How to market your training program

Start a blog

Blogs are a great way to market your training program. By adding a blog to your website and publishing valuable content that’s relevant for your target audience you’ll get a major SEO boost and increase traffic to your website. Try publishing a blog every two to three weeks for starters, and cover topics that would interest your target audience. 

Topics could include:

• Tasters of your upcoming courses
• Tips to apply learnings from courses
• Overview of industry standards, trends, and certifications
• How to convince your boss that professional development is valuable
• Case studies on course graduates 
• Thought leadership on industry trends, challenges and related topics 

Google loves well-written, helpful, relevant and up-to-date content. That will go some of the way to ensuring your blog posts show up in Google search results. But to take it a step further and ensure your blog posts are appearing at the top of searches by your target audience, you’re going to want to do some keyword research to find out what your audience is searching for online. To find out more, check out this in-depth Hubspot article on How to do Keyword Research for SEO.

The final step is to optimize your blog posts for SEO. There are a ton of plugins available to help you do this. For example, the Yoast Plugin for WordPress will analyze your content and tell you exactly where you can make improvements – from shortening your sentences to adding more H2 headings throughout your blog, to writing a solid meta description. 

Get the Yoast Plugin for WordPress.

Start a YouTube Channel

YouTube is a great way to market your training program.

YouTube is the worlds second largest search engine and an important part of the Google ecosystem. It’s a great way to reach new audiences, get in front of new prospective clients and funnel traffic to your website or database.

Create video content that’s relevant to your brand and adds value for your target audience. For example, you could interview experts in your industry or share snippets of your course content to give them a sneak preview.

Thought leadership in industry media

By creating thought leadership content for external publications you position yourself as an authority and expert in your industry, create trust, increase brand awareness and reach new audiences. It also makes great content for emails to your database and to share on your social media channels. And a bonus? Backlinks on high authority external websites will give your own website a good SEO boost!

Don’t overthink it – reach out with a simple, straight-to-the-point email to relevant industry publications, news sites, blogs and relevant local bodies to see if they are interested in publishing guest content. Pitch an idea that will add value to the reader, the publisher, and your training business. Write about something you know well, but make sure it’s not a sales pitch. Provide plenty of links back to helpful, relevant content on your website, and if they allow it, provide a call to action at the end of the article that drives them to purchase a course.

Google Ads 

Google Ads are a great way to market your training program by getting in front of potential customers when they’re searching for courses. Ads appear at the top of Google’s search results as “sponsored content” and millions of Google partner websites for keywords that are relevant to your course offerings.

It’s a Pay Per Click advertising platform and the way it works is that you create ads, choose your specific simple or long tail keywords, and determine how much you’re willing to spend per click. Google Ads utilizes an auction system that takes place in real-time that determines your placement and how many clicks you get on your ad.

Google Ads experts offer free help in this space, so it’s worth setting up an initial consultation to see what could work for your business.

Find out more about Google Ads.

Course marketplaces

Online course marketplaces specialize in course marketing and lead generation and will help you advertise your courses at scale. Course marketplaces should play a key role in your marketing strategy to drive more visitors to your website. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves – we’ve got a whole section on course marketplaces coming up in chapter 3.

First of all, let’s clarify what we mean by “conversion rate” and “average customer value”?.

Conversion rate: Conversion rate measures the number of users who converted as a percentage of the total number of users that visited your site. The higher your conversion rate, the more effective your website is at converting your visitors to customers. If 100 people visit your website in a day and 20 of those people enrol in a course, your conversion rate is 20%. 

When we talk about checkout conversion rates, we mean the number of people who have started the course registration or checkout process but have dropped off somewhere during that process. These people show high intent to purchase as they went part way through the process of enrolling in your course, but for some reason or another they didn’t complete the purchase.

There are a few ways you can improve that checkout conversion rate – we’ll get to those in a minute.

Average customer value: The average customer value (ACV) tells you the average value that each customer brings to your business during a given timeframe. This is measured by taking the total customer value during a set timeframe (typically a calendar month or year) and dividing it to find the average value. As a simple example, if your customers always enrol on one course in a year, and all of those courses are worth $100, then your ACV is $100. 

You’ve already spent money acquiring and servicing that customer – through advertising, the cost of technology (website, marketing platforms etc), administration etc, so improving your ACV is a smarter way to make more money, instead of simply acquiring new customers. 

You can increase both your conversion rate and your average customer value with a few tricks.

Simplified checkout process

A complicated checkout process is a sure-fire way to lose potential customers at the final hurdle. Keep your checkout process as simple and streamlined as possible to improve conversion. 

Here are a few tips:

• Ensure your checkout only has the necessary fields and does not require extra information. The fewer steps in your checkout process, the better.
• Remember visitors’ details with autofill.
• Allow for multiple registrants on the same course & multiple courses per order to reduce the pain of checking-out multiple times. 
• Use trusted payment methods but provide multiple payment options. Including debit and credit cards, PayPal, mobile wallets, and invoice, to reduce friction.
• Use course registration forms that are customizable, on-brand, mobile-friendly, and integrated into your existing website. Arlo does all of these things, to ensure simplicity and continuity throughout the checkout process.

Abandoned cart email automation

An “abandoned cart” means someone has added a course to their cart, partially or fully registered for it, but not made it through to the checkout and payment stage. They may have forgotten to check out, distracted by another task, searching for a credit card to make payment, or simply still considering whether they want to enrol in your course. 

Whatever the reason, abandoned cart emails can help increase your conversion rate by automatically sending a series of emails reminding people to come back and complete their course booking. You can include a reminder of the course they didn’t finish enrolling in, a reminder of the benefits and key learnings they’ll gain from your course, and even a discount code to encourage them to come back and make the purchase.

Marketing automation software like Hubspot can automate the process so you don’t have to manually send each message. 

Case Study: TEFL

See how the International TEFL Academy increased revenue by +340% with course bundles, marketing automation, an optimized checkout process and a simple tweak to processing fees.
 

Find out more

Course bundles 

Course bundles are a great way to increase your average customer value. A course bundle is a collection of courses, or courses plus extras, that are bundled together and sold as a package deal. Training companies might choose to break a course into multiple parts, and then pitch it as a package deal. Another opportunity is to up-sell an intermediate or advanced course to learners who’ve completed a beginner course. 

For learners, course bundles are appealing because they’re cost-effective – bundles usually provide a small discount. It also enables them to gain a comprehensive understanding of one subject or a variety of related subjects without having to go searching for more courses. And gives them the flexibility to pick and choose what options best suit them. 

Certification renewal reminders 

A big win for increasing average customer value is to remind delegates when their certification is about to expire. Customer records are stored in Arlo’s in-built CRM and certificates are automatically sent once a course has been completed. With a simple set-up, Arlo can then send automatic reminders to your customers when their certificate is due to expire and they need to renew their certification, prompting them to book a course with you.