Online Marketing Strategy for Professionals / Teachers / Consultants / Trainers / Instructors / Counsellors / Service Providers Post COVID-19

First things first, let me fascinate you with some facts –

“$325 Billion is the projected value of the online education industry by the year 2025.”

“More than 98% of US Corporations intend to inculcate E-learning in their organization in 2020.”

Mind you, these are the projections made before the COVID-19 hit the world. COVID-19 took the world by a storm, and almost every organization you used to look up to came to a standstill.

COVID-19 is a once in a lifetime crisis, but it has shifted the focus of businesses worldwide on the importance of having a digital presence. And by the time you end up reading this post, you will be equipped with all the tools and strategies to build online authority for your brand/personal brand. You will also get the insights and secrets to create a consistent flow of customers and an overflowing sales pipeline.

Hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide went online. They built websites and invested in social media to cover the loss they incurred offline. One of the most prominent examples – Zoom. As we saw the company’s stock price increased exponentially in a week. Almost every other business/professional has started using Zoom to communicate with customers/teammates.

With all these events, comes a fundamental lesson. — The importance of the digital world and why you must have your operations diversified to prepare for the worst.

Statistics around online marketing is equally fascinating. The scope of getting customers and growing your business online is more than ever. This is extremely prevalent in the services business. The reason behind that is…Mobile Phone.

Do you know the amount of time an average person spends on their mobile phone?

Hint – A lot.

With the vast rise in users on social media, opportunities are endless to target people at the best time possible, i.e., the time when they are using their mobile phones.

Relevance for Professionals / Teachers / Consultants / Trainers / Counsellors

The business of teaching and counseling has boomed in the last decade with platforms like Udemy, Unacademy, etc. Everyone wishes to grow by learning new things relevant to their industry to cope with the ever-changing world. And so far, the best and the most efficient way to learn is to learn online. From teachers all over the world.

Because of this, the potential of getting customers is more than ever. But with so many people offering their services, it is vital to building a unique identity of yourself. Personal branding is the real estate of the online world, and some various tips and tricks can help you nail it.

Step by Step Strategies & Roadmap

Let’s dig deep into all the strategies and the blueprint you need to build a personal viral brand that will help you skyrocket your business!

 1. Building a website/landing page

The website is the first step to building authority online. To understand the importance of a website, let’s compare it to a physical office space. As in the case of a traditional business, physical office space is a go-to place where customers go when they need your service/product. Similarly, a website is the online go-to place where your customers go when they want your service/product. Simple, right?

Your business must have a substantial social media presence, but all the traction that you get must be diverted to your website. After all, this is where you sell your services. So, creating a website with an amazing UI, UX is really important to enhance the customer experience. Also, some additional things like LMS, payment platforms are needed which we’ll be discussing in a minute.

But before all that, you should sort these two important things first:

• SEO

Billions of searches happen on Google every single day. Among these billions of searches, there are millions of students looking for a teacher/counselor or mentor.

It’s all about getting found.

Your website/landing page must be optimized for SEO to help you rank on top of high searches and low-competency keywords. By doing tweaks and changes, and building meaningful links from high authority websites, you can rank for the target keywords.

To create viral content that is SEO friendly is to get organic customers time and again.

• Responsiveness

As we’ve established above, the average person spends a lot of time on their mobile phone. Even more than their PCs.

What this means is, there’s a good chance they’re browsing your website on their phone.

Find more statistics at Statista

Your website/landing page must be optimized for all device types. Website speed, user interface, and UX design are significant in providing a seamless user experience that can substantially increase conversions.

2. Setting up LMS

LMS, also known as a learning management system, is an efficient system built for E-learning based websites.

As the name suggests, a  learning management system (LMS) is an application that supports your whole e-learning ecosystem.

In addition to the features provided by a typical training software like the ability to create courses, running tests, and assessments; an LMS gives you all that and more.

With LMS, you can have reporting to track progress, integrate smoothly with other tools you might be using, provide downloadable certificates on course completion, and much more.

LMS makes the E-learning experience better for the learner as well as the teacher(you).

Win-Win.

A website made for a professional/teacher/Consultant or Counsellor must contain some of the essential fragments exclusive to E-learning websites.

A few significant inclusions in the LMS system integrated are –

• Custom Dashboards

Management is a crucial part of E-learning platforms. With so many courses, teachers, and students active in the platform, it gets pretty tough to manage them at the same time without a system.

That’s the beauty of an online platform, the management becomes pretty comfortable with the system of individual dashboards for all the stakeholders.

The LMS system contains custom dashboards for students, teachers, and the Admin. There is a master admin panel from which all the accounts can be managed at the same time.

Students get an individual login and get access to all the courses that they are enrolled for. They can also access tests and get results within the platform using automated technologies. The student will not get any other data other than the course he/she is enrolled in. Every part of the student dashboard is customizable and can be changed according to the owner’s brand.

Teachers will have their separate logins in which the details of their courses will be given. Teachers can create their tests and send custom notifications to the students. Teachers will also get tools to analyze students’ performance in a single window so that they can give individual attention to students.

The final dashboard is of the Admin. Admin will get access to all the data and courses. The payment details and analysis charts will be provided to the Admin so that everything can be managed at the same time without collection bits and pieces of data. 

• Option to sell courses and books

You will easily be able to integrate as many products as you want on your website. With advanced E-commerce capabilities, these LMS platforms are equipped with all the necessary technologies to list and sell courses and books. You can include many details and video descriptions to make them engaging. Various graphics and images are inbuilt to help you deliver your message while providing value at the same time.

• Numerous value-added features

Hundreds of other value-added features like interactive charts, payment integrations, chat platforms, online classrooms, etc. are present in the LMS, which help you to scale without any technical foundations.

You will be able to redirect hundreds of thousands of organic and inorganic traffic on your website. Everyone who reaches your website will be part of your funnel, and you can track every activity of the potential customer.

3. Integrating payment platforms

Every customer expects a seamless payment. 

Safety is the biggest concern for online consumers.

The website/landing page should include payment integration through leading payment platforms like Instamojo, Razorpay, etc. These platforms are among the safest and the most convenient options for secure payment. All the payments received on your platform will be instantly transferred to your bank account.

4. Marketing

The holy grail of building a brand in the E-Learning industry is marketing. Online Marketing, or better known as Digital Marketing, is the marketing of the future.

Soon, every business will be devoting more than half of its money and efforts into digital marketing because of its innovative concepts. Just like Radio overtook Newspapers and TV overtook Radio, Digital marketing is on the path to surpass all marketing platforms, and the E-learning industry is no exception.

The best part about all this is that the behemoths in the Education industry have not captured the digital space. Unlike TV advertising, you can beat your competitors in Digital platforms without burning a hole in your pocket.

Some of the best ways to marketing E-learning platforms are –

• Social Media platforms for Organic Brand building

Each of your potential customers is active on Social Media. Social Media is the best online marketing strategy, especially for the B2C industry.

Brand building is equally important to grow your E-learning platform, as are inorganic advertisements. The first thing that any potential customer checks after getting to know about any learning platform are its social presence. Building a loyal and engaged community on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and Tiktok can help you grow exponentially.

The first step to growing on all these channels is producing engaging and value-driven content. Content pieces must be created and distributed on these platforms daily. You can use the same content to post on all platforms.     

To compliment the first step of creating content,  the second step is all about engaging. Engaging with the online community in groups, forums, and E-learning pages. Engaging organically with individual accounts will help divert their attention to your account/page, thus giving you loyal customers.

• Facebook ads

After and along with building your organic followings on social media platforms, you need to run Facebook ads. Every business is fueled with revenue, and organic growth takes time and does not get you the desired revenue in the initial stages. The initial boost required by your company will be given by Facebook ads, one of the most premium ad networks in the world.

There are various strategies to ace the Facebook ads game and get a multi-fold return on investment. It’s about building the perfect ad copy with engaging content that catches your target audience’s attention.

• Google Ads

With billions of searches every month, you cannot ever ignore Google Ads. The organic way of leveraging google searches is SEO, and you are already aware of how to get your website SEO optimized, as discussed above. Additionally, the LMS platform should also contain the best SEO practices, and you can incorporate essential keywords easily using LMS.

The inorganic and the fastest way to capture leads from organic Google searches are running Google Ads. You will have to be careful and analyze each element of the ad and the target audience. Running optimized Google ads have changed the fortunes for millions of companies all over the globe, and you can undoubtedly be the next!

• Email Marketing

Email marketing is among the most effective marketing strategy for professionals. Students actively check emails, and this particular strategy is used by the leading companies in the world.

The first step of Email marketing is building a healthy email subscriber list. For that, you will need a lead magnet integrated on your website and social media channels.

There are various marketing strategies to make the user interface engaging and include offers and lead magnets like ebooks to increase your subscribers’ list.

After you have built your email subscribers list, it’s time to create meaningful content to promote via email newsletters.

You have to remain up to date with the trends and involve copywriters to write killer subject lines to have a tremendous open rate. Involving experts can help you get a push start and build a brand.

The best part of Email marketing is that the data will forever be your property. Unlike social media channels and SEO rankings on Google, which can disappear overnight, Email subscribers will remain with you for as long as you want.

With optimizing and creating valuable content, you can convert a large chunk of email subscribers into customers.

• Linkedin

Linkedin is especially useful when the target audience is working professionals. Linkedin has emerged as the leader of the online platforms for professionals and currently caters to more than 675 million active monthly users and 30 million companies.

With such a vast online community, the opportunities are endless for prospecting and finding customers. Building an organic following on Linkedin is the first step to building a brand on it. There are even options available to automate Linkedin marketing at a later stage.

In terms of content, you can easily share the same content as produced for other social media platforms. Participating and creating Linkedin groups a very effective strategy for growth. You can generate data of potential clients and send connection requests with personalized messages to these accounts to build your brand value.

Linkedin ads are another way of marketing your courses. You can choose to show your ads and in-mail messages to professionals in a particular industry. In-mails have more than 50% open rate, which can help you virtually reach more than 12% of the world’s populations according to statistics.

Linkedin will work for some of the companies, whereas Facebook ads would be the priority for some. This is where the expertise comes into play.

• Blogging

Blogging is a part of SEO and helps you create an inflow of regular visitors to your website. The most important fragment of blogging is keyword analysis.

Analyzing your competitors is the best strategy to find low competition keywords in your Industry. Writing meaningful long-form articles on the target keywords will help build domain authority and rank for particular keywords simultaneously.

For example, let’s assume you are a Marketing consultant. If someone searches for the best marketing strategy for a restaurant and lands on your ranked article, he/she can easily convert into a customer if you have provided value in the particular post.

5. Integrate the latest technologies

Another wave of the technology revolution is on its way in the form of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. These are equally important in the E-learning industry as trainers and consultants use these to explain complex scenarios to their students.

Integrating AI and VR in some form or the other can help you stand out from your competition and be among the early adopters of the latest technology.

 

So there you have it, all the essential knowledge to launch your E-learning business online.

If you follow the above-listed strategies correctly, you can easily outrank your offline competitors as the opportunities in the online world are infinite!

And in case you need help with any of the things mentioned above, our team sleeps, eats, and breathes Marketing. 

Online Marketing for E-learning platforms is our forte, and we have successfully given the digital wings to hundreds of successful brands. We have a clear agenda of becoming the go-to marketing agency for Professionals/Teachers/Consultants/Trainers/Counselors like you who are committed to transforming lives. Our dream is to provide learning opportunities for every student in the world. 

We would love to hear your experience with marketing strategies in this industry, and please don’t forget to email us when you get success after implementing the above-listed marketing strategies for professionals. 

Let’s join hands and touch countless lives with E-learning.