When you think of marketing your eLearning LMS courses, you have two options at hand – free and paid. Free content marketing strategy involves blogging regularly, increasing social media presence, and growing network connections. All these, though don’t require money, need a lot of effort to be accomplished. Needless to say, they demand a huge amount of time from you. To eliminate this huge time-consumption and speed things up, you can go for paid advertising. But before that, let’s find out if paid advertising would be a smart choice for you.
Importance of paid advertising for your eLearning LMS courses
If you aren’t going for paid advertising, it means you have to create blog posts on a regular basis. That would seriously hamper your course development itself. Because the time you should have spent for your course development is being wasted for blog creation. One other aspect is the time. Organic marketing takes up a lot of time to spread the word. So if you are relying on the free strategies only, you are making a big mistake. Instead, make your course worth advertising and spend some dollars on ads.
Online paid advertisement categories
The easiest of ways to begin online ads for your eLearning LMS course is using Google Ads. Does it ever happen with you that you are searching for a certain something on Google and the search result came up with lots of recommendations including one or two on the top, termed as ‘ad’? Well this is what happens when you run ads on Google. These ads appear based on keyphrases. You decide which keyphrases you want to appear for and how much you want to pay. Based on these selections, Google places your ads. You can also set the highest limit of your monthly payment and choose how Google will calculate your ad cost. If you select pay-per-click, Google will only charge you for those who clicked through to your site. On the other hand, the pay-per-impression system charges you for every one thousand people who viewed your ad.
# Placement ads
Placement ads mostly appear on websites and apps. These ads have a relatively low amount of exposure as ad blockers on browsers prevent them from showing. Nonetheless, it is still a fantastic medium of displaying your eLearning LMS ads. For the best output, use Google’s Display Network, where you can specify the location types where you want your ad to appear and then bid on the space. The best part of placement ads is the accuracy of the targeting. You can narrow your bid to a specific page on a specific site and even vary how much you spend. If you know your audience well and want to target a very specific niche, placement ads are a great way to get your course in front of them.
# Remarketing ads
If you visit a particular website and then log in to your Facebook profile, you can see ads from that particular website. Have you ever experienced that? I’m sure you have and it freaked you out. Because you thought that the website or Facebook is monitoring your every step. We all know that this is at least partially true, but that doesn’t make remarketing ads void. Actually what happens is that when you visit a website, it places some cookies in your browser. These cookies tell Google where you have been and if that website has set up a remarketing campaign with Google’s Display Network, Google will insert that ad in place of other unrelated ads. This is better than getting random ads because since you can’t escape ads, at least get personalized ads that might be of help to you.
# Social media ads
With a total of over billions users, social media platforms are a great place to show the ads of your eLearning LMS course. These ads blend in with other content so well that it doesn’t look like an ad in the first place. With social ads you can target your audience demography, user likes and preferences, and/or other such attributes. Social campaigns rely heavily on personal information and it’s only effective to the extent you can predict your audience interests.
# Sponsorships & honorary mentions
One other way you can advertise your eLearning LMS course is by sponsorships and mentions. You can sponsor a podcast, an event, or virtually anything to be in front of people’s eyes. And you may come to an agreement with someone popular in your industry or a social media influencer so that he mentions about your course either on their programs or live sessions and posts.
Wrapping Up
Advertising your eLearning LMS courses maximizes your chance to get success within a short period of time. But if you are launching your first course, you might be short on budget and can’t afford to use all these channels at a time. No worries, because you don’t have to. Identify your target audience, see where they gather the most, and then use that particular channel to advertise your course for a maximum impact.