By Amanda Rosewarne, CEO and Co-Founder of the CPD Standards Office
With Forbes revealing that the market for eLearning is to be worth $325 billion in 2025, the demand for information and information products has never been higher. Couple this with the fact that information is limitless in supply, it soon becomes a magnet for entrepreneurs and businesses all aiming to capture their piece of the ever-growing pie.
With an influx of supply brings with it a natural set of problems. How on earth do businesses stand-out? In fact, it has been creativity that has been winning.
The Unique E-learning League by the CPD Standards Office in the U.K. lists the 10 most popular online courses that you might not have heard of. The table boasts courses such as How To Take The Perfect Selfie and How To Dance at a Club to How To Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. These courses have generated more than a staggering $2 million from over 20,000 students.
Getting your course CPD accredited
Building creative courses allows you to stand out from the crowd and reach new audiences. Having them CPD accredited gives them the credibility that sets them apart competitors.
It positions yourself (the course provider) as a premier partner, permits premium pricing (such as in the cases listed in the CPD campaign) and allows you to be listed as an accredited supplier training provider. This goes some way to building credibility around the brand providing the online course and naturally leads to an upturn in referrals.
How To Use Creative Courses as a Marketing Tactic in 2019
1. Ensure courses are creative and relevant
The principles of the CPD campaign can be applied to business. The tactic is to create a course that taps into a previously untapped market audience.
For example, the aforementioned How To Take The Perfect Selfie course generated over half a million dollars. This would provide a supplier of camera, visual equipment or even a photo app the opportunity to drive eyeballs to their product, as well as build brand loyalty on the way.
Had the course been titled How To Take a Picture Of Yourself With a Smartphone, it may well have flopped. The tip is to pick a topical area within the market that remains relevant to your business.
The word selfie was only been adopted by dictionaries within the last decade, making it an incredibly topical word of choice.
2. Have discounts and upsells within your course
As users watch more of the course, and as they extract more value out of it, naturally the provider will likely experience a relative rise in brand loyalty.
As loyalty with the user grows, a common tactic will be to include discounts and upsells along the way. This can include offering your products or services at a discounted price to give the user comfort it is the right solution to their problem.
Generating a small sale along the way will also prove the financial commitment the customer is willing to give to the business which could lead to a bigger sale further down the line.
3. Create a community
Integrating a chatroom-style function with your course would allow multiple users to share ideas and pose questions. This can help prospects along the way as any problems can be quickly addressed.
One additional benefit would be using existing customers or brand advocates to help prospects through the courses. They can be there to give additional value to the prospect to ensure they’re getting everything they can out of it.
Creating a community of brand advocates also permits word of mouth and greater brand awareness of the business.
4. Create a course series
Retaining those that have finished the course remains an integral part of building loyalty with the brand. To do this, a follow-up sequence of courses that provides further value and offers further progressions can be used.
An initial course could look into topic basics, with later courses then going into more depth on a subject. This could be something rolled out upon success of the first course and identifying what additional information prospects want to learn about.
Final Points
One of the overriding concerns preventing businesses from creating an online course to begin with usually falls down to both money and time.
Creating an online course provides the business with an entire vault of evergreen content that can be used across multiple marketing channels. Content can be cut and rolled out across social media campaigns as well as email sequences, aiming to serve content to prospects at different stages of the sales funnel.
The course itself, therefore, would be an investment in content creation which has the opportunity of turning a cold prospect into a paying customer.
Amanda Rosewarne is CEO and Co-Founder of the CPD Standards Office. She has extensive experience in the CPD field, is a unique expert on the provision of workplace training and has a background in occupational psychology.
