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Are you running an online education business, selling tutorials, e-courses and other products or services online? Do you want more leads and sales from your online education website? This comprehensive guide to digital marketing for online education businesses will help you.
EdTech, or technology-driven education, is one of the fastest-growing industries today, all thanks to the increasing demand and use of online learning by students and classrooms all over the world.
Basically, the online education industry is one with massive opportunities for startups looking to build something meaningful and impactful and teachers looking to get the most out of their knowledge. However, getting success in this industry is not so easy, as there is stiff competition, along with challenges like convincing traditional schools & institutions to add online education and resources into their budget. But it’s nothing that cannot be achieved through right marketing strategies and a little effort on your side.
But, before we start discussing the best marketing techniques for online education businesses, let’s begin with the basics.
Understanding Your Target Audience
The first step to any marketing strategy is to identify the target audience, which is the potential customers of your products. In the case of the education industry, the target audience will be schools, students, parents, teachers, etc. And in order to make a successful sale, you’ll need to convince all these people.
As you can see, even in a single sale of education products/services, there are multiple target users. So, the first thing you should do is start approaching your initial or first customers.
In the case you are running an online education platform or selling resources, your initial target users should be students who want to learn and teachers who want to use these resources to educate in their classrooms. Even though you know that these students or teachers aren’t your primary customers because they will probably never buy anything from you, you still need to woo them in order to sell paid products to parents or school leaders, who are your ultimate target audiences.
So, how do you do that?
Well, as we have found out through research, the best way to attract non-paying yet still important target users is through free offers, which is why many online learning portals keep a free version of their resources/tutorials, allowing users to get an insight into the material before they decide to buy it.
Of course, the primary users of these free/demo products will be students and teachers looking to try out your materials but not willing to buy just yet. And if or once they are satisfied with it, you can expect them to turn into advocates for your brand and help generate leads and traffic that actually converts into sales.
But, there is another problem. How do you tell teachers and/or students about your free products or convince them to try it out? This is where digital marketing comes in.
Once you’ve identified your target audiences and the right way to approach them, you’re ready for digital marketing.
Digital Marketing Strategies To Promote Your Online Education Website/Business
Now that you know who your target customers are, the next step is to find out how to promote your products/services to them.
To start with, you need to be able to think like a potential user, get into their minds and understand their problem. Then, you need to convince them, or better show them, how using your product/service will solve that problem.
Here are a few online marketing tricks or techniques you can try.
Video Marketing
What do you think is the best way to reach out to your target audience and explain to them just how your product is going to make life easier for them.
It’s, of course, videos.
Video marketing has turned out to be a life savour for online businesses, especially the ones with complex products or services. For instance, videos can help your potential users understand how to use your platform to learn. Here’s how to use videos to expand your e-learning business reach to millions of people on the internet.
Create tutorial videos and post them on free websites such as YouTube to let users get a glimpse of what your online education website is all about. You can share how-to videos, tips, lessons, live classes, and more. Even though your actual content/material will be on your website, these free videos will immensely help spread the word and help bring users to the website.
You can also create a series of videos on a particular topic that has good demand in your industry. Use tools like keyword research, Ahrefs, etc. to find out your relevant topics to create videos about.
One of the major reasons why videos are the most effective way to reach your target audience is that videos are easy to grab and learn from. 8 out of 10 people prefer to learn through videos than text and other forms.
Even in terms of ROI, video marketing is one of the most successful digital marketing strategies out there.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is all about helping a potential customer with curated content and solutions with the ultimate aim to make them convert.
Besides using the content to tell your target audiences about your e-learning products and services, you can also prepare and use content to assist a potential user throughout the buyer’s journey so that they finally take the action you want them to take.
However, it’s very important that content is produced strictly for a target buyer/user, otherwise, it will have no result whatsoever.
In the case of the online education industry where your initial target audiences are students and teachers, you’ll need to produce content to make these potential users try out your products/services first before you could even think of selling anything. For this purpose, you can create content like video, blog posts, etc. to attract the initial customers at the top of the funnel. And, once your initial customers are ready to spread the word to the actual buyers, you make sure that they have the right content such as white papers, case studies, etc. to prove their case.
On the other hand, if you are directly targeting schools or parents, the content should be prepared accordingly.
Paid Marketing
Paid marketing has always been a go-to approach for businesses and products/services that do not get much success through other means.
If this is the case with you or if you are looking for instant results and are ready to spend a few bucks for it, there is no harm in trying a paid ad campaign service. There are multiple options for online paid marketing, the best of which is pay-per-click, which is a paid marketing service that involves paying to get clicks on your ads. You can hire a paid marketing service/campaign from Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other online platform that can best help you reach your target audience.
And if you have no knowledge or experience in that, consider getting the help of a professional PPC agency.
In general, paid marketing works well for products that are inexpensive to buy so that more and more people are easily attracted to it. So, in the case of your online education business, you can start by offering a free sample course or lesson through ads on social media and/or Google.
One of the best things about paid campaigns is that they give quick results. And since a large number of your target audiences, teachers, students, etc. are probably already on social media, finding and targeting them through paid ads is the most convenient and fruitful approach.
Other Digital Marketing Strategies for Online Education Industry
Besides the above specialist marketing techniques, other general digital marketing strategies such as search engine optimisation (SEO), local promotion, email marketing, content marketing, etc. are also known to produce good results.
SEO for educational institutions is the process of improving the search engine (Google) ranking of your website so that more and more target users can see your business and access your products/services. It involves optimising the website for various technical aspects and making it responsive to ensure the best user experience, which also impacts the search engine ranking.
We also work on off-page optimization, including content marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing, PR & media, link building, etc. to improve the overall reputation of your online business so that target customers can find and reach you easily.
Conclusion
For educational institutions and startups that want to make it big in the online education industry digital marketing is an ideal approach.
The first step to marketing your educational website online is identifying your target customers, which include teachers, students, parents and institutions. Also, you’ll have to identify and deal with the various challenges such as teachers’ and schools’ resistance to adapt to new technologies, long sales cycles, non-buying customers (students & teachers), etc.
But, if you use the right digital marketing strategies in the right way, it can actually help you grow your online education business and convert more leads into sales.
If you run an online education business and want to know about the best digital marketing strategy to use, get in touch with us at Proven Digital. We are Australia’s leading digital marketing agency with a proven track record of results-driven and ROI-focused marketing solutions.
