How To Market Online Courses :Proven Tips for Success

Online courses are top-rated, but can you make a living by selling online courses? Yes, you can. 

Your online courses have the potential to change the lives of your learners (and yours, too) and win them over as clients. 

But if you want your online courses to be game changers, you must ensure they reach your audience and buy the course. 

Yes, that’s what we are going to talk about in this blog- How to market online courses.

12 Tips on How to Market Your Online Course

If you are an online course instructor, you know the factors that leads to the success of a course is valuable content, but is that the only thing you need to bring course enrolments. 

No, it isn’t enough.

No one is going to enroll in your online course if they have never heard about it. 

Before getting into how to promote your online course, how does it help?

Online course marketing helps you grow your online presence, increase your income, and increase the enrollment rate of potential clients who already know about your online course.

Now, coming to promoting online courses, there are different ways you can follow. 

We are going to talk about the online course marketing strategies you can implement:

1. Use email marketing in your favor

The traditional yet powerful marketing channel email marketing can have a huge impact on online course marketing. In fact, emails give you the opportunity to reach a large number of users. 

The best way to use email marketing to promote your online courses is to build interest in your brand and strengthen the relationship with your audience.

To create a successful email marketing campaign, make sure you do the following:

• Identify your target audience and their requirements.
• Craft well-designed and relevant emails; never spam them.
• Offer a value proposition, which must explain to your recipients the benefits of your online course.
• Alternate between different types of content like special offers, company news, new product launches, and personalized emails.
• Include a clear and visible call to action. 

If you have an LMS, you can integrate it with a newsletter to get the detailed statistics that allow you to know who read the email and when, who clicked and what, and the percentage of reading, etc. 

Bonus tip: When marketing an online course, to improve the conversions from your email marketing campaigns, you must consider how your marketing works as a sales funnel.

Here’s is how to build a sales funnel for online courses.

2. Use lead magnets to grow your email list

Leverage different types of lead magnets when promoting online courses, which are basically downloadable content that offers value to your potential students and wins their attention and personal information like contact number or, email or both.

So how to advertise your course using free lead magnets? Create a short course, or a downloadable PDF on a relevant topic, an infographic or anything that your prospects would find helpful. Give these lead magnets to your prospects for free, of course in exchange of their contact information. 

3. Use ad retargeting

Use retargeting ads to reach potential students who have visited your website but didn’t enroll. 

Retargeting campaigns remind your website visitors of your course, after they leave your website without buying. You can run retargeting campaigns using Google ads, Facebook retargeting, and LinkedIn Ads, and you can also leverage other advertising platforms. 

Bonus tip: Meta pixel is a code that you place on the website to collect data that helps to track conversions and optimize ads from Facebook ads and build a targeted audience for future campaigns.

4. Run a free webinar before the launch

Are you looking for ways on how to market your online course? If yes, a free workshop, a webinar, or even a free master class would be great to understand your audience and boost your credibility by showing them you are genuine and possess the knowledge and expertise you are about to share in your paid online course.

When marketing an online course, you can run live webinars and recorded webinars to engage with prospective students and answer any questions they might have.

You can use live webinars to:

• Turn your prospects into paying customers and increase your conversion.
• Present the advantage of learners subscribing to your online course in an engaging way to a broader audience.

You can use recorded webinars to:

• The recorded webinar can help overcome the challenge of the time zone differences of participants. 
• Visitors can give you their email in exchange for access and enjoy the webinar at their own pace. 
• Create a button or call to action for viewers to enroll in your course program.

5. Create a Facebook or LinkedIn Community

If you are working on how to promote courses to students, you must consider engaging with your prospects on social platforms. You can build a closed community on LinkedIn or, Facebook, or both, or even slack channels to build awareness of the very existence of your online courses.

This works if there is an initial interest in your courses, as you can keep your audience up-to-date and engaged with relevant information.

Encourage your prospects in your community to comment, like, and share your course and interact with each other.

6. Go live on Facebook and Instagram

Another creative initiative you can try if you are looking for how to market online courses is to go live on Facebook and Instagram.

It has huge benefits, but not many professionals do it. Along with using Facebook and Instagram stories, you can go live on these platforms to talk directly with your audience and share updates about your online course.

7. Start a podcast

One effective way to promoting your online course is to start a podcast about your online course topic. Every user who listens to your podcast are potential students for your course. Consider sharing valuable tips related to your topic, and at the end of each episode, you must add a call-to-action to visit your website and learn more about your course.

8. Offer a course satisfaction guarantee

Are you looking for powerful ways on marketing an online course and offer a satisfaction guarantee to see it working wonders? 

Yes, it is a great way to increase your course’s sales; you can offer a 30-day money-back guarantee where students who aren’t satisfied with your online course can request a full refund within a month of their purchase.

8. Run early bird pricing 

Early bird pricing or a limited-time offer encourages students to book in advance, and it increases the sign-ups. A compelling early bird pricing strategy gives students reasons to enroll in your course at the earliest.

Here are some tips to make early bird pricing work for you:

• Communicate the value of your online course with storytelling.
• Build a specific landing page offer.
• Use emails to promote your early bird pricing offer.
• Drive direct booking through your website.
• Offer a flexible cancellation policy.
  

9. Use paid advertisements

It is an excellent marketing strategy if you are looking for how to market online courses and are willing to spend money.

Paid ads can:

• Gives quick results.
• Easier to track the success rate of ad campaigns.
• Reach the right audience.

Here are the different types of ads you must try out:

• YouTube ads

YouTube ads can target specific geographic areas and demographic criteria. This is a great way to promote your online course to your channel subscriptions or anyone who watches videos related to your course topic.

• Facebook ads

Facebook ads work great as it helps to create ads that target users based on their interest, demographics and behaviors.

• Google ads

Google ads are one of the most popular types of paid advertising that you can use for online course marketing. You just need to study the keywords that your target audiences use to search for your course topic. This way, you can bring your course in front of your people who are searching for similar topics.

11. Team up with popular YouTube and influencers

Collaborate with online instructors who are popular or influencers who have the same type of audience to promote your online course. It opens your online course to a brand new audience and add educational value. 

Find popular influencers or online instructors who have the same target audience as you and use the partnership to promote your course. You can also create online courses together with them and gain access to your audience and theirs. 

12 Translate your online courses to more than one language

This is one of the unconventional ways if you are brainstorming about how to market online courses. By translating your online course to another language or multiple languages can efficiently expand your market to millions of other people. 

And it is much easier than you think. You can hire a translator to get your online course up and running in a different language. 

10. Utilize TikTok videos, Instagram reels and YouTube shorts

When promoting online courses, create short, engaging videos that offer valuable insights related to your course. Use relevant hashtags to increase discoverability. Short videos are in trend now; they reach a wider audience quickly than you might think. 

YouTube shorts and Instagram reels have a greater reach than other marketing channels. Think about a creative concept to unveil your online course launch to your target audience. 

Conclusion

So here you have all the actionable tips on how to promote online courses that you can apply to sell more courses. While all these are tips that work, you cannot implement everything in a single shot, and there isn’t any one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to adopting promotional strategies. 

Experiment with different strategies and choose the ones that align with your business objectives and goals. Good luck with online course marketing.