6 Ways To Promote Your Online Courses

Normally it usually encompasses a year with long and short term planning. It is important to have a marketing plan , not only so that the entire team involved knows what actions to take, it will also allow us in the future to understand the impact of our plan, if the objectives have been met or not and what actions have been successful to reproduce in future campaigns.

Before starting your campaign to promote your courses, we must analyze the state of our organization. With the SWOT analysis (Weaknesses, Threats, Strengths, Opportunities) we will be able to place our school in a market context.

It is also very important to know our target or target audience. Not all campaigns are effective for all audiences. If, for example, your target audience is in the millennial demographic, it would be a big mistake to run your promotional campaign through the physical press.

To measure the impact of our campaigns and check if we have met the objectives, it is very important to have clear metrics. They can be number of followers, visits to the web, number of conversion of leads to clients, retweets, etc.

Having seen these points, we list a series of actions that you can carry out in your campaigns.

6 Ways To Promote Your Online Courses

1. Social Networks

As they say, if you are not on social networks, you are nobody. It is very important to create a social media profile for your school so that people can get to know you. Use hashtags to more easily reach your target audience and interact with your followers, answering questions or encouraging us to participate through your publications.

The most relevant and well-known networks currently are Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin and Facebook, but there are other interesting networks to promote our school: Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, Tumblr, Quora, WeHeardIt, Twitch and a long etcetera.

But be careful, not all social networks are relevant for promoting your school . It is of little use to be in each and every one of the possible networks if you do not have the resources to keep them all active. Although it is important to be present in several to reach as many people as possible, it is also important to choose wisely and prioritize social networks. Likewise, you must take into account the target of your school and in which social networks you can find them. For example, if your school trains human resources professionals, Linkedin is a good network to promote yourself.

The language and proximity to the user is different in each social network and you must take it into account . Twitter is much closer and more informal while Linkedin has a more formal profile.

Through social media, we can reinforce our brand message while promoting our courses. Some ideas to promote your courses on social media:

• Contests . They are very useful to publicize our school and to get new followers or increase the interaction of our accounts. Through a retweet, a hashtag, a registration or a challenge, the user can have the opportunity to get something useful for free. You can raffle a course or material related to your school, such as merchandising.
• Collaborations with influencers . Influencers have a very large but segmented audience and, better yet, very loyal. It can help us make our messages more visible. There are many ways to collaborate with influencers, from simple promotional messages, course reviews, or creative and disruptive activities to attract attention.
• Viral promotions . It is about promoting your courses in an original way and causing a positive reaction in users to share it and generate a viralization of that content. Although there are many famous viral campaigns, it is very difficult to do one successfully without investing money (in advertising), because many factors are at stake that we cannot control.
• Joint actions with other brands. You can collaborate with other brands to run a campaign to increase your reach. 

In any network and any campaign, a good use of CTAs or Call to Action is very important . We must encourage the user to take an action when viewing a post, be it to like, follow our account or enter our website through a link to use a promotional coupon.

2. Content marketing

If you give free and interesting content, people will come back for more. Currently there are few online platforms that do not have a blog to share relevant content. Create relevant content about your school, values and what your users are looking for. Take surveys on social media to find out what they want you to offer them. You can invite people from your professional circle to write on your blog, bringing a different point of view and a new audience to your platform. Or vice versa, participate in other blogs contributing your grain of sand and taking the opportunity to indirectly promote your training platform.

It is also a good strategy to create lead magnets , free downloadable resources in exchange for users subscribing to a mailing list. This includes any type of user-friendly content, from eBooks, templates, tools, infographics, etc.

You can even go one step further, create and upload videos to YouTube, start a podcast, develop free mini-courses, webinars or virtual workshops… Don't be shy!

It is important to always take into account SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to improve the organic positioning of your school, that is, to get a good position in search engines such as google without the need to pay. Use keywords (keywords), relevant links (link building), etc. But the most important thing and what the algorithm values the most is that your page has a good user experience, content quality, relevance and notoriety of your platform.

3. Email Marketing

Through other marketing campaigns, events or contacts you will have been able to create a mailing list . Unlike other marketing methods, email is one of the most direct ways to communicate with our users, as you go directly to their inbox.  With email, you can share news to your user, create exclusive offers to reward their loyalty or make a compilation of the best posts or the most relevant courses for their profile.

4. Events

Participating in events is a good way to get new contacts and students for your school. Join proposals for large / medium events or organize talks with different eminences in your sector.

Another option is to organize a free webinar on a topic or as an introduction to a school course. The webinar will be the presentation of your training offer and they will be able to know first-hand how your courses work. There are many tools to deliver webinars, from the most basic like Hangout , to the most professional like Zoom.

5. Advertising

You can create paid advertising for your courses from Google Ads to generate banners or links that will appear on different web pages. You can also promote your featured posts on your social networks. The price will depend on the duration of the campaign and the target audience. It is important to clearly delimit the public to which the campaign is directed. Luckily, advertising managers allow you to detail and narrow audience ranges very easily.

You can also advertise without the need to pay . You can put banners on your web pages or blogs that link to the course you want to promote. The scope will probably be less, as you will target your own audience. If you want to reach a wider audience, you can write a press release and send it to different specialized media. Choose them well, because although a generalist medium has a lot of scope, the conversion will be less than that of a small medium but specialized in what you offer.

6. Mouth - Ear

The easiest but no less effective method. Contact your family, friends and acquaintances and tell them about your new training platform, what you offer and what problems you provide solutions. Do a good job with your training and your clients will recommend you to their acquaintances. Easy right?