After spending all the time and effort putting together the perfect online course, finally, the time will come to launch and promote it for success.

But where do you start? Social Media, ads, email, influencer marketing? There are so many options, it can leave you confused about where to start. In this detailed article, you’re going to learn the best of all the marketing strategies to promote your online course and start selling faster.

4 Steps You Must Take Before You Promote Your Online Course

Before launching and promoting any product, it is essential to prepare for success. This is especially true when promoting online courses. Several steps need to be taken before you can even think of spreading the word about the course.

For example, setting up clear objectives, defining your target audience, creating a unique selling proposition (USP), developing a promotional plan, and establishing measurable goals.

If you take some time to get ready before you start to promote your online course, you will be more likely to succeed. This means your course will have a better chance of being successful.

Now that we have discussed the need to prepare before promoting your online course let’s move on to the 4 core steps that you need to take.

1. Be Seen As An Expert In The Domain

Introducing something new and innovative that excites your future customers can be a daunting task – especially if it’s your own online course. To ensure success, you must do more than simply create an attractive product; you must create a personal brand online that generates confidence and trustworthiness in the eyes of your customers.

Before you start the promotions, you need to build up your reputation in your expertise to get people excited about the content you share. Try the following insights to establish yourself as an expert:

• Create and share valuable content: Create content that’s helpful to your potential customers. Share engaging stories about the topics related to your course and provide valuable information for free. Find ways to contribute to conversations on online forums related to the course topics.
• Showcase your wins: Show off the successes you have achieved in your domain. Awards, recognitions, experience, brands you’ve worked with, case studies, or success stories of people who have benefited from learning from you earlier.

Once you have enough proof and following that trust your expertise, the next stage is to get ready for the promotions.

2. Launch The Website

When you’re launching an online course, your website is going to be the center of all promotion activities. We recommend you create a course website that looks professional and has easy navigation.

Also, keep in mind, the more information you can provide about the course on your site, the better chance people will have to make an informed decision about signing up.

This includes ensuring your website has:

• Mobile responsiveness since a majority of website traffic will be from the phone
• All the pages needed in a website: Home, about us, course pages, and contact us
• A well-designed course landing page that converts maximum page visitors to paying customers
• A catchy course name and chapter titles that get people excited about the course
• List course pricing, promos, and discounts
• Add a lot of testimonials from past students
• Finally, optimize the site for SEO for organic search results and sales

3. Understand the 3 stages of launching your course

Online course promotions are spread across three stages – pre-launch, launch, and post-launch. Each stage requires different strategies and approaches for maximum success.

• Pre-Launch: This is an important stage where you build anticipation for the launch of your online course. During this phase, you want people to get excited about the upcoming course without giving away too much information.
• Launch: This is the most critical stage to sell online courses as you start actively pitching your product to potential customers and try to convert them into paying customers. This is when all your pre-launch activities pay off.
• Post-Launch: After the launch, it’s time to improve your marketing strategy to get better results based on the analysis of the results of your promotion activities in the pre-launch and launch stages. Based on the analysis, you can tweak and optimize your marketing efforts to get better results.

4. Create A Launch Plan Focussed On Results

Next is the time to create a launch plan that is focused on getting maximum results – Sales. A successful launch involves implementing multiple marketing strategies and activities simultaneously to maximize the results from the launch.

If you want to create a lot of excitement for your upcoming course launch, it’s best to follow a 4-week plan. For the first two weeks, share behind-the-scenes content and sneak peeks on social media to get people interested. You can further build excitement around your upcoming online course by sending emails to potential and past students who have already shown interest in taking the course.

During the third and fourth weeks of the launch plan, you should focus on actively promoting and selling the online course. Talk about the number of students showing interest, run coming soon promotional campaigns, blog about it, and send emails to your existing network of past students. You can also run special early-bird discounts and promotions as incentives for early sign-ups.

To ensure you stay on track with executing your launch plan, Clickup’s free social media calendar could be a great tool to utilize. This platform helps you organize the tasks and activities necessary for success, keeps you updated about when posts should go out, and allows you to stay ahead of the progress throughout your launch journey.

32 Marketing Strategies On How To Promote An Online Course & Sell Faster

Now that you understand the 4 steps you must take before you start promoting your online course, here are the top XXX marketing tactics that you can use across the 3 stages of launch to market online courses and get sales faster!

Pre-Launch Promotion Strategies

1. Presell your online course

A presale is when you sell your product before it is officially available. For an online course, you create a landing page, announce the launch date, and typically offer a massive discount for those who sign up on the program early. In order to entice students, you would also need to add a few initial course videos to show how the content is.These early bird signups become your course beta testers. As they watch your content, they would give you feedback about the content itself. So not only do you get sales coming in, you also get people to share valuable insights on how the course is.

Plus if you list the entire curriculum of the course on the page, it gives insights into what would be eventually available. And your beta testers would also share feedback on how the curriculum could be modified to make it more impactful.

2. Host a live webinar

Hosting a live webinar is another great strategy to market your online course, especially in the pre-launch stage. When you conduct a live webinar, it gives you the opportunity to showcase your expertise to a large audience and build that trust in your credibility. Plus, you can use the webinar to give participants exclusive early access or discounts on your online course.

Another benefit of offering a live webinar is that since the content is not ready, you could offer to coach the subject matter covered in your course to your potential students in a series of live sessions, the first time around. By conducting the sessions live, you no longer need to create the recorded content for your course.

Simply, conduct the live sessions, record them, and repurpose the recordings as course content. So in just a few live sessions, you get to record the entire content for your course without the traditional hassles of writing scripts, shooting videos, editing, and post-producing them.

3. Create a lead magnet to capture high quality leads

A lead magnet is a content piece that entices your potential students to download the content you are offering in exchange for sharing their email ID & contact information like phone numbers. It could be an ebook, checklist, cheat sheet, worksheet or video tutorials related to the topic being taught in the online course. 

Lead magnets are important for an online course because they can help you build a list of interested leads who can then be retargeted later to generate more sales. Typically, once the lead magnet is created, you need a sales page for it before you start promoting it across your network on social media and the internet. Every single individual that downloads the lead magnet, is a potential future customer for your course.

For example, if you are creating an online course on photography, you could offer a free ebook guide containing tips and tricks related to taking great photos or create a checklist of all the necessary accessories needed for capturing amazing shots. This way, people get to learn something highly valuable for them from you, and you also get to show how knowledgeable and helpful you are.

Ultimately, creating lead magnets allows you to establish trust and credibility with your audience even before they buy anything, besides building your own database of high-quality leads that you will be able to promote your course to.

4. Create a sales funnel for your online course

Once the lead magnets are ready, you must then consider building funnels as a means to capture leads and convert them into paying customers. A sales funnel is a logical sequence of steps that you take your potential and existing students through, which ultimately leads them toward buying the online course.

For instance, when someone downloads your lead magnet say an ebook, they enter your funnel. Then you can use automated emails or WhatsApp promotions to nurture the leads and drive them to buy your courses. There are several types of sales funnels that you could create. Here are the top 5 sales funnels that are widely used across the globe:

• Basic Landing Page Funnel
• Webinar Funnel
• Ebook Funnel
• Mini Course Funnel
• YouTube Funnel

Creating a sales funnel is the single most important step that you should take before launching your online course. It will help you to map out how to increase your outreach to hundreds of thousands of potential students in no time; plus it also helps you establish an ongoing relationship with them for future purchases as well. 

Want to learn how to build your sales funnels? Watch this free Masterclass: The Ultimate 4 Step ‘AFSP’ Copy & Paste Blueprint to selling online courses & coaching programs

5. Reach out to old leads & connections

In addition to creating lead magnets and building sales funnels, you should also use your existing network of leads and connections to generate more course sales. Reaching out to old leads and customers can be a great way to market your online courses without spending any money on ads.

Plus because of your existing positive relationship with them, most would be happy to buy from you again. Make sure to ask for testimonials as they complete the course which would be a great add-on to your course page.

You can create personalized messages for each of your old leads and customers, highlighting the value of your course and reminding them of how you have helped them in the past. You can also use email automation tools to send out automated follow-up emails regularly to keep them updated on any upcoming courses that you are launching.

6. Offer a satisfaction guarantee

If you’re confident about your course, offer a satisfaction guarantee. Most customers are hesitant to invest in online courses because they’re not sure if they’ll be worth their money or time. An impressive satisfaction guarantee can go a long way in convincing them of the course’s quality.

This doesn’t mean that you should make outlandish promises, but instead give them a realistic assurance that the course will deliver on its promises. Explain to students that if they are not satisfied with their purchase, then they can request for a refund but within a certain period of time. This is especially important as it helps establish trust and assures them of the course’s quality before buying.

7. Start a social media group for potential customers

As you start getting traction in your upcoming course, you can start building your own community to provide more insights on the course and topics around it. you don’t necessarily need a paid platform to enable this community. You could use the free group features available on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn to create a group for your upcoming course.

For example, if you’re launching a course on digital marketing, you could create a Facebook group called “Digital Marketing Insiders” and invite people to join the group. By sharing helpful content related to digital marketing, providing valuable insights and running engaging discussions in the group, you can build an engaged community of people who would ultimately buy the course. Plus you can also use this group to announce the launch of new courses, collect feedback and create a buzz around your brand.

This is a great way to build relationships with potential customers before they even make their purchase, as they can get insights from other users who are enrolled or have completed the online course.

8. Participate in Forum discussions

Another strategy to bring more traffic to your course page would be to strategically join specific online forums around the course topic. Forums such as Quora, Reddit and many others are also great as most people search for solutions to their problems through forums. So whenever someone posts a question related to the topics covered, you get to answer their questions and provide helpful advice to other members.

Additionally, you could also share your lead magnets – valuable resources related to your course and even highlight how your course can help them learn more about the topic. This will create awareness of your brand, increase the visibility of your online courses, and educate people on what they can expect from your course.

9. Boost Your Social Media Presence

The more engaged followers you have, the better your chances of promoting your online courses. To do this, you can create content related to the course topic and share it on different social media channels.

You would need to optimize your profiles by adding relevant banner or profile images, keywords, tagging related hashtags, and adding a call-to-action to visit your course page. This will help you improve your ranking, which will result in more traffic and awareness for your online courses.

Consider each platform’s strengths and use that to ideate the content formats you would create for each platform, for example, Twitter threads are very popular currently. However, there are similarities in content preferences across social media channels.

Short-form content is now the preferred format that consumers like to engage with. You can use the popularity of short videos and share them as YouTube Shorts and Facebook/ Insta Reels. Riding current trends and creating content in those formats will help you grow your following very quickly and build an audience that wants to learn from you.

10. Start a newsletter to build an email list

This year has seen a lot of traction in newsletters as a source of generating leads to build an audience and market your online courses. You can start by offering a newsletter around your expertise with a form for subscription on your website or blog. Once they’ve subscribed, you can then send them helpful content related to their interests as well as new updates about upcoming courses and discounts. This is a great method for quickly creating a large database of leads that are interested in your course topic.

Mailchimp and SubStack are incredibly popular and industry-leading email marketing solutions that you’ve no doubt heard of. Both are amazing tools and have several easy-to-use features that let you gain subscribers and create, publish, and send newsletters automatically.

11. Start a podcast

Podcasts have become extremely popular in the last couple of years and they are a great way to spread your message, and expertise and engage with your target audience. Starting a podcast allows you to take control of the conversation, as you are not restricted by algorithms such as the ones on social media channels.

Plus it’s relatively inexpensive to start one up since all you need is a microphone and some software for recording. You could use Adobe Podcast, an AI-powered podcast solution, to record and edit your audio.

Once the content is ready, use Anchor to distribute the podcast to Spotify and most other popular apps instantly. The tool makes podcast distribution and growing your podcast subscription very easy.

12. Optimize Your Website For SEO and Promote your course on your blog

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most cost-effective ways for promoting your online course. Imagine someone typing on google – how to lose weight in 30 days and your blog post showing up on search results.

This can help you improve your website’s visibility so that more people can find it when they use the internet to search for things.

A blog post that offers valuable information answering the core questions your target audience is asking is a great way to bring high-intent traffic to your website. Ensure to have each blog post offer some call to action – a free content piece that they can download in exchange for their email ID. This would further help you generate more leads for your online course.

Bonus Strategy: 13. Include a link to your course in your email signature

Your email signature is an overlooked yet powerful tool for marketing your online course. You can add a link to your course in the signature and every time someone reads one of your emails, they will be exposed to it. This provides you with an opportunity to promote your online course to people who may not have been exposed to it otherwise.

Make sure to include relevant keywords in your email signature and link it to a page that contains an attractive offer. This will help you capture the reader’s attention, drive more sales, and increase the visibility of your online course.

Launch Stage Promotions To Market Your Online Course

14. Run Facebook & Instagram Ads To Sell Courses Faster

Once you have created your course content and the course sales page and you are ready for the launch, it’s time to run ads on various social media platforms. Paid ads are one of the most effective ways to get immediate sales for your online course.

You can start with Facebook & Instagram Ads to grow your business. Making sure that you set up the ad campaigns correctly, target the right audience, and have an engaging ad copy makes all the difference.

Paid ads are the fastest method to generate maximum leads for your online course and increase conversions from those leads to actual sales in the shortest time.

15. Run YouTube Video Ads To Target And Retarget Potential Customers

Videos are a fan favorite. So it makes sense to run ads in video format. YouTube is one of the largest video streaming networks and it’s home to billions of hours of content.

You can create short ads targeted at your audience that showcases your content, benefits, and price clearly. YouTube ads also have the option to add a call-to-action button on your video which makes it easy for people to take the desired action. This means you can start generating leads and sales quickly.

For example, If you have a course on weight loss, then running youtube ads on videos that cater to the fitness domain will help you get a lot of high-quality leads because they are already interested in the topic.

16. Run Google Ads To Get More Leads Instantly

As of December 2022, the online search engine Google had a share of around 84.08 percent. As such, Google Ads is a really effective way to get in front of your potential customers and generate leads for your online course.

You could use the platform to target people who are searching for keywords related to your course on the internet. You can also create remarketing campaigns to retarget people who have visited your website previously but didn’t convert into paying customers.

You could run search ads, display ads, video ads, or use the new performance max campaign to get a large number of leads and sales in just a few clicks.

17. Launch Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing is one of the best marketing strategies to promote your online course and generate sales. Industry reports suggest that for every $1 spent, you can get on average $42 worth of sales.

So as you run ads, social media & funnel-based sales campaigns, you will get several leads who may not have purchased the course from you in the first attempt. You can use email marketing campaigns to convert these leads into paying customers.

You can create automated email sequences and send them out regularly to your prospects. The emails should be informative, helpful & persuasive as it will encourage people to buy the course from you.

Creating engaging subject lines and adding interesting visuals in your emails will help you capture your audience’s attention. You can even offer promotional discounts and exclusive deals to further incentivize them to make a purchase.

18. Launch Whatsapp Marketing Campaigns

Whatsapp to date has a far better open rate than emails. As per recent reports, WhatsApp has an open rate of 98% compared to emails having an open rate of 20%. So you must use the platform to reach out to your leads and existing customers.

To start, create various Whatsapp campaigns that are engaging and informative for users. Using automation tools such as Zapier Or Pabbly, you can set up custom triggers to send personalized but automated messages to ensure consistent contact with prospective customers. Discounts are a great way to quickly generate revenue for your course. Utilize this strategy and watch how much faster you will be able to grow!

19. Reduce Abandoned Carts

No matter how good your sales page is, a lot of people who begin the checkout process will abandon their cart. Internet failures, transaction declines, or wrong passwords, the reasons could be many. This means that with each abandoned cart, you are losing potential customers and revenue.

So track this data in your platform and ensure to retarget this specific audience. You can use automated email campaigns to reduce abandoned carts and recover lost sales. Emails have a low open rate, so you could use an automated WhatsApp messaging tool like Wati.io to help you bring customers back to your site and complete payments.

20. Launch A Free Mini Course

Buying a full course has a lot of unknowns. One way to beat this is to offer a mini version of the online course for free. This allows potential buyers to have a taste of what they are getting before committing their time and money to the course. You could give away the first few lessons of your course or create an entirely new mini-course that is related to your main course.

Make sure to include the value proposition in front of every lesson and also give your contact details so that people can reach out to you. This would help in gaining trust and visibility for your online course.

21. Go live on social media

People love live sessions for the engagement it offers. They get to ask questions and converse with you live. As such, doing live sessions on social media is a great way to increase the channel’s popularity, generate more leads and increase sales for your online course in real-time.

You could start by doing live Q&As, talk about a sub-topic from the course, conduct live sessions sharing your expertise, or help solve a core problem that your target audience could be facing.

Because of the longer engagement time in such live sessions, social media platforms also help your content reach a larger target audience organically. So it’s a win-win for both.

22. Get recommendations from an influencer in the domain

Another great marketing strategy is to get social media influencers to give you a shout-out about the course. This would help you reach out to their large audience base and also gain some credibility as an expert in the domain. A testimonial from the Influencer about the efficacy of the course is a great showcase on your course page and adds a lot of social proof for your future students to consider.

Doing this is not as difficult as it sounds. All you need to do is approach a few influencers with an offer that will be mutually beneficial for both parties. You could exchange free access to your course for a shout-out or even offering some monetary compensation would work too.

Post Launch Promotions To Market Your Online Course

23. Add Social Proof/ Testimonials

In this digital age, people are more likely to trust what their friends recommend than any advertisement. What better way to build that trust in your online course than by adding social proof?

Ask your customers who have already taken the course and benefited from it to share a testimonial about their learning experience. You could simply send a WhatsApp message, an email or ask for a video submission.

Add all these testimonials on the course sales page to create maximum social proof and credibility in the efficacy of the new online course.

24. Empower your users to share User Generated Content

Go beyond testimonials and encourage users to share their experience with the course on social media to increase its visibility.

For instance, you could ask them to share a video of themselves talking about how they benefited from the course or even pictures of them working on something related to what they learned in the course. Encouraging existing or new students to share their positive experiences will amplify the reach of the course to newer audiences and get you word-of-mouth virality.

25. Create Multiple Courses, Promote Them As A Bundle With discounts

Creating several courses around the same topic and bundling them together with discounts is a great way to maximize profits, increase sales, and build your audience base.

For instance, if you are teaching web development skills, you could create multiple courses such as HTML Bootcamp Basics, Advanced CSS Techniques, Responsive Web Design, etc. and bundle them together with discounts for a limited period of time.

Creating such bundled offers comes with multiple benefits – not only does it give the customer an irresistible bargain, but also increases the lifetime value of each customer since they get to access multiple courses at once. Plus, it gives more visibility to all your courses and encourages customers to purchase multiple courses at once, thus increasing your revenue.

26. Improve your course sales page

Often an overlooked strategy, improving your course’s sales page could make or break the success of your online course. Make sure that your sales page is optimized for maximum conversion by testing different versions, adding clear calls-to-action, and leveraging testimonials. Keep track of any changes you make to the page and leverage A/B testing to measure which version yields better results. Test different designs, and content length of the page, add a promo video on the page and consider analytics to check which section is the user spending the most time on.

Freemium tools like Hotjar offer heat maps based on the user behavior on your site and can help you understand which segments need improvement based on the time spend.

27. Promote your webinar recording

Live webinars are a great way to sell your upcoming courses in the pre-launch stage. But you can still use the strategy to market your online course long after it has been launched.

So make sure to record the live webinar, edit it so that all the important content is included and use it to drive more signups to watch the recording. As more people signup to watch the recorded webinar, you can nurture them through the sales funnel and convert them into paying customers.

You can also leverage this recorded webinar by using it as a teaser for the full course or even making it available for free to generate more interest in your course.

28. Celebrate Your Customers

Thank your customers for their purchase and celebrate the milestones they have achieved by completing their course. This could be as simple as sending a handwritten thank you note or a discount coupon for their next purchase.

You could also highlight their success stories on social media or even on your website to show how your courses have helped them achieve their goals. This not only helps build goodwill but also encourages more people to purchase your course in the future.

Celebrating your customers strengthens the bond between you and them, thus helping you increase retention and engagement in the long term. Also, don’t forget to thank them for their loyalty as this will help create strong relationships with your customers.

29. Ask For Referrals From Students

As more students join and complete the course, ask for referrals. Offer giveaways, goodies or discounts to your students who bring in more paying customers based on certain goals achieved. This becomes exciting for students to participate in and helps you grow your business further.

30. Launch An Affiliate Program

Affiliate marketing is a powerful way to increase the visibility of your online course and also reward people who refer you customers. It is a win-win situation for both parties as affiliates get rewarded for referring more customers and you get more sales without having to spend anything on marketing.

There are multiple ways to launch an affiliate program. You could use tools such as Commission Junction. To track programs sold through affiliates, you could create coupons on your Knorish account and share them with your affiliate network. As sales come in, you will be able to track exactly which affiliate is getting you maximum sales.

To motivate your affiliates, provide them with a generous commission percentage as well as additional bonuses for when they reach specific goals. This will make them more likely to tell other people about your courses and help you reach your sales goals faster.

31. Speak at local events and groups

Nothing beats the power of building relationships in person. Reach out to local events and meet up groups related to your course topic and conduct a session around your course. Additionally, you could do a revenue share basis the sales that come in from the session when you talk about your program in the event.This gives you an opportunity to network with like-minded people who are interested in learning more about the topics that you teach.

You can also get feedback about your courses from these local events and use it to improve the quality of your courses.

32. Publish a shorter course in an online course marketplace

Create a shorter version of your online course and publish it on course marketplaces such as Udemy or Skillshare. This will help you get more visibility for your course and reach people who are looking for an inexpensive option to learn about the topics you teach.

The advantage of publishing a shorter course is that it allows you to offer your content to a much larger audience that the marketplace has to offer. This helps build trust and loyalty with your customers, as well as increase the chances that they will purchase the full course when they are ready.

Bottom Line

These are just a few of the many strategies you can use to market your online course post-launch and make it successful! With the right mix of content, marketing tactics, and engagement, you can easily drive more sales for your course with minimal effort. You don’t have to use all of the marketing strategies above, choose the ones that best fit your needs and your target audience and get started with those.

Take small steps and go live. Experiment, analyze, and improve to grow sales and become successful online.