Let’s figure it out together with Sveta Shulman, a marketer at the online university . Sveta has been in internet marketing for over 10 years; she started as a commercial author, then moved on to SMM and targeted advertising. At TeachLine, she promotes courses; she knows how to find clients, attract their attention, remove questions, work through objections, keep in touch with them after completing the courses, and return them for a repeat purchase.
Hide teachers and speakers
Everything should be as transparent as possible online. You can’t touch a virtual product with your hands, which means you need to have as many facts “for” and “against” as possible to make a decision. This is not only about live videos of smart, charismatic speakers, but in general about greater personalization of materials. Depersonalization does not work – gradually all schools are moving away from this. About ten years ago, infogypsies instilled in people the fear that they would be taught by someone incompetent.
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Use only direct advertising
See an ad for a course? If the ad is solid and “polished”, and the website pages and social networks are empty and lifeless – you are looking at a school that is incapable of managing its platforms. Its is based only on advertising, and not on proving its competence. Why are they so silent? Either there is no expertise, or the school cannot afford full-fledged advancement financially – which means that things are not going very well for it.
You are not allowed to see how the training is going
Banal advertising with the call to “Buy now at a discount” and the lack of free materials on the website/in social networks tell us that the training center was unable/unwilling to build an elementary sales funnel. It is easy to film a product, give its acknowledging mistakes characteristics, show it in operation. And even some case won thanks to a good lawyer is also an excellent argument. Showing the result of courses is much more difficult: the target set by the student does not look so impressive. And how it will work after these courses is a generally foggy case, because here everything depends not only on the school or training center, but not even always on the graduate himself.
But there is still something convincing – and that is… the charisma and expertise of the teacher. Nothing works like a real warm-up video with the speaker: not reduced prices, not a detailed program, not reviews. Webinars, free master classes, workshops – that’s what really sells. We collect most of our leads from such events, where we let the audience see – who will teach them? How does he communicate? Is his presentation interesting? Does he know the topic in depth? So online learning is, one could say, always a story about many small personal brands.
You are attacked from different sides
You receive an ad offering to get “something” useful, you click on the link and… you find yourself in a labyrinth of mailings, auto-webinars, confusing chicago business schemes and God knows what else. Letters bombard your inbox, and you are constantly getting calls – even at night.
This is all a story about an unsuccessful attempt to build a tricky sales funnel. What do you, a potential client, care about the marketing of an online school if there really are (as you hope) competent specialists in a foreign language/painting/training/calligraphy? Direct: this way you can understand that these guys have nothing set up in the educational business, and they are testing different schemes on you – and the same will most likely happen with the learning process. Do you need it – to be a guinea pig, even if the people on the other side of the screen are honest and generally trying very hard? Well, only out of pure altruism.
And if the courses are related to marketing and digital, such behavior is proof of the team’s incompetence. If the guys teach advertising, but they themselves cannot build a campaign smoothly and painlessly for the client, then they will not teach you this either.
on the contrary, ignore requests and do not get in touch
You simply left a request on the website – you wanted a manager to consult you and answer questions about the course and training scheme. And now only a week has passed, and you are ready to throw away the SIM card, change your name and fly to another country to hide from intrusive managers.
If a training center clings to potential clients and does not let go until it receives payment, most likely it does not have very many leads. You wanted to clarify something or ask something. You left a request or contact information. And that’s it. Silence. No calls, no letters. You call the phone numbers listed, and there are only beeps. You don’t need a school that doesn’t care about its clients – there is no guarantee that anything will change during the learning process.
They don’t give anything for free
The teacher’s charisma, which was mentioned above, is important – but that’s not all. You are interested in knowing how the training is organized, whether the teacher is just lying, what the picture and sound are like in the course – in general, you probably want to get the maximum information about what you are paying for and have the right to. A school that understands this always has free materials: voluminous and informative blog articles, master classes, marathons. With the help of the latter, you will also be able to evaluate the quality of homework that teachers of these courses give. Didn’t find anything like that? Perhaps the school lacks the resources to create quality free content.
They try to “get by” only through promotions and big discounts
At the start, we tried dumping ourselves. It was an interesting and useful experience, but we will not repeat it – not because discounts hit revenue and profits hard, but simply because… they do not work. At some point, we realized: it is better to invest the same money in the production of additional content with teachers – this sells much better! (Here we return to points 1 and 2…)
If you see discounts of 10-30%, that’s normal. We organize them ourselves from time to time. Some students keep us in their bookmarks and wait for a small price reduction – it’s psychologically easier to “allow yourself” to buy the course. But discounts of 80-90% are suspicious. Or is he… not very competent?
They have a couple of courses for sale recorded from 2018
The world has accelerated incredibly – and rarely in any area does something remain unchanged. If there is one, all the information on it has long been posted for free; in the rest, everything changes dramatically in a year or two, especially in digital and marketing. And if the niche changes, the content of the lectures should be updated as well.