properly tracking their sales and marketing efforts. Getting a tracking framework is crucial to driving sales effectively and efficiently.
Why is this important?
Social networks and search engines provide you with data on impressions, clicks, visits, and more but these numbers don’t always align with what is actually happening. Setting up the proper campaign and web traffic tracking and measurement allows you to validate the numbers your seeing from partners, and make decisions with confidence.
Since not all traffic is equal, we always recommend reverse engineering your sales to understand:
We also recommend using heat maps on the key pages of your website to learn how users are navigating. If you know where people click and where they stop reading that makes it much easier to re-design your pages for optimal conversions.
Our Analytics tool of choice is We Track Your Marketing and our heat map tool of choice is Hot Jar.
2. Find Your Voice
Use your current audience and userbase to test your messaging before running paid campaigns or expanding to other platforms where you’ll try to acquire new users. It is the most cost-effective message testing strategy you can take.
Start with a platform where you already have an audience. Examples: an email list, a Facebook group, etc. This audience is already in your ecosystem and has an awareness of who you are. It makes them a Warm audience.
Now the goal is to let them know what you are selling and turn them into a Hot audience.
Doing this keeps the split-testing variables low as you are working with ONE audience.
Now you focus on developing your message and split your messaging into two different directions to see which gets the best results. If you’re tracking things properly as noted in step 1, determining your winning message should be easy!
3. Test Small
After you have narrowed in on the messaging that works best for you it is time to go after Cold traffic.
Pick the platforms where you think your clients are active and use the messaging from the previous step to launch some test campaigns. Start with no more than three channels and determine what channel is performing best.
4. Scale what works
Once you’ve found your most successful channel it’s time to double down on your best performing channel before you try to get other channels to work.
To effectively scale and grow your best performing channel, we recommend split-tests. This means taking your most successful campaign or campaigns and changing one variable for a portion of the target audience. These variables could be creative, messaging, the copy on your call to action button.
Take the winning combination and then try to beat that with another test, and then another test.
These 4 steps should get you on the right track to start marketing your online courses and driving sales. If you have any questions or tips, leave a comment below.
Tom Libelt has successfully marketed 150+ online courses over the last 7 years with his company We Market Online Courses. He is also the host of Smart Brand Marketing.
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