Lately, there has been a boom in businesses offering webinars, informative podcasts, and online courses. In this digital age, there’s no questioning that online courses are appealing and convenient. As our lifestyles continue to become more jam-packed and instant gratification continues to be ingrained into our societal norms – the looming question in the back of your mind may become even more pressing: Should your business start to offer online courses?
The answer seems simple enough on the onset: yes. But like anything worth delving into the truthful response is: it’s complicated.
Online courses are meant to provide value. Offering an online course because everyone else is doing it is simply not sufficient. In fact, it’s one of the cardinal sins of marketing: “Because my competitor is doing it.” SMH.
Benefits of Offering Online Courses, Podcasts or Webinars
First, let’s go over the myriad benefits of offering an online course, podcast or webinar for your business. There are a number but here are five to get you started:
- Reach a wider audience: offering online courses can help you reach a wider audience as you can offer access regionally, nationally, and even internationally.
- Increase brand awareness: podcasts, webinars, and online courses can help increase brand awareness for your business or organization.
- Generate leads: utilizing webinars and online courses can help you generate leads for your traditional service offerings.
- Drive traffic to your website: online courses can help drive traffic to your website, which can lead to increased sales or conversions.
- Enhance your SEO: offering online courses and sharing updates on social media can help enhance your SEO and improve your visibility in search engines.
- Connect with your audience: webinars, podcasts, and online courses can help you establish a more trust-based and deeper connection with your audience.
What to Consider When Considering Offering Online Courses
The first thing we always want you to consider when embarking on any new marketing strategy is your audience.
First, what is your audience hungry for that you can provide – in easy, bite-size pieces no less?
Then, ask yourself, can they benefit from a course with this information? Or is it something that will drain them to have in a course format? Will it be easier to digest as a blog post, or an eBook? Or better yet – a professional service instead of a DIY guide?
If you’ve gotten this far, and you have a topic, that could serve your audience well in a course format – then we can move on to stage two.
Building a Course that Sells Itself
Our Creative Partner here at The Found Gen, always says her two favorite words are Passive and Income. She loves to find ways to get our clients to incorporate some form of passive income to their brand – including online courses. The biggest hurdle though, is execution.
If you plan to build your own online course strategy, it is imperative that you are able to properly develop, launch and maintain your programming. Passive Income is only passive after a point.
Ensuring that your course is ripe with valuable content, engaging activities and easy to find online are key.
If you don’t have the ability to execute it on your own – that’s okay. That’s what we’re here for. Get in touchwith our team of marketing experts today.