What type of digital marketing strategy is best for your training institute courses?

In the previous blog post we discussed about digital or online vs offline or traditional marketing is which is better in today’s context. Digital marketing strategy proves to be a better solution for promoting any business in today’s internet dominated world. In this blog post we will dig deeper in understanding digital marketing strategy to help you decide what kind of approach to take to best promote your training institute course online.

“Advertising is much like war, minus the venom. We are usually out to capture others’ citadels or garner others’ trade. We must have training and experience, also right equipment. We must have proper ammunition, and enough.” – Claude Hopkins, “My Life in Advertising”

Business are moving to digital marketing rapidly, that also means that it is becoming extremely competitive. It is especially important to understand nature of your business and devise right digital marketing strategy to take full advantage of your resources.

Outbound marketing involves practice of putting out your advertisement in front of the audience. For example, putting banner ads on mass web traffic websites, or advertising on social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn etc. Ads space and time slots are expensive options but, in the end, if done correctly it can really pay off. Creating the right ads and choosing the right audience is the key to success for the outbound marketing.

Inbound marketing involves creating niche related online content to attract interested people to your website or product listings. Some examples of it are writing and publishing blogs or articles on your own website or other niche related websites, forums etc. It may also include posting short videos or info graphics on social media sites etc.

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• How to choose a niche to target. What is a niche and why does it matter?
• How to choose a business name.
• How to get web hosting for your website.
• The power of email marketing and why you should start building an email list.
• How to get your emails to stand out and get engagement.
• How to get traffic through paid advertising such as Facebook Ads, Google Ads.
• A keyword tool you can use to find out how many people are searching for a search term. If you know what people are searching for, you’ll gain more traffic to your website!
• How to integrate social media to grow your business.
• The social media platforms to consider going on.
• How to grow your connections on social media channels.
• Four ways you can monetize your business.
• Growth hacks and advanced strategies to skyrocket your business.
• How to use ‘influencer marketing’ to get a flood of new traffic to your brand and business.
• And so much more!

First stage is about creating awareness about your training institute and courses you offer. This can be achieved by producing blogs about the courses and how those courses can benefit its students. You can also write articles and contribute on articles sites such as Ezine etc. Producing infographics about your offerings is also a good way to create awareness of your brand. You can produce short promo videos and share on social media sites such as YouTube etc. You can also start interest groups about your niche on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter etc. Whole objective of this stage is to offer value to the interested people and create awareness, trust, and visibility of your training institute. Target audience at this stage can be the public who have some interest in training courses. You can collect emails of such people by offering them news, updates, and interesting content about training courses. This way you can build a data base of email lists.

Second stage is about targeting those people who are seriously looking for training courses. At this stage they are ready to investigate more detailed information about their interest topics. This information can be shared by offering e-books, research reports etc. Webinars are also particularly good way to engage serious buyers.

Third and final stage targets the people who have made up their mind to enroll for a course but now they are looking for the best offer to join. They may need little more convincing to enroll in your offered course. This can be achieved by presenting them with case studies that how your courses have helped people who participated. Testimonials are other powerful way to convince people to enroll.

So what are the key points to measure the success of a digital marketing strategy & campaign? First, it should be able to generate traffic to your website or course offerings. Targeting makes your campaign more effective while tracking makes it possible to gather useful data about each segment of your digital marketing campaign. These statistics and data can be used to further tweak your campaign. Google analytics and tracking pixels are some type of analytical and tracking tools.

Your email data base of those people who are interested in training courses should increase over the time. Someone who had viewed your content and had not enrolled but signed up for emails, news and updates, has given you opportunity to send them your offerings in future and keep them engaged. Such database of potential buyers are valuable assets for any business.

Collection of statistical data about your campaigns should enable you to do attribution modelling. Simply meaning you should be able to identify customers first touch points for each success full sale. Thus, you can determine buyers’ trends and focus on those marketing strategies that are aligned with buyers’ trends.

If you want to learn more about digital marketing strategy, here is a free course focusing on digital marketing using social media. This course length is about 4.5 hours and it is a good start for you to make sense of social media aspect digital marketing. Click here to find the course details.