Train the Trainer Part 4: Sell Your Course
There are so many ways to market the course that you have created! The key is to pick 1, 2, or maybe 3 strategies to start with. Don't overwhelm yourself, and start slow. This way you can also measure the success of the strategy that you have chosen. Some strategies (like SEO) are long-term, while others (like an email campaign) are short-term. So it is perfectly reasonable to pick one long-term and one shorter-term strategy.
Here are a few general marketing suggestions to help you get the creative juices flowing:
- You can run early-bird discounts for a limited time so that you encourage potential attendees to register (but it's so important to market and promote these discounts (whether on your social media platforms, in your newsletter, etc...) so that people know about them
- Email marketing to your list (Embodia markets to our list)
- Social media marketing: this could be through organic posts (that anyone can post for free), or through paid social media ads (if you're willing to pay for advertising)
- Writing blogs: the content could be about the course, but it definitely shouldn't include everything that's in the course - and then users might want to learn more and end up buying your course. But don't forget to add the CTAs (Call-to-Actions) throughout the blog linking to your course
- Reaching out to potential affiliates/associations who would promote the course on your behalf
- Posting about your course in Facebook groups that your target audience uses (a lot of PTs tend to ask about physiotherapy course feedback in such groups). Here's a list of some PT-related Facebook Groups you could be a part of
- Run a free live webinar on Embodia, and promote your course during that webinar
- Giveaways: you can run a giveaway on your social media accounts or even with us on Embodia's Instagram (we tend to do that on a quarterly basis so that it's not overwhelming); this will lead to a higher awareness/exposure of your course
- Podcasts: join other podcasts as a guest and talk about your course
- You can run a presentation about your course at some conferences whose audience is similar to yours
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization, which means the searchability of your course on Google). Embodia has a very good SEO strategy so we do this for you. However, having guest blogs on other sites, having a YouTube channel, or linking to your course from your website or other websites all contribute to the strength and growth of the SEO strategy for your course!
Additionally, we've found the book "Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth" to be very insightful.
Based on insights from interviews with more than 40 successful startup founders—including Paul English (Kayak), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot) and Alexis Ohanian (Reddit)—"Traction" will teach you how to:
- Find and use offline ads and other channels your competitors probably aren’t using
- Get targeted media coverage that will help you reach more customers
- Boost the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns by automating staggered sets of prompts and updates
- Improve your search engine rankings and advertising through online tools and research
So although you are not building your own company, the techniques listed in this book can still be used to develop your marketing strategy for your courses.
We've created a checklist you can follow to make yourself accountable and give you some goal templates you can use. You can download the checklist here.