Boost your product in the marketplace of online education

While the era of Covid-19 tested levels of patience and endurance, it brought in some useful concepts for our rapidly changing world. One of these concepts is the acceptance of online education as a certified mode of knowledge dissemination across the globe. Since online education has endured long beyond the lifting of government-mandated lockdowns, it is a great business to invest your money in. However, simply investing does not guarantee the success of the business. There are several key factors to consider alongside and even before investing, including finding the target audience, strategic marketing techniques as well as the “it” factor(s) that sets apart your online educational platform from the others available in the retail space.

Find your audience

“Instead of focusing on making something for everyone, focus on marketing something for someone.” 
– Seth Godin, marketing expert and author. 

While education is not limited to a certain audience, courses are made to cater to the needs of a specific population. Finding your target audience is necessary to market the product in the right market space, ensuring access for the audience as well as economic viability for the producers of content. It helps to create content that meets the demands and interests of the learners. Only when these demands and interests are met do the customers benefit from the platform, increasing engagement and participation. A well-defined target audience enables sharing of feedback and constant reiteration to produce the best possible educational platform available. It also creates relevance to your service, ensuring competitive advantage as well as stability.

Identify marketing trends

You have started the business of online courses and found the right audience, but they haven’t found you yet. To help spread the name and to attract a potential audience, marketing is the way to go. Marketing refers to the promotion of a product or service to the point that selling becomes unnecessary. There are many forms of marketing present today, with blogging, social media, email marketing and paid promotions especially popular.

• Spotlight guide: The business of online education
• Steps to building a winning online presence for your university
• 19 ways to promote your online course

Attempts at marketing will be futile if your product isn’t worthy of being marketed. Along with these strategies, there must be some features and elements that set your platform apart in the ever-evolving sector of online education. Once this is implemented, you can blend traits of traditional marketing with distinctive features of the service to maximise the brand’s potential.

Distinguishing your platform

The following are some methods to create a sense of novelty in your virtual learning platform:

• Free trials: Who does not like having not to pay for services? Providing a sneak peek into what you have to offer, without financial commitment for a short period of time, can prove to be beneficial in boosting growth and exhibiting value.
• User-centred: Catering to the audience’s needs can be taken a step further by offering personalised education. Modify your learning material to suit the learning style of the users, which may be auditory, visual, kinesthetic and so on.
• Considering how AI is ruling the present times, why not include it in your business? Use AI to recommend courses that may be intriguing and befitting to each user.
• Engage: Use methods such as micro-learning with bite-sized portions for routine study to implement aspects of active recall.
• Be unconventional and make use of the power-packed influence of cliffhangers to enhance retention, stimulate critical thinking and encourage participation.
• Humour: Use humour to make learning feel like less of a burden. Bloopers or common errors represented as jokes can help in building a deeper rapport with the students.

Starting an online business and strategically marketing it does not have to be a difficult task. Following simple guidelines – such as making sure that your efforts at promotion are aimed at the right audience and implementing the best marketing strategies – can help you achieve and exceed outreach goals. By underscoring the qualities that make your educational platform unique, you can create a lasting impact in the realm of online education.

Mariam Shadan is assistant professor in biomedical sciences, and Fathima Ubaid is an undergraduate student, both at Dubai Medical College for Girls.

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