Are you ready to start selling your training programs online?

Before you make your first sale, you need to build a relationship with potential customers. There are three places that you can utilize to do this:

  1. Your business website
  2. Social media
  3. An e-commerce store

All these locations are ideal for building trust-based relationships with your potential customers. When someone visits any of these three places, they should have the following experience:

  • Gain awareness of your business or products.
  • Find something of interest to keep them there.
  • Be prompted to make a decision.
  • Follow the clear call to action.

If you are looking for best practices on how to sell and market your courses online, you are in the right place. Let’s start with how you can use your website to build trust with potential customers and how you can turn that trust into future sales.

Website marketing

Every business should have a website. If yours doesn’t, then your first step toward selling training programs online is to create one.

Having a website for your business helps clients understand your brand and what your business has to offer. In Business 101, this is called “Brand Awareness.”

Word of mouth is still a popular marketing tool. However, once a potential customer knows about your business, they will need a place to either learn more or request a demo. Your website should facilitate those transactions. Here are few examples of things that you can have on your website to generate leads:

  • Write a blog to build interest.
  • Offer a short-term free trial to assist customer decisions.
  • Allow customers to sign up for a free consultation.
    • Consultations can be used to learn about a potential client’s business problem or business opportunity. Note that these are two different things: a business problem is something that happened in the past, whereas a business opportunity is future focused.

One of the first steps that you can take is to visit the websites of your competitors. How are they designed? What are the calls-to-action? Analyzing competitor websites is free and can provide insights on how to best set up your own website.

Let’s get social

Social media is a great resource for selling training programs online and for building awareness. Currently, there are 4.2 billion social media users. Somewhere out there is your customer. Similar to how your business should have a website, your business should also have its own profile on social media.

The goal of using social media for business is to build trust with your potential customers by sharing industry knowledge and expertise. This can be done in several ways. First, you can post links to relevant articles and start a conversation with your followers by sharing your own professional opinions. Alternatively, you can write your own content and use social media to share it across your network.

The best social media platform for B2B marketing is LinkedIn:

LinkedIn also offers businesses several ways to reach customers directly:

  • Sponsored Content: Native ads appear in the LinkedIn feed.
  • Sponsored Messaging: Engaging messages are sent directly to a potential customer’s LinkedIn Inbox.
  • Text Ads: You can set up simple pay-per-click desktop ads.
  • Dynamic Ads: Ads are automatically personalized to your audience. If your business has a website, you can use your historic website data to determine who should be seeing your ads.

Bring them into your e-commerce store

After inviting your customers to you, now you are ready to sell to them. There are numerous platforms for selling courses online. One is Shopify. Over 1,700,000 businesses in 175 countries worldwide have made over $200 billion in sales using Shopify.

The benefit of selling your courses through a marketplace such as Shopify is the ability to make the purchasing process simple and easy, from browsing to final sale. You can also automate the entire sales process so customers who purchase your courses are automatically redirected to your LMS, where they can take a course themselves or invite others. This will free up your time to focus on course development and business growth.

Shopify also has a game-changing app store that can be used to drive sales of your online courses. The following apps are just samples of the tools that can be used to both market and sell your online training program:

  • ActiveCampaign: This can automate revenue-driving activities through powerful email campaigns, signup forms, SMS messages, and email automation.
  • Hubspot: This is marketing software used to build deeper customer relationships. Upgrade your marketing by automatically sending abandoned cart emails.
  • Google Analytics: Knowing what is working and why helps you make the best decisions for your business. The Google Analytics Dashboard provides you with sales data from your store.
  • Referral Candy: Use Referral Candy to automate a referral program, acquire new customers, and avoid referral fraud.
  • Privy: This is a suite of conversion, email marketing, and SMS tools, including exit-intent-driven popups and banners for your Shopify store.

An LMS can host your training, and having one that integrates with Shopify is a quick win for your business.

Conclusion

When you are ready to start selling training programs online, the right partners and tools can help ease anxiety and automate the sales process. It may seem intimidating at first, but now you have the insights to optimize your website, launch a dynamic social media strategy, and set your online sales to autopilot.

Firmwater is more than an LMS training provider. We partner with customers, providing them with the tools and expert insight that they need to implement the best in-practice e-learning course development and delivery. Our customers have been trusting us for years to deliver their high-quality training, freeing them up to focus on growing their business.

For more tips on how to market and sell your training program online, check out these resources:

Here at Firmwater, we don’t just sell an LMS for training providers. We partner with our clients, giving them the tools and insights they need to implement the best practices in e-learning course development, growth, and delivery. We care too much about our customers’ businesses to have them wade through forums and chatbots for help.

Ready to use an LMS that’s designed for the way YOU work, with a team dedicated to YOUR needs? Book a no-obligation consultation directly with our team today