How to Attract a Market to Your Course

We know that one of the most important functions of having a successful business is having an audience to sell our products or services to. Without an audience, you might stumble along until someone finds you, but this isn’t really going to bring you the clients you are looking for, or need to keep your business going. 

The key to marketing is an audience. The only way to get an audience is through marketing. So we can see how marketing is essential. But what kind of marketing should you be utilising when it comes to finding an audience for your course or workshop? 

How to Create a Market

Creating the course, filming the presentation and setting up the landing pages is just part of the process. No marketing means no traffic being sent to your website and landing pages. In turn, no traffic means no audience. 

So, how do we create this market to eventually sell our courses and products to?

The first thing is understanding that you need multiple ways to connect with your audience and bring them into your marketing funnel. Quite often it takes 7-8, what we call touches, with a potential customer before they will purchase a course or product. In this timeframe, they are assessing our education, what we know about the market ,what we can teach them and what they will take away from the course. In essence, they are assessing whether the course is worth their time and money. 

There are plenty of ways that we can educate the market prior to them coming on board as a student of our courses, including livestreams, webinars, Q&A’s, e-Books and downloadables. These items help your potential customer understand your knowledge and can help spark their interest in learning from you further. 

Educating Your Market

As we mentioned above, there are plenty of ways to educate your market, leading towards enticing them to buy:

• eBooks – a great way for your audience to find out more about your knowledge. You receive their contact details and can then place them into your email nurturing series.
• Webinars – doing them live is better than pre-recorded (however pre-recorded is better than not doing them at all). A live webinar allows you to connect with the audience, answer questions, see what topic sparks your audience’s interest, see what they are on your webinar the most and so on. You can also get email addresses and place interested parties into your email marketing funnel. 
• Email lists – a great way to stay in touch with your current audience. Let them know you will be running a course or webinar; tell them about your pre-launch or a new course you are working on. Many people are afraid to email their email lists, but don’t be. People will unsubscribe from your emails – but these aren’t the people you want; they were already unlikely to purchase in the first place and only signed up to get the free goodies. Those who want to buy, whether they are ready to right now or not, won’t unsubscribe from your emails. 
• Groups – social media groups, going live on a Facebook group, connecting with people and putting event information on social media is a great way to grow an audience. 

Four Important Factors in Growing an Audience

There are four important factors that come into growing your market and audience no matter which platform you use to do so. 

The first is of course educating your market via the above methods. Your audience is unlikely to know that  you are an expert in your field and they won’t generally know the ins and outs of what you do. Now is the time to show them that you know your stuff, what being taught by you like going to be like, and what problem you are going to be solving. 

We then move onto the Call to Action, or the CTA. This is how you bring people to your courses. Encourage your audience to book into your next course or webinar, show them what the next course of action is to learn more. People tend to need logical steps to follow, and this is where you can show people what you really do. 

Next up is launch pricing or pre-sale pricing. You’ve seen early bird tickets for events, but are you using them yourself? Set a deadline to pre-purchase your new course at a discounted rate or to grab early bird tickets for your next event. This encourages action from those looking to buy your course. 

Finally, you need to follow up with your potential market. Nurture them through an email sequence, send a private email, let them know how long is left on early bird pricing or product launches. This is where you can get your 7-8 touches in and get people to connect. 

Remember that educating your market means you end up with a much better informed attendee. Encourage action and follow up – this will get the audience flowing through to your courses, events and webinars.