The ultimate guide to market and sell online courses

The demand for online courses has surged over the last decade, presenting a great opportunity for educators to monetize their expertise. With an increasing number of online trainers, the market has become more competitive than ever. In this blog post, we will take a deep dive into the strategies online course creators can follow to streamline their sales and marketing activities. 
 

1. Do market research and find your niche

It's crucial to create courses that actually have a demand in the market. Dedicate sufficient time to study your target industry, understand audience needs, and assess market competitiveness. You can begin your research by funneling down the topics that you’re passionate about. Subsequently, you can conduct a learner persona analysis, which will help you figure out the needs and characteristics of your typical learners. Most importantly, research market competitiveness to identify a unique selling point (USP) for your brand that will give you an edge in your niche. 

Expert tips

How do you find a USP for your online course brand? Conduct thorough competitor analysis while taking your strengths and expertise into consideration. It can be a unique teaching style, an innovative approach to course delivery, or interesting course content. You can also analyze the students' reviews for your competitor's business and identify the pain points that most students face and strategize based on that information. 

2. Create a learner persona

Creating a learner persona should be part of your initial research when starting your online course business. In simple words, it's a detailed study of your ideal student's characteristics and goals. Conducting an in-depth learner persona study helps you to better understand who they are, what they need, and how they learn best.

You can start by gathering data on your potential students, such as their age, gender, occupation, and educational qualifications. Then you can dig further to uncover their goals, aspirations, and pain points related to your course topics. The best way to collect information is to conduct online surveys, interviews, and actively participate in online forums. Once you have a clear picture of your target learner persona, it becomes easier to position your courses and brand aligned to your learners’ needs.

3. Set up and manage online portfolios

The effectiveness with which you set up and handle your online portfolios greatly impacts your business and brand growth. Your online portfolios can be broadly classified into two segments.

Social media profiles

Your social media accounts are the primary base to build your brand, communicate with audiences, and regularly stay in touch with your community. Building social media profiles is a straightforward process of signing up and being proactive based on the platform type. Each social media platform is unique in terms of content and user interactions. The general success mantra for all social platforms is to be consistent in posting content and engage with users regularly.

Tool recommendation  

It's cumbersome to post and manage multiple social accounts at the same time. Social media management tools like Social Pilot, Sprout Social, and Zoho Social make it easy for you to publish content, respond to comments, and track performance in a unified interface.

Website (online shop)

Your website is the place where your customers digitally walk in, browse, and buy your courses. Unlike the old days, building a website is not an expensive errand; some online course platforms like TrainerCentral offer drag-and-drop style website builder tools enabling you to swiftly build and manage websites. The simple trick to build a website with good user experience is to have quality visuals, precise content, simple navigation, and a seamless purchase flow.

4. Build brand value and trust

Brand awareness and loyalty are essential cornerstones for the success of online course businesses. Having a good brand reputation in your field of expertise can build trust amongst your target audiences. This brand trust can contribute to shortening sales cycles and improved sales. The best approach when strategizing brand building activities is to have a clear view of your brand positioning, brand messaging, and unique selling point. Keeping that in mind, you can shape your brand the way you want your audiences to perceive it.

5. Focus on course quality

While you excel in marketing and branding, your course quality is the main factor that drives the growth and success of your training business. The basics of maintaining the quality of the course depends on your course curriculum, sequence of learning, content production quality, and style of delivery. A well-designed course experience motivates learners to buy more courses and promotes positive recommendations, which are crucial for sustained business growth. So, diligently focus on creating courses that effectively empower learners with valuable skills and knowledge.

6. Set competitive pricing

Competitive course pricing is a critical strategy to master when scaling your business. You require a well-researched pricing plan and a clear vision to hit your business milestones. There are two approaches that you can consider when pricing your courses. The first approach is competitor shadowing, where you shadow the pricing of competitors in the market and fix your pricing considering your course's unique selling point and quality. The next approach is the standard method, where you calculate the pricing based on the resources spent and the marketing expenses. You can also mix both the strategies based on your preference. The main thing to keep in mind when finalizing pricing is to never simply low ball the pricing just to bag customers.

Expert tips  

As an online course creator, you should have clear revenue targets to begin with. It's always better to follow the top-down approach, where you fix revenue targets for specific milestones and strategize your pricing and marketing based on that.

7. Fix your target market

When selling courses, you can either target specific regional markets or global markets. The regional targeting approach is pretty straightforward, where you produce content in the regional language, use regional payment systems, and configure other communications.

For the global approach, it's important to tailor your course content, pricing structure, and payment systems that are flexible to accommodate the needs of diverse audience groups. For instance, when targeting the global markets, you need to adjust your course pricing based on the country's purchase power parity and also use globally recognized payment gateways for payments. This way, you can make the purchase and learning experience seamless for the global audience.

So far, we’ve discussed how to get started, create your branding, and conduct market research for your courses. Now let's talk about the pivotal marketing and sales strategies to help achieve your goals.

8. Set up your marketing funnel

Marketing funnel is a concept of sequentially aligning your marketing and sales activities towards your business targets. The top of the funnel is the awareness stage, in which all of your marketing and branding activities are done to create awareness and generate leads. Next comes the lead-nurturing stage, in which you will actively strategize plans to impact the purchase decisions of your leads. Finally, the bottom of the funnel focuses on customer experience and retention. As an online course creator, you need to have a clear vision on the activities in each customer stage and streamline marketing and sales efforts accordingly.

Tool recommendation 

A CRM is an absolute necessity for any business. Especially for online course creators, it's pivotal to manage incoming leads from different digital streams and systematically nurture them to paying customers. Zoho's Bigin CRM, monday.com and Hubspot are some of the popular and affordable CRM tools suitable for individual entrepreneurs and SMEs. The best way to choose a CRM is to jot down your required CRM workflow first and try executing it using different CRM tools. This will give you a clear picture of how the CRM can actually fit to your business needs.  

9. Focus on organic marketing

Organic marketing is a long-term marketing tactic where you consistently create content on different mediums to help build brand awareness, reputation, and lead funnels without the help of any paid marketing initiatives. Some businesses tend to overlook organic marketing because these initiatives are slow in bringing in tangible results and demand a lot of perseverance. But the main advantage of investing in organic marketing is that it has the snowball effect of driving more quality traffic over the years with regular content updates. As time progresses, the collective organic results will bring you a load of leads without spending on ads, and it also gives an added advantage of brand trustworthiness in your niche. So, as an online course creator, you can focus on building a long-term organic strategy for different marketing avenues.

10. Create content marketing strategy

People's time and attention are precious. In this distraction-filled digital space, if you can grab people's attention and time through content, then that's an unbeatable success formula for your business growth. Brands and influencers are spending an incredible amount of resources in content creation, striving to become industry leaders and build everlasting brand awareness.

The best practice is to slowly start investing time and resources into content creation across digital platforms where your target customers spend most of their time. As you slowly populate content, you’ll be able to determine which content works better in which platform, and based on that, you can funnel your efforts. You don't have to create different content for specific platforms. Plan your content in such a way that you can repurpose it across platforms with minimal tweaks.

11. Strive to become an industry influencer

Influencers are significantly impacting people's purchase decisions. Especially when it comes to industry influencers, aka experts, people trust their reviews and experiences. This trust has the potential to become an active purchase of the service you provide. As an online course creator, you can become an industry influencer in two different ways: first, you can position yourself as a well-equipped industry leader and create an individual profile as an influencer and create a brand around it. The other way is to position your business as a brand and strategize on building a reputation around it. For example, let's say you're trying to start an online guitar teaching institute. You can either position yourself as an expert guitarist, post quality content, and then strive to influence the audience. Or, you can position your academy as a teaching institute and post informative content on behalf of the business.

12. Collaborate with other influencers

One of the best ways to accelerate your brand reach is to collaborate with other influencers in the industry. These collaborations are mostly mutually beneficial for both parties, helping them grow beyond their existing followers. Content such as podcasts, videos, and blogs are the commonly preferred types of collaborations by influencers. The best way to approach influencers is to reach out to them directly with clear-cut objectives and other business aspects.

13. Set up affiliate marketing 

Affiliate marketing is an advertising model where businesses pay third-party influencers for the traffic, leads, and sales they refer. This pay-per-performance marketing model helps online course creators build a strong channel of leads regularly flowing from a wide range of affiliates. The main advantages of affiliate marketing are:

• Affiliate marketing is risk-free. 
• It has an excellent return on investment.
• It’s zero-cost marketing.

You can recruit influencers to promote your courses and pay subsequent commissions. You can keep track of your referral performance by using unique URLs for all of your affiliates. Correlating the data with your CRM and sales reports will help you monitor affiliate performance and calculate commissions.

Tool recommendations 

An affiliate management software helps you easily monitor affiliate performances and calculate commissions automatically. Tapfiliate, UpPromote, and Zoho Thrive are some of the popular tools you can use to manage your affiliate networks.

14. Participate in trade shows

Trade shows and community meetups are a great way to meet your followers and fellow influencers in person. It gives you a window to meet and engage with your audiences, helping you to foster relationships and build brand awareness. Networking is another invaluable thing you can find in tradeshows where you meet like-minded individuals. Your tradeshow networking can help build collaboration networks and other business opportunities.  

15. Offer freemium access

Freemium is a marketing technique of providing free access to some of your course resources for users to feel and understand the service before actually making the purchase. This helps users feel confident when signing up for your courses. The freemium strategy also helps fuel your lead growth, reduces customer acquisition cost, and improves conversion rates.

16. Host free live workshops

In addition to providing free course access, you can also conduct free live workshops for interested users. People are usually motivated to enroll in such obligation-free live workshops. You can also plan a lead nurturing strategy specifically crafted for users enrolled for the free sessions. The free live session helps the audience understand your service better and positively impacts their purchasing decisions.

17. Pitch in for guest blogs

Spreading your identity is the main objective for all branding and marketing exercises. Guest blogging is a great way to reach more readers in your industry. Many tech magazines and blogs are open to guest blogs with valuable content. You can reach out to websites with demography aligning with your target audiences and start contributing through guest blogs. This helps improve brand awareness among the blog reading community. Your guest blogs linking back to your course website will also improve your SEO ranking.  

18. Send customized newsletters

Newsletters play multiple roles in different marketing and sales stages. For prospects in the awareness and nurturing stages, you can send newsletters about your courses, customer testimonials, achievements, and so forth, speeding up the conversions. For existing customers, you can focus on upselling your services and gathering testimonials and feedback. So, as an online training business, you should consider newsletters as a medium of communication through which you can nurture and build rapport with your customers.  

Tool recommendations 

Online course creators can use email automation tools like MailChimp and SendGrid to design and publish their newsletters. Zoho Campaigns, particularly, is the best solution starting at $29/month with many customization features. The main thing you should keep in mind when choosing an email automation tool is its integration capabilities with your existing CRM and the automation workflow.

18. Participate in podcasts

In 2023, the podcasting market was set to reach USD $27.3 billion and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 27.8% in the next decade. Podcasts are increasing in popularity, with these trending content mediums preferred by most users. Not just binge listening, people actually buy products that are discussed and marketed in podcasts. According to one report, 28% of users have purchased products that they’ve learned about in podcasts. These numbers are a testament to the importance of podcasts, and you should also invest in riding this wave. You can either start your own podcast, or do a collaboration with popular podcast channels and garner audience attention.

19. Run Google Ads

When it comes to paid advertisements, globally, 80% of businesses depend on Google Ads to promote their products and services. Being the world's most commonly used search engine, Google is one of the most successful mediums to reach your target audience. In Google Ads, you can run different types of ads, such as search ads, display ads, and video ads. Search ads are the ads that are displayed on top of your search results. Display ads are digital banners placed on websites you browse via Google. Finally, we have video ads, where you can broadcast your video promotions on YouTube.

With Google Ads, there's no one definitive success formula. As an online course creator, you should thoroughly do your keyword and competitor research. From a broader perspective, you need to have a good keyword strategy, precise landing page design, and a budgeting strategy. You can start with a small budget with limited keywords and slowly expand as you get insight into your ad performances. Google Ads provides you with a ton of data to optimize your ad targeting, which you can always use to analyze and refine your ads accordingly.

You can also check out this blog post, Guide to setting up Google Ads to promote your online courses for more detailed insights.

20. Run Meta ads

The renowned Meta social apps Facebook and Instagram holds 75% of social media market as of 2024. Both social apps put together have more than 3.59 billion active users, which is 77% of all internet users. These numbers are a testament to the platform's penetration across markets, obviously becoming a hot forum for businesses to promote their products.

Both Facebook and Instagram support various types of ads fulfilling different business needs. One of the major advantages when it comes to Meta is the option to target ads based on the user's profile and interests. Instagram's algorithm and ease of use especially has irked the interests of many e-commerce businesses. As an online course creator, your first step should be to create and build a proper social profile on both platforms and slowly build ad-target demography based on your existing user data and conscious assumption.

21. Analyze and iterate based on ad performance data

Your paid ads generate a ton of performance data, which you’ll use to monitor each ad campaign's reach, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, and much more. When correlating ad performance data with your centralized CRM system, you’ll be able to identify which medium is bringing in quality leads, which lead types are converting, and which leads are generating more revenue. Based on this analysis, you can optimize your ad bidding and targeting to get the most value for your ad spend. So, when running paid ads for your online courses, keep a close eye on your ad performance and spend.

Expert tips  

When optimizing your ads, it's always better to make big targeting or keyword changes once in a month. This way, you will have a sufficient amount of data to analyze and derive inferences.

22. Leverage TikTok reach

The bite-sized video sharing platform has stormed the social media market with its virality and highly engaging content. Mostly dominated by GenZ users, the platform offers a feed of easily digestible short videos boosting the platform's user engagement rates. The main difference between other social platforms and TikTok is the amount of user engagement. One recent study showed that micro influencers have an engagement rate of 18% as opposed to Instagram's micro influencer engagement rate of 3.86%.

In the case of macro influencers, Instagram's macro influencer engagement rate is 1.21% compared to TikTok's whopping 35%. This growth has motivated online businesses to channel resources to create trend-driven TikTok videos and do paid ads. Especially in the case of an online training business, TikTok is a wonderful gateway to run cost-effective ads with higher engagement returns. If done right, online course creators can easily excel by creating attention-getting marketing videos aligned to the platform's fast-changing trends.

23. Be active on LinkedIn

If you’re planning to sell courses for professionals and students, then LinkedIn is one of the primary platforms you should focus on for building brand awareness. LinkedIn is pretty unique when compared to other social media platforms, because it’s mostly driven by keywords, cohort engagement, and follower demography.

For example, let's say you’re a digital marketing expert looking to sell courses on SEO. Your business objective on LinkedIn is to regularly post content, spread brand awareness, build your reputation, and slowly nurture the audience to customers. To achieve this, you need to keyword-optimize your profile.

The next step is to deliver quality content consistently. Your quality content is going to drive more engagement from other people from the digital marketing field. The more engagement from users in the same field, LinkedIn recognizes you as a field expert and starts accelerating your organic reach.

24. Sell courses parallelly on marketplaces

Marketplaces like Udemy and Coursera can help improve your course sales in the initial stages. When getting started in the course creation industry, it's better to promote courses on marketplaces parallelly and build your online course business individually. Many online trainers use marketplaces as a launch pad in their initial stages to test course quality and then accelerate towards their own training business. You can adapt this strategy when getting started and slowly use your marketplace presence as a brand expansion for your training business.

25. Use YouTube to increase audience reach

YouTube ads are a great way to promote your online courses. The video commercials provide greater brand awareness when compared to other ad models. Video ads are a bit costly when compared to search ads, but brand recall and ad impressions are excellent. YouTube's ad targeting is flexible enough to accommodate the needs of your business and provides options to meticulously target the right audience.

26. Set up a lead-nurturing workflow

You may run impeccable marketing campaigns and generate hundreds of leads, but if you don't have a lead-nurturing system in place, you’ll be wasting a part of your advertising money. Overall, you’ll have three types of leads: hot leads, warm leads, and cold leads.

Hot leads are prospects who are interested in your services and are willing to purchase immediately. Warm leads are prospects who have shown interest but aren't ready to make the purchase right away. Cold leads are prospects who are just exploring similar services and need more time before making the purchase.

For all three types of leads, you need to have a nurturing system in place. You should constantly be in touch with prospects via emails and phone calls. The systematic nurturing process provides prospects with the needed information regularly and positively impacts their purchase decisions. This in turn shortens your sales cycle, reduces lead churn, and improves the lead/conversion ratio. You can set up the nurturing mechanism using most of the CRMs you find in the market. Research and adapt products that fit your needs.

27. Excel in making sales cold calls

Nothing beats the personal touch that a cold-calling approach can give to a customer. Cold calling helps you connect with your prospects in real time, adapt your pitch based on the prospect's responses, and build rapport effectively. Though digital mediums are a great way to generate leads, your cold-calling expertise is the main factor in driving sales. The more cold calls you make, the better you can empathize with your prospects and position your services to be aligned with their needs. It also gives you an added advantage over your competitors who aren’t putting the extra effort of cold calling prospects.

28. Streamline the learner purchase process

In simple terms, make it easy for the customer to make the purchase. The seamless purchase workflow gives the customer more confidence when they’re buying. The simple trick to offer a seamless purchase flow is to have a dedicated sales page with prominent CTAs, followed by a non-distracting final order confirmation page. It’s better to always offer flexibility to customers when they’re making a purchase. Whether it’s the payment methods or the mode of payments, offer sufficient options for your customers.

29. Offer seasonal discounts

Seasonal discounts and product offers are a common strategy adopted by most businesses during seasonal times. The seasonal marketing strategy is a great way to accelerate your sales with reduced efforts. Giving product discounts for a limited period of time encourages prospects to take actions swiftly, cutting down the sales cycle period and labor for each sale.

30. Focus on cross-selling and upselling

Cross-selling is an easy way to maximize your revenue with minimum efforts, if it’s done right. Generally speaking, learning is an ongoing process that never has an end. So, as an online course creator, you can always provide more valuable courses for your existing learner groups.

Your learners will be more willing to opt and buy courses from their favorite trainer than signing up for new trainers. Create a cross-selling strategy that aligns with your students’ learning path, and this will progressively improve your customer lifetime value. Cross-selling is mainly dependent on how well you strategize and communicate your offerings to your existing customers.    

A slightly different sales approach is the upselling strategy, where you encourage customers to opt for more premium services. For example, let's say a learner is interested in buying a single course. Now, as an upselling strategy, you can bundle live workshop classes and an e-book for a discounted price for them. The learner will now be more open to consider buying the full package of learning sources. This way, you can encourage prospects to buy add-on services during the purchase.

31. Focus on building customer relationship

Having a strong customer relationship with your customers/learners is key to the long-term success of your online course business. Building a strong rapport and trust goes a long way in helping customers feel secure and connected with your brand. Your well-built customer relationship can help improve customer retention and the repeat purchase rate.

The customer relationship is a long-term strategy where you provide exceptional customer support and maintain agile communications. When building a strategy, it’s important to think from the customer's point of view; what will the customer expect at different stages of the sales cycle? What are the customer’s pain points? What’s the customer's preferred communication medium and optimal response time? Another way to streamline customer relationships is to conduct regular customer feedback surveys and take actions based on their results.

32. Focus on scaling the business

Scaling a business is the toughest part of any enterpreneur's journey. Especially for online course creators, it's quite difficult and cumbersome when expanding and scaling. Once you have found your market fit and started selling courses consistently, your next step should focus on scaling the business. There are three strategies that you can consider:

1. Create more courses and diversify your offerings for the larger target audience.
2. Progressively increase your ad campaigns and brand penetration exercises to increase the volume and quality of leads generated.
3. Tap into other markets with the needed business tweaks.

33. Gather customer reviews

How many times have you looked at the customer reviews before going to a restaurant, salon, or making an online purchase? Online customer reviews significantly impact businesses’ growth. According to one report, 95% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase. Especially for the online course business, customer reviews are a medium that prospects can relate to and take action. So, always have a detailed feedback system in place to collect feedback systematically and take counter actions.

Tool recommendation 

 Zoho Survey, Jotform, and SurveyMonkey offer flexible customizations, a simple to use interface, and the ability to easily embed survey forms on your website, emails, and other digital mediums.

Wrapping up 

In the coming years, the online course market is definitely going to be more crowded and competitive. So, in addition to excelling in course creation, you should also be equipped with excellent marketing and sales skills to build your business. When getting started, marketing and sales may seem overwhelming, but you can always slowly learn and test your strategies. The one thing you should always keep in mind is to iterate and refine your processes regularly.