Positioning Your Course in the Market

As with any part of your business, positioning your course in the market correctly is what leads to success. You’ve spent a lot of time working on your course contents and putting it together in a way that helps to educate people, but just having it up online for people to find isn’t enough.

To sell your course and get people on board, you need to make sure people know about it, and make sure they can find it. But how do we go about that?

We’ve put some tips together to help you get started in positioning your course in the market.

Define Your Target Audience

Before you start to create your course, you should have a very good idea of who your target audience is. By knowing this information, you can tailor your course to the right market, and know how to reach them.

To define who your target audience is, take the time to sit down and outline your course and what it will teach. Then consider who will be able to use your knowledge best. You may find that your course will be relevant to two or three audience types and that’s ok – as long as you work out where to find them and the best way to reach them.

Choose the Right Platforms

As part of understanding who your target market is, you’ll want to look at the right platform to reach them on. This comes in two forms – the first is the platform that your course will sit on, and the second is the platform you’ll use to reach your potential students to tell them about your course.

At Course Creators Circle, we use the Thinkific platform as it is versatile, and your students will have no issues accessing your courses from your Thinkific store. The platform allows you to create, market, and sell your course all from one platform.

When it comes to the platforms you can reach your potential students on, think about where you get the most engagement currently – is it Facebook or Instagram? Perhaps it’s Tik Tok. Where you already get good engagement is a great place to start.

Create Compelling Content

To draw people into your course, you need to create content that is compelling, and this includes compelling titles. The title of your course will be the initial determining factor as to whether people look further into what you offer. Use your title to describe what your course is, for example “Learn SEO in 5 Days” or “Using Social Media to Market Your Business”. By using these types of titles, your potential students can see what it is they are going to learn.

You then also need to ensure your course content is interesting and contains the right mix of information and visuals to keep your students engaged and learning. It may be a good idea to have a friend or colleague go through your course before you open it up for sale to ensure the content is compelling enough to keep your students on track.

Format Your Course Appropriately

Structure your course so that it replicates an in-person course, that is, you have an introduction, a number of modules and a final overview. Your students should be given a list of tasks to do or a list of things to read or a discussion to participate in to cement the knowledge they have just learnt.

You may also like to schedule in calls with your students at various points throughout the course should they need additional assistance in how to implement a step or even just to check in how they are going.

Optimise Your Content for SEO

Marketing your course is much like marketing a product or service you offer in your business. You’ll already have a list of engaged customers or potential customers, and then some will find you organically through SEO. The same can happen with your course. By using SEO throughout your course content and in your course descriptions, as well as on your social media posts, you’re opening your course up to being found organically through a Google search.

Utilising software such as Answer the Public, Bramework or Keywords Everywhere, you can find SEO friendly terms and phrases to use when writing your content.

Add Images and Video

There is nothing worse than doing a course that is all just words. Adding visuals such as images and videos not only brings your course to life, but it can really help you get information and points across to your students in a way that is much easier to understand.

Research has shown that visuals help people retain information and prevent cognitive overload – this occurs when too much information is presented and expected to be processed and retained. Learning new skills and information can be difficult enough without being able to process it effectively.

Using visuals in your course can also encourage your students to make associations between different information.

By utilising the right images and videos throughout your courses, whether that be infographics, videos of you speaking directly to your students or videos and images showing examples of what you are presenting, you help your students understand your course content a lot better.

Market Your Course Effectively

There are plenty of ways you can market your course to reach a wide audience, including:

• Promoting your course on your blog
• Using your social media channels to promote your course
• Add student testimonials to your course landing page
• Include a link to your course on your website and on your email signature
• Build an email list
• Offer a sneak peek of your course, early bird pricing, or a perk for signing onto your course
• Put yourself out there by gaining interviews on podcasts or writing articles or guests posts for various websites and blogs
• Hosting a live webinar

Thinkific has a number of great tips to help you market your course effectively, allowing you to reach more people.

By following these simple tips, you’ll be able to confidently position your online course in the market and see success.

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