In recent times, there has been a considerable spike in institutes that offer short-term (primarily skill-based) courses. While the business has been showing a lot of successes, the marketing for them is a bit trickier. Not every strategy can be copied and pasted across institutions, as most of them need to be bent according to the offerings of a course or an institute. These strategies used in digital marketing for educational institutions include identifying and choosing the best niche, content marketing, social media marketing, branding your institute, building positive word of mouth, and much more.
What Does Your Course Offer?
Before moving ahead with sales and marketing, it is essential to develop a strategy to sell your course. To build that strategy, you need a proper understanding of the course. Think of a good answer to critical questions like, “What skills do students actually learn? What problems do my courses solve? How are my course modules different from competitors?”
Thinking of these answers automatically tells you what you can sell or market as the best thing about your course. Additionally, the clarity you gain helps you in content creation, marketing, and brand positioning. The following are some things to keep in mind or make sure of before building a full-fledged sales or marketing strategy:
- Identify the core skills taught in the curriculum of your course.
- Make sure your course is industry-relevant.
- Define your target customer base and age group.
- Ensure that your course pages reflect transparent prices, duration, and learning paths.
Top 10 Best Strategies for Selling Courses
Once you know your course in depth, the next step is to build a marketing or sales strategy that does justice to your goals and the standards of your course. In case you can’t decide what pathway to build for your course and how, the following are the 10 most effective strategies you can optimize as per your offering and work upon:
1. Choose the Best Niche
It is simply not possible to sell a course, or anything for that matter, without choosing the niche or the target audience it can best cater to. Choosing a profitable and focused niche prevents your course from getting lost in a crowded market. Hence, picking the right niche ensures strong demand, precise audience targeting, and a strong position within that niche. Instead of targeting everyone, pick a specific audience and prove you are the best for them. Follow these steps to choose a niche:
- Study market demand using digital tools like Google Trends, and determine whether your course aligns with that demand.
- Choose a niche you already have expertise or experience in.
- Example: If you are selling a programming course, don’t present it as just another coding course. Instead, market it to a specific niche, such as “C++ for Freshers” or “Web Dev for Beginners.”
2. Explain and Promote Your Course Through Social Media
When you publish high-value content for your audience, no matter the platform, it helps your course reach a broader audience. This content reaches the learners, who then start viewing your brand as a knowledgeable educator rather than just an advertiser. The following are some forms of content that can get your course the highest traction:
- Write LinkedIn posts and Instagram carousels explaining course topics.
- Use YouTube Shorts or Reels to simplify concepts.
- Post case studies and student success stories to build authenticity.
3. Focus on Brand Building
When your institute becomes a reputable brand, selling any course successfully becomes a huge possibility. This is due to the trust students feel when choosing your course. Having a strong brand helps in selling your course because learners prefer institutes that hold credibility and experience. You can build a brand for yourself by:
- Establishing a consistent visual identity through your signature color palette and logo.
- Enhancing your ground-level or social media visibility.
- Encourage content featuring your students, like their testimonials, photos, and classroom clips.
4. Leverage Marketing Channels
Among the massive volume of students in the country, all of them depend on different channels to find the best courses for themselves. These channels include Google and YouTube, or they get attracted by some advertisement. Hence, a multi-channel marketing strategy is needed to get the maximum visibility.
- Create catchy content on Instagram Reels or YouTube.
- Run targeted ads on Meta, Google, and YouTube for specific demographics.
5. Expand Your Reach Through Free Facilities
What you offer for free gets you and your course the maximum attraction. When students get a chance to experience your teaching style without paying, a positive perception of your institute, curriculum, and faculty is generated, which can increase with time. Besides, the students who appreciate the free facilities can end up enrolling in your course. The following are some free facilities you can offer to students:
- Offer free workshops, demo classes, or learning bootcamps.
- Provide downloadable notes and beginner guides.
- Give free trial access to a few recorded lessons.
6. Develop Your USP
Out of the thousands or lakhs of institutes offering the same course, a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) makes yours stand out. With a strong USP comes better marketing messaging and a stronger positioning in the eyes of the audience.
- Whether it be the price, placement support, project-based learning, or mentor-led sessions, identify what makes your course stand out.
- Highlight your course’s past results and offerings, such as industry research projects, internships, or certifications.
- Make your USP reflect in your marketing messaging or tagline.
7. Highlight Positive Reviews and Word-of-Mouth
Positive word of mouth is one of the best forms of marketing. As many positive reviews as there are online or offline, the maximum is the reputation of your course. Honest feedback or authentic reviews help massively in building trust and credibility and eliminate any doubt about the course’s quality.
- Show video testimonials, Google reviews, and alumni feedback on your website.
- Encourage students to share their reviews.
- Showcase the positive ratings on your social media platforms or websites, too.
8. Scale Your Courses
The larger the product or service you offer, the more interest it attracts. Expand the reach, capacity, and impact of your existing course by improving its curriculum to scale it to the highest level. The following are some ways to scale your course:
- Offer your course in a variety of languages (English/Hindi/regional).
- License your curriculum to schools, colleges, or training partners.
9. Build Effective Sales Funnels
Developing a proper sales funnel to sell your course to students makes them move slowly from awareness to interest, trial, and finally enrollment. Without being aggressive in sales, a proper sales funnel helps in increasing conversions.
- Attract leads through offerings like a free resume template for data analysts in your sales funnel.
- Offer the students tips, resources, and small lessons.
10. Content Publishing on Google
For selling courses, any form of content present on Google is the backbone of course selling. As students who wish to learn anything, they reach your course through Google and probably enroll in it too. However, enrollment is not guaranteed. To make the chances of content related to your course reaching a good volume of audience, the following are some insights you should take note of:
- Publish weekly blogs, solving student search queries related to your course.
- Promote your institute and your course by including a CTA (Call to Action) in your blogs.
- Include the success stories of students who have qualified in your course in the past.
Conclusion
Besides creating a good curriculum and hiring great teachers, running a successful course business requires a lot of effort from you. These efforts include strategic branding, content-driven awareness, student trust, and consistent value creation. When you take the proper steps in niche selection, content promotion, word-of-mouth creation, and funnel-based marketing, there is no way your institute will not reach its goal with ease.
In need of assistance with digital marketing for an edtech business like yours, we at Mediagarh are always ready to serve you. We provide digital marketing for edtech businesses, with proficiency in SEO, Google and Meta ads, lead generation, social media growth, and more, backed by experience serving the most prominent colleges, universities, coaching academies, and schools across India.
Consult us at Mediagarh for our digital marketing services and see your institute and its admissions touching never-before-seen heights.
FAQs
Q. How to scale a coaching business?
To scale or grow your coaching business, you need to be clear about your niche and build your brand within it through the best possible marketing strategies to increase trust with your audience.
Q. Why is content marketing important in business?
Content marketing is an approach of creating and publishing digital assets on Google or social media platforms to build trust and attract higher engagement from your target audience.
Q. How to promote an online workshop?
Several ways that can help you promote your online workshop involve building a strong brand for yourself, email and WhatsApp marketing campaigns, social media promotions, and SEO growth of your website.
Q. How to increase online course sales?
Some methods that can help increase your course’s sales include promoting it through blogs, YouTube, Instagram, and other social media platforms, and running advertisements across different channels.
Q. What exactly is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel is a marketing-based model that defines the entire route a customer takes before purchasing your course. The sales funnel starts by creating initial awareness and ends with the sale of your course.
