Sell Your Course With Content Marketing
For online course creators. 6 minutes read
Unlock the power of content marketing with a few easy-to-implement strategies
Intro:
We have all seen those million follower Instagram pages, but how can we get that for ourselves?
Content marketing is simply using your social media following as a sales channel. If you are launching a course with an existing following, you already have purchase notifications just waiting to go off. However, even without a current following, you can grow your social media following several tips and tricks that let you start building a sales machine without breaking the bank.
Think about content and how you interact with it when you use social media. Eye-catching memes, relatable posts, or more educational snippets may be what catches your eye. When your potential audience sees you posting content that they like, it can drive them to check your page out further and discover the brand you have.
Supplementing your paid marketing with content marketing can lead to you having steady sales generating traffic on multiple platforms. This can be a safety net for unexpected updates to paid traffic that cause a dip in performance and let you have peace of mind that your marketing funnel is diverse.
Let’s jump right into the details of content marketing now.
The Foundations For Content Marketing
To get started with anything, you need to have the “foundation” of knowledge to know what direction to take.
Content marketing is just simply posting on social media, but there is a lot more to consider beyond that. It is great because you don’t have to use any paid tools for content marketing, although you can use the tools to make things easier.
Your posts need to be relevant, engaging, or valuable to your audience. This is so your posts draw users into your brand. There are a wide variety of platforms and more emerging as options! If your industry has a particular niche social platform or group, that can be a great place to see what your audience is potentially interested in.
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, and countless other examples are all platforms people browse daily. So when you are active with your audience, they will recognize you in your paid traffic, on their newsfeed, or anywhere else they find your marketing. This adds social proof that will help you get more sales.
Visualization of social medias
The easiest way to start building the basics of your content marketing is to begin researching your audience and influential people in your industry. This will allow you to have ideas and proven concepts to work off of for your own brand.
Keep Your Content Marketing Structured
With the industry’s needs in mind, you may feel ready to get started right away, which is excellent! However, to make your content marketing much easier to manage, you will want to get a structure going that works for your brand.
Scheduling your content will take the mystery out of your marketing by avoiding problems like:
- When should I post?
- What am I posting tomorrow?
- Did I remember to post that?
To do this, just sit down and take a look at the industry. Are other creators posting one time a day? Do they post once a week? These will give you clues on how often you should be posting to fit in with the audience. Content marketing isn’t just about selling; you need to provide some value. This could be making the prospect laugh with a funny, relevant meme. Or teaching them some quick insights you have picked up that will help them, and possibly get them interested in what you have to offer. You can do direct sales posts, but try to avoid having nothing but sales-oriented messaging.
Now, you may be wondering where you can get all this content from? First, take inventory of your existing assets. Then, you can spin Webinars, blog posts, videos, old social posts, and much more into a social media post. Get creative with it, and focus on building assets with a lot of different angles so you can have a fresh supply of content at all times. You can also look towards outsourcing your content marketing creation.
Once you have the assets, you can easily manage the flow of new posts with a quick weekly routine. Create, schedule, post and you are done.
Monitoring your posts is key. Using native platforms, you can quickly check performance. Third-party platforms exist, but most needs are met using free solutions. Page insights, for example, will let you look at an overview of your engagement, reach, and likes for a month. Wherever you launch content marketing, look into what native tools exist for your platform to make things easier. These can also automatically post for you, so all you have to do is set the schedule and let them do the posting for you.
Content marketing can be fulfilling in many ways. Building an audience you regularly interact with and bring value to is a great feeling. Some tools we have found usual are:
Creative edition on canva.com
Canva: Great for creating images and simple posts quickly with no advanced skills needed like Adobe for example.
HubSpot: This is an all-in-one package that provides you with every thing you need for content marketing. Analytics, creation of content, optimization of the campaign and more are all possible with HubSpot
BuzzSumo: If you are wanting to look into your industries top performers, BuzzSumo is a great way to research and find information about content marketing in any industry.
Headliner: It just may be one of the easiest to use video editing tools, but it is perfectly fine for content marketing. Quickly edit your videos together and add captions for your content for free!
If you don’t see the results you want with content marketing, look at how long you have been doing it. Test for at least 45 days before deciding to change your approach to make sure you give it a real chance at success. Content marketing can take some time to really pick up, but you can still make an effective marketing tool using the strategies above.
Some easy ways to look at your campaign objectively and figure out what needs to be changed is to look at the following:
- Find your highest engaged post, see if you can’t create more content like that.
- Look at your posting times and when your audience is active.
- Research your niche for new trends or a shift in focus
Once you step back from the problem and look at it from a bigger picture, it will clearly define what you can do to improve going forward. The more you test in marketing, the more likely you are to find that perfect ad.
Content marketing is a great strategy to implement for building your brand. You can cheaply and easily tap into a growing audience and section of marketing. If you have an existing content marketing strategy, take a look at it after reading this and see if you can implement any of these tips to make your lives easier!
If you don’t have a content marketing plan, you can get started with researching and begin growing your social media accounts.
Next month’s blog will go over running paid traffic for course offers so you don’t want to miss out!
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