5 Ways To Market Your Online Course & Increase Sales in 2022

It's not enough just to create great learning or training program content. If you want that course content to become a consistent part of your revenue stream, you have to know how to market your online course.

Especially for coaches and trainers who know their stuff and already work with individual clients, selling online courses can become an effective way to scale your business. You just need the right strategy for marketing your online course. Let's get started. 

How Do Online Courses Attract Students?

Potential learners and clients love online courses for a few reasons:

• Especially when they have a defined outcome, like a certificate, they look great on a resume.
• Taking a course online instead of engaging a coach or trainer means being able to complete the lessons and modules at a time convenient to the learner.
• When they include discussion or other social components, online courses can be a great professional networking opportunity.

But of course, not even the best online courses magically attract learners without any effort. You need a strategy to sell your services, which is why the average business coach spends almost 20% of their time on sales and marketing. 

How Do You Attract Customers Online?

An effective strategy to sell online courses almost necessarily begins with an in-depth understanding of your audience, and why they'd want to buy the course to begin with. And here's a shocker: if you want to sell online courses, you need an online promotional strategy. Print, out-of-home, or other fancy non-digital tactics won't help much.

The question, then, becomes how you can promote your class online and attract customers. An integrated strategy is crucial. Focus on multiple channels, but make sure your messaging and visuals are consistent so your customers can easily make the connection. These tactics can help.

5 Ways to Market Your Online Course and Grow Your Revenue

If you've ever engaged in digital marketing, you know that a well-structured and attractive resume of your achievements and valuable experiences is half of success. But knowing how to sell online courses also requires a secret ingredient: the ability to make every touchpoint you have with potential customers engaging, getting them excited about your coaching or training course content. Keep that in mind as you follow these tips for marketing your online course.

1. Use social media to increase online sales

Almost regardless of industry, social media can increase online sales significantly. That's because the through-line from browsing on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to signing up for a course is extremely straightforward. 

The key is understanding how to make that connection between social media and selling your online courses.

Start by understanding which social platforms your audiences love to frequent. If they spend their time on LinkedIn, so should you. Plenty of external research can help you understand where your target demographic likes to spend their scrolling time.

Start by maximizing your presence on social media. Then, get specific about selling online courses, posting snippets or even hosting live Q&A sessions about them that grab your audience's interest. Link directly to your course's sign-up page to close the loop.

2. Create (and execute) a content marketing strategy

Content marketing is an invaluable boost for coaches, and the same is true for anyone trying to determine how to sell online courses. It's all about extending the value your courses already offer into free content used to attract your audience, then convert them into selling customers. 

Start your content marketing efforts by optimizing your course's landing page for the keywords your audience might search for, and populate that landing page with plenty of social proof. Then, build an active blog with regular posts that further focus on those same keywords, using content from the online course you're trying to market.

You can use every post you publish as an opportunity to promote on social media and to your existing email subscribers. Once you have enough readers, the only step needed is optimizing your blog to turn readers into clients, and you've put in place one of the core strategies for marketing your online course.

3. Promote your classes online through outreach ads

Don't underestimate the potential power that digital ads can have to sell your online courses. On Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and almost any other major digital platform, you're able to narrowly target your intended audience and build compelling creative to convert them to clients.

Options for how to market your online course via digital ads include:

• Google search ads, which are text-based and appear at or near the top of relevant search results for the keywords and demographics you want to target.
• Google display ads, which are static or animated banner images that can appear on millions of websites that are part of the Google Display Network. 
• Social media newsfeed ads, which can be text or video and appear naturally as part of the platform's user experience. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other platforms can provide hundreds of audience targeting options that range from user demographics to interests and behaviors.
• Retargeting ads, which are specifically targeted to recent visitors of your website. So, if you want to sell online courses to visitors who are just browsing for options, a few well-placed retargeting ads may just provide that final push.

The best part: digital ads can be low-priced, providing opportunities to market your online course for as little as $20 per day.

4. Include course promotions in your regular communications

As a business coach or trainer, you probably have plenty of communications within your network as well as potential and current clients. Why not use those communications as another opportunity to market your online course? 

The process is simple, especially if you already have an optimized landing page for the course you're looking to sell. Just link to the landing page in your email signature, letters, and any other regular communications with your different audiences and stakeholders. Who said knowing how to sell online courses had to be rocket science?

5. Sell online courses on third-party marketplaces

Who said you can only sell online courses on your own website? Plenty of external, third-party websites offer the ability to host your course on their platform as well, increasing your exposure in the process.

The list of online course platforms is large and continues to grow. You should keep in mind, however, that your revenue using this strategy will not be quite as high as it would be when selling online courses through your own platform.

In other words, taking this route is almost necessarily a trade-off and one of the more controversial options when deciding how to sell online courses.  Explore it a bit before jumping in; with the right partner, building your own platform might make more sense.

How to Get More Customers Using an Integrated Online Course Solution

You know how in business, it's not just about what you know but also who you know? When you want to market your online course, it's not just about the content of the course or even your marketing strategy, but also the tools you use to make sure it's successful.

Take Profi as an example. As an integrated platform specifically designed to help coaches and trainers help others, it might just be the tool you need to sell online courses. Host the course on our simple, secure, and holistic platform and sell it using the integrated payment system. You can even create a membership community to build more engaging experiences. 

Ready for the next step? Book a Demo with one of our Product Coaches today for the first step toward a system that can help you reliably sell and market your online courses.