Your training organization is eager to press the launch button on the new online course you developed. You’ve invested a lot of thought and energy in developing this training, so everyone has high hopes for the course’s success.
To help support that success, do take a few minutes before you press “publish” to ask yourself the following questions.
1. Is your course relevant and distinctive?
Around the world, the online training market is hot, in both demand and supply. As a result, your course needs to stand out among your competitors’ offers. To do so, your course has to focus on a specific niche of prospects and do the following very well:
- Solve a specific problem that troubles your target and deliver concrete results.
- Provide your target with an easy-to-follow roadmap for creating the results they want.
- Be produced to the very best of your ability. The competition in online training is stiff. Shoddily produced training courses greatly reduce their chances of success.
2. Have you validated the course with an existing audience?
Let’s say you want to launch a course on B2B sales. You can validate your course in two ways. You can survey your target to sound their interest in your offer.
Or, even better, you can launch a pilot course and be transparent with your audience about what you’re doing: Offer them a significant discount on the price in exchange for getting their frequent feedback and testimonials. A pilot course can accomplish three valuable goals for you:
- Provide concrete evidence that your target audience finds value in what you have to offer.
- Prove that the course can make money.
- Create a list of likely buyers once you launch the final version of the course.
The right LMS can help you pilot your course by ensuring the course is visible only to those piloting the course, and enabling you to offer discount codes or generate gift cards.
3. Have you minimized the obstacles to launching your course?
You can, of course, sell your training on your own website. If you do, you’ll need to build a team to assemble all the necessary e-commerce and marketing functions you’ll need to distribute and market the course as well as the right platforms to offer your content and manage users.
Or, you can simply subscribe to a modern, easy-to-use learning management system (LMS) that already has all the marketing and e-commerce functionality you need to manage, distribute, and market your course.
In fact, with the right LMS, you don’t need to worry about website design, IT infrastructure, or security. Guided by an intuitive LMS and a team of experts ready to help, you can launch a course in a matter of days.
4. Have you created a landing page to promote your course?
Before you launch your course, you do need a landing page. That’s a web page solely dedicated to converting prospects into customers.
The right LMS will provide you with easy-to-use tools for creating both a landing page and a showcase for your course(s). These pages should also be easily customizable to reflect your brand identity.
What’s more, your landing page and showcase pages should be SEO-optimized. That way they’re more likely to show up in search engine results as prospects look for information on topics related to your course.
With the right LMS, all of these advantageous features are built-in.
5. Do you have a plan for promoting your course consistently?
To drive prospect traffic to your landing page consistently, you do need to reach out and engage with them. The goal of this marketing outreach is to provide your prospects with the right information they need at the right time so that, finally, they can make the right choice of your course.
Remember, before any prospect becomes a customer, they need to pass through the three stages of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and conversion.
In the case of your B2B sales training course, that journey means your marketing efforts need to:
- Create awareness of the B2B sales problem your course solves.
- Develop consideration of the value your B2B sales course offers as a solution to the problem.
- Convince your prospect that your B2B sales course is the only right choice for them.
Your prospects will be poised at various points along this buyer’s journey. By nurturing your relationship with them, you can increase their anticipation, desire, and conviction that your course is just right for them.
Marketing tools for success
It is important to understand how your prospects are behaving and interacting with your course. As you run campaigns on various mediums, you will have access to a variety of KPIs.
It is also important that your LMS be connected to such tools to obtain relevant analytics. Make sure you can plug in your Google Analytics to obtain relevant information on navigation behaviour and demographics.
How to nurture a relationship with your prospect
This relationship-building can be carried out in different ways. The first step is to get them on your email list so you can connect with them appropriately. Present them with an appealing incentive in exchange for their email address: ideally, an item of value related to the problem your course solves.
For example, you can offer coupon codes and gift cards to other training courses in your catalog in exchange for their email address. You can also give away valuable information related to the problem your course solves via a tip sheet, PDF, short video, or an introductory webinar.
Naturally, not all the prospects on your email list will become customers. So your marketing efforts should strive to continually attract prospects into your sales funnel. If you have a clear understanding of your prospect’s pain points, challenges, and buying patterns, that will enable you to create content that is relevant to them, in a medium they find appealing, on a platform they regularly frequent. By stimulating engagement with your content and interacting with your community of interested prospects, you’ll build conversations, relationships, credibility, and trust.
When you do all this effectively, you convert your prospects into customers.
6. Have you made it easy for customers to buy the course?
Once you have a converted prospect, you need to ensure they can buy your course securely, in the currency you offer, via one of your various payment options (e.g., credit card, invoicing, etc.). Here, too, the right LMS’s state-of-the-art e-commerce functionality can simplify your life tremendously.
Another advantage of the right LMS is that it gives you, like NASA’s Mission Control, one central location from which you can manage your online courses, whether you offer one or hundreds.
7. Do you have a process for staying in touch with your customers after the sale?
To keep fine-tuning your course and your offer, make sure to survey your learners once they’ve completed their course. Do encourage your customers to share their experiences on social media and to write reviews. Stay in touch via email. Send them promotional offers.
A satisfied customer is always your best bet for repeat business and for referrals to other prospects.
So how do you feel about your responses to our seven questions? Did you find this was valuable guidance?
If you’d like to learn more about how to support the success of your online training, do connect with us.
