Tips to Make Your Online Course Stand Out

The online education market is absolutely booming right now. Valued at 10.84 billion dollars in 2020, it’s predicted to grow to a whopping 44.49 billion dollars by 2028.

Unsurprisingly, with such a lucrative prize pool, everybody wants in on the action. Nowadays, having a top-notch course (and a powerful LMS plugin on your WordPress LMS website) is simply a prerequisite. To really stand out and attract more learners, you need to get a little… Creative. 

Here’s how.

Keep Content Up To Date

Things move on quickly. From when a learner has enrolled in your course until they finish, trends may be beginning to shift. It can happen that fast. 

That means you always need to be on top of new developments and make sure they are reflected in your course material. This is just as true for both prospective learners as it is for those who have completed your course. 

To ensure that the content is always fresh and up to scratch, you should develop newsletters and look into customer relationship software if you don’t already have some. And to make it easier on yourself, it’s a good idea to automate as much as you possibly can. 

Make Use of Surveys!

Surveys are always excellent tools to gauge customer satisfaction, but when it comes to online courses they become indispensable. Learning is a very involved process and we tend to judge it more harshly than other types of services. 

By carrying out surveys, not only do you better involve the learner in their education, but you also gain key insights into what you can improve going forward. 

Ideally, you would ask them to carry out two different surveys—one at the beginning and one at the end. The introductory survey should focus on what they expect to learn from your course and how they intend to apply it to their everyday lives. Knowing the motivations behind why people sign up for your course is key to delivering an experience they will rave about. 

But it’s also just as important to survey them afterwards. At this point, the insights you gain are going to be most honest and will really help you to craft a course that meets expectations, and market it to the right people. 

Rebrand LifterLMS

LifterLMS is our pride and joy. We poured a lot of time and effort into making it as useful for you as possible. That said, we understand that sometimes our branding can get in the way of your message. 

On afterage, it takes between 5-7 impressions for people to remember your brand. From then on, it’s all about relationship management, where you can either strengthen or weaken their perception of you.

Ensuring a consistent brand experience is a huge deal in promoting a positive relationship and can even increase the trust learners have in your course. 

To help you achieve this, you can actually Rebrand LifterLMS, which will let you rename the plugin and put your own color scheme and logo on it, among other features. 

Promote. Promote. Promote.

This is especially important for those of you who come from an educational background and are moving into online courses (although it’s true for everyone!). 

With so many different online courses out there, the ones who triumph aren’t just those with the best content. You also need to develop a strategy to properly market yourself. It’s always possible to get help from a freelancer or agency when doing this, but if you want to go it alone, here are some basic tips: 

  • Set a well-defined goal.
  • Carry out audience research.
  • Decide what a “successful” campaign is beforehand (specific metrics).
  • Share on the social platforms where your audience is most active.
  • Decide if you want an organic campaign or if you want to pay for ads. 
  • Implement whatever you have decided on.
  • Analyze and adjust based on the results.

This is a general outline of the process. To be effective, you will need to put a lot of thought into each step, particularly whether you want an organic campaign or not. If you’re unsure what to do, an organic campaign is better for long-term results that last. But in the short term it’s hard to get traction. A paid campaign, if done right, will bring in a larger audience in the short term but the second you stop running the campaign, you will not have any exposure. 

There are many ways to make your course stand out and the approach you take is up to you. But the one area where you can’t cut corners is on user experience. At LifterLMS, our plugin makes it simple for anyone to create a course on their WordPress website that is user friendly and esthetically pleasing. 

Want to find out more about how we can help you bring your knowledge to the masses? Reach out now