Having people interested in your product, looking for information and reaching you wanting to consume. Ideal world? No, the name of this is lead generation .
These contacts will accompany your business throughout its useful life; without generating new leads, the lead nurturing and sales team has no way of working with content and offers that will convert that person into a user.
The question then remains: what are the best practices for generating leads for your online course? How to attract potential students to your base, and then nurture them to the point that they feel prepared to make the purchase?
Check out our tips below!
What will you read in this article?
- What are leads and what is their importance
- What brings lead generation to your online course?
- Webinars
- Templates
- E-books
What are leads and what is their importance
The first step is to understand what leads are and how they impact the success of your online course before we actually get into lead generation. Leads are people who leave their contacts and basic information in exchange for some content or details about a product or content of interest.
Information will vary according to your priority and what your team believes is most effective to have. It can be education, employment level (junior, senior, etc.), area of expertise and so on. The important thing is that this data helps the lead nurturing area to better segment its communications to qualify contacts and “prepare the ground” for when the offer arrives.
If the flow follows this path in a fluid way, consumers are more likely to make the purchase.
Those who are starting to undertake may not understand the importance of lead generation for their business. Capturing these contacts is a very effective and low-cost strategy – ideal for small and medium-sized businesses. It is an excellent opportunity to show your product to an audience that is already willing to listen, which directly impacts the sales team’s conversion rates.
The generation of these contacts (lead generation) attracts and maintains potential customers, increases retention and loyalty in the post-purchase process, generates authority and increases the chances of prospects to find the company through search engines.
All of this has to do with the customer’s purchase journey, that is, the path he takes between recognizing that he has a problem until he understands that your product is the best solution.
Each stage of the journey requires a type of treatment, and they can all be used in your communication strategy to retain those leads.
What brings lead generation to your online course?
According to the B2B Technology Marketing Community, one of the biggest sites on the market, the number one challenge B2B marketers face is how to generate qualified leads – but this problem is not just for companies that sell to other companies.
Bringing good leads should be a concern for organizations in all sectors, as the main objective of digital marketing is to generate demand for the company’s products and services. That is, you need to show people that your business can help them.
And how to do that? We’ve brought you some tips on how to generate leads for your online business and you’ll notice that they all have something in common: the content offering . Therefore, the first step is to study the user’s journey and understand what his main pains are, what problems he wants to solve and how his online course can help in this trajectory.
Remember that excessive sales do not add value to the lead , he needs to understand that his online course cares about the needs he has. Quality content is inbound marketing’s greatest ally when it comes to capturing and qualifying contacts, and now learn how to capture them:
Webinars
If your business is an online course, webinars can be a good gateway. In general, a webinar is a type of videoconference or seminar conducted over the internet and its name is an abbreviation for the term web based seminar in English . That is, it is when the company uses its own EAD platform or a social network (Youtube and Facebook are the most used) to communicate with the public.
As we are talking about capturing leads, it is best to set up a landing page for your webinar. For those who do not know, landing page is a page that aims to convert and uses several tools for this purpose; among them, a form. It must be thought out together with the Sales and Lead Nurturing teams, as these areas have very important inputs of what are the most important data to be collected from people.
Subsequently, this information will be used to nurture contacts throughout their purchase journey.
As the focus of this article is online courses, the webinar is the best way to offer your target audience a small sample of your content. Thus, the entrepreneur can understand the potential of his business and test his authority on a certain subject.
The cost is low: just a camera, a microphone and a quality connection; the reach, gigantic.
Templates
One of the stages of the customer’s purchase journey is the recognition of the problem . Let’s use online postgraduate courses as an example: after introducing the person in this subject, with tips on how to have a specialization can add to the curriculum and increase the salary gain, she understands that taking a post can be a solution and starts to move to this end.
At this time, the Digital Marketing team can offer templates – ready-made templates that serve for the person to organize themselves or have a broad view of the situation in which they find themselves. They are excellent lead pickers for their practicality and, therefore, need to be self-explanatory.
Returning to the example of the first paragraph, your online course can offer a routine organizer for those who work and want to do a post or a financial spreadsheet, for the person to do the calculations and see if possible to study without spending too much.
Each template can be followed by material related to that subject: the routine can be followed by tips on how to organize the time to study and work, while the finance spreadsheet can come before a material that shows the main techniques to save money in for graduate studies.
This communication flow must be carefully thought out to be sent without exaggeration so as not to fatigue the user, and can be composed of several types of material.
E-books
Without a doubt, e-books are one of the most common ways of generating leads for physical and digital businesses. These are subjects explored in more depth, since blog posts can be restricted because of their size.
One of its great advantages is that they are easy to produce materials, requiring the work of a copywriter and a designer to ensure that the layout and use of images gives the desired image.
But that doesn’t mean it’s just sitting and writing. If your prospect gives the information and receives material that does not meet their needs or that does not deliver what was said, it will have a negative effect.
A good tip to prevent this from happening is to plan what will be said before the content is produced. Determine the subject covered and try to make a cut so that the theme is not too broad, and always keep in mind what problem that content intends to solve.
Create personas, that is, a character that represents your target audience, and be guided by the needs of the persona who is most likely to download the material.
Knowing how to generate leads for your company can be your great differential. After all, it is the constant updating of the base of possible consumers that drives sales and it is up to the Lead Nurturing and Sales teams to treat and nurture these contacts so that they go through the entire consumer journey, finally reaching the bottom of the funnel and making the decision purchase.
We hope that our tips have helped to enhance the communication strategies of your online course.
Did you like our tips? To find out more tips on how to boost your results and keep your base engaged, keep following our blog and subscribe to our newsletter.
