Guide to Creating Your Mini Course to Generate Lead

The pace of eLearning has accelerated faster than anyone could imagine during the COVID-19 pandemic. But now post-pandemic online learning has become essential with course providers worldwide launching over 2800 online courses, 19 online degrees, and 360 micro-credentials in 2020.

There is no doubt that eLearning is growing, but so is the competition for educators who are course providers. How can you generate valuable leads for your online course business?

But simply creating an online course is not enough to find learners to sign up for your courses. 

To sell your online courses to a broad student base and earn a sizable income, you have to invest in lead generation for your courses. And do you know that mini courses play a critical role in lead generation and management? 

Significance of generating leads for your online courses

Creating an online course is not enough to attract people to sign up for it. You need to put in the effort to generate leads for your online course and if you need more reasons, here’s why:

Attract relevant clients

Imagine talking about programming to a marketer or someone who doesn’t have any interest in coding. A well-defined lead generation strategy will help you promote your online course to the right audience so you are not wasting your valuable time and money on an irrelevant audience.

Build a relationship with prospects

It is obvious that people prefer buying from those they recognize and trust. Setting up lead generation funnels is a great way to establish yourself as a trust working brand so that when they want to purchase a course, you will be on top of their minds. 

Communicate the value of your online course

Use social media, blogs, email marketing, and other promotional activities to convey the value of your online courses to your target audience. This will help them understand the value of your online course and motivate them to sign up. Show your learners how your online course can improve their knowledge and skills, help in advancing their careers and achieve progress.

Creative ways to leverage mini courses for lead generation

We know that breaking down complex concepts into small chunks makes it easier to retain information and understand the concept quickly. This is exactly what mini courses do. 

If you are brainstorming about how to create a mini course, make sure you check out these creative ways on how mini courses act as effective lead magnets for lead nurturing.

Use mini courses as lead magnets

Offering free and high-valued content in exchange for the mailer address of users is a common practice that actually works. Give your potential audience a free eBook or a mini course that your audience will see value in. This will increase the probability of them signing up for your newsletter.

Use engaging mini courses for more engagement from your freebies than from the real course. The main difference between a mini course form preview videos or PDFs is that it offers two-way communication. You will get inputs from leads as questions and engage them with your work.

A mini course comes with the power of interactivity; it also creates a sense of achievement to community something bigger for your potential clients. And yes lead generation becomes more effective with mini courses.

Test your course ideas to see whether it is in demand

Do you have a course idea in mind but is unsure whether it will be successful? Or are you wondering what to improve your online course to make it more appealing and engaging? 

The best idea is to create a mini version of your course and identify its demand among your target audience. The significance of finding the right course idea cannot be underestimated, as it has the power to boost audience engagement to new heights.

Get paid without building a macro course

mini courses are great to gauge the demand for your course even before it is launched, and it’s a great way to make money as well alongside. If you want to sell your mini courses, you can sell them on marketplace platforms and generate revenue. Start making money with your mini courses while you work on your macro course. 

The motto is to start small and fast and get going. Turn your mini courses into a revenue generator technique before you start making more money with your real online course.

Understand your target audience and enhance your marketing communication

Mini courses are great for knowing more about your target audience and improving your lead generation approach in the long run. How much do your target learners know about your brand and the subject you are teahcing? What results do they need in return from your teaching? Finding answers to these questions will help you know more about your prospects and enhance your overall promotion efforts and investments. 

If you are looking for how to create a mini course, consider it as a survey, assessment, and feedback collection to build a bond with your ideal audience and make a more robust decision about where you must spend more of your time, money, and efforts on. 

Knowing about your target audience is the secret sauce of marketing, and why not use it for your benefit with the free mini courses you offer? 

Create multiple free mini courses to increase sales

Offering free content before the official launch of an online course is a traditional approach to help your prospects know more about what you are actually selling. But the challenge with this approach is that it doesn’t fit all. 

People who have landed on your website or who have checked out your online courses have different requirements So, if selling your macro course in bulk is your goal, offer multiple ones instead of a single mini course. 

This approach allows your target audience to experiment with different approaches before committing to buying your online course.This increaest their confidence as they know they are spending money on something that will bring them excellent results. 

Either place mini courses as a collection or sell them separately according to your goals. 

Increase your webpage visiblity by embedding mini courses

As you might know, each webpage of the course-selling website has a specific goal. For example, it might be visitors signing up for newsletter, connecting your team through a call, joining your community, or anything similar. 

By embedding mini courses you are improving page conversion with better and more engaging content. This not only increases the SEO performance; it also helps improve engagement with your target learners. And the result is the visitor spends more time on your webpage, which will increase its rank in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

It’s your turn now. Now that you know how to create mini courses, how are you going to use them? 

Tips for creating a mini course that converts

Many educators get into trouble creating an online course that shares knowledge with their audience. Now there is nothing wrong with that- all inline courses must be rich with information. 

But you must create an online course that converts your audience and website visitors to your customers for more. For an online course to convert, it must offer value to the target customers. The content of your online course must be actionable and must generate a healthy ROI. 

So here are some practical tips for creating mini courses that convert: 

Choose a practical niche

No matter what topic you choose to create your online course on, it must be of high value and something that the course buyer can apply immediately. Ensure your course includes statistics, examples, and actionable advice for your learners. 

When selecting a niche for your online course, consider what you are passionate about and your expertise. If you are stuck in any area, monitor online forums and Google to see what people are needing help with the most and start from there. 

Select a specific audience

When creating a mini course, consider your ideal demographic. Learn about their details like where they live, what age group do they belong to, estimated experience level, their career goals, and more. Get more granular and understand the specific challenges faced every day. 

A mini course assures a course creator to make around 20% more sales in a year. But makes sure you play smart and keep your course really short and precise, and the market is followed with hundreds of courses. Make sure to distinguish yourself to stand out in the crowd.

Follow a competitive price

Now that you know about how to create a mini course, let’s come to the most important aspect, pricing your mini courses. Unless it is of extremely high value, do not go for premium pricing. A mini course is expected to be priced way too less than longer online courses. 

To find the right pricing, think about the ROI they can expect from your course material. You can also launch a pre-sale on your mini course to see how the target audience reacts to the courses at different prices. Follow a split-testing campaign to nail down the right price.

Conclusion

As discussed in this blog, the ways to utilize mini courses creatively are endless. And the sky is the limit with what you can experiment. Any educator working on creating online courses can reap advantage from mini courses, whether you are a course creator, training provider, consultant, or coach. 

Please feel free to contact with our experts if you want to know more about creating your own course-selling marketplace platform so that you can leverage the power mini course to its fullest.