If you’re considering pursuing an online degree, congratulations! You’ve come to the right place. You’ll find a wealth of information about the ins and outs of marketing an online degree on this blog. Whether you’re new to the field or you’re just looking to refresh your memory, you’re bound to find something to help you along the way.
The Basics Of Marketing
To begin with, let’s get the basics out of the way. What is marketing and how does it work? To put it simply, marketing is the process of communicating with potential customers to encourage them to buy your products or services. In simpler terms, marketing is telling people you’re here and what you have to offer.
Your online degree is a form of marketing. When you enroll in an online degree program, you’re telling the world you’re here and what you have to offer. You’re giving potential customers the information they need to decide whether or not to pursue your online degree program of choice (if any).
Now, let’s get to the meat of marketing your online degree. What should you be doing and what shouldn’t you be doing to successfully market your online degree?
Be Selective Of The Mediums You Use To Market
One of the first things you should do to effectively market your online degree is to be selective of the media you use. You have a finite amount of resources (time and money) and you should be using these resources to the best of your ability. Therefore, you should be limiting the amount of time you spend on social media platforms, reading blogs, and watching YouTube videos. The more you use these platforms, the more you’ll be exposed to advertising. This is where most people go wrong. They think because they’ve listened to a podcast or watched a YouTube video about a topic, that this is the same as reaching an audience through traditional methods like newspapers and magazines. It’s not. A video does not a marketer make.
Traditional methods of marketing (newspaper articles, radio ads, billboards, and so on) may be the most effective ways of catching a person’s attention, but if they don’t have an interest in what you have to offer, then they won’t be inclined to listen to you or read your material. When it comes down to marketing, you need to be thinking about your target audience and ensuring your chosen mediums reflect that.
Consult With An Expert
Another thing you should do to effectively market your online degree is to consult with an expert. An expert is someone who has extensive knowledge about a particular subject matter. They may be an accredited business school expert, marketing consultant, or someone who has specialized in a particular area. Simply put, they may know more about your product or service than you do. When you’re new to the field of marketing, it can be difficult to know where to start. You don’t have experience to draw on and it’s challenging to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t work. This is why you should be consulting with an expert. They can give you a fresh set of eyes and a different set of strategies and tactics to pursue.
If your ultimate goal is to sell your product or service, then you need to be thinking about how to effectively market it. One of the best things you can do for yourself is to ask someone who is more experienced than you are for help.
Use The Right Placements
The final thing you need to do to effectively market your online degree is to use the right placements. “Placement” is the act of having your ads appear in the right places at the right time. This type of marketing is called “paid search.” There are a number of platforms available to advertise your online degree. To put it simply, you can use Google Ads, which is run by Google, or you can use social platforms like Facebook and Instagram to reach your audience. In addition to this, you can use special software programs to find the best times to advertise on social media platforms. For example, you can use Hootsuite to find the best times to post on social media platforms.
You might decide to try and reach students in your chosen field. After all, this is who you’ll be marketing your degree to. There are a number of platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter that you can use to do this. When you’re using these platforms, you’ll find a wide range of people. Some will be interested in what you have to offer and some will be there to waste your time. Ensure you’re reaching out to the right people.
Now, you might be thinking, “Marketing my degree won’t be that difficult. All I need to do is set up a Google Ads account, find a blog to post on, and I’m good to go.” Well, you’d be wrong. What you need to do is much more complicated than this. To make matters worse, you have to figure everything out on your own. Don’t expect to simply walk into a marketing job and know exactly what to do. This is because the field is constantly evolving and changing as new trends emerge and old ones fade.
Hopefully, this article gave you a good foundation for understanding marketing and how to market your online degree successfully. In the next section, we’ll discuss how to find the right audience and how to engage with them to encourage them to act on your promotional material.
Find Your Audience
When you’re deciding where to focus your efforts when marketing your online degree, you first need to identify your audience. Who is the person you’re aiming to reach with your online degree? What do they need or want?
If you can’t find the right answers to these questions, it can be difficult to know where to start. You must be thinking about your target audience when you’re choosing your marketing strategy. If you can’t pinpoint one specific group of people, it might be a good idea to aim for a more general audience. For example, if you’re studying business administration, you might want to consider advertising on a general business website instead of a degree program site.
In addition to this, you need to think about how you want the person reading your ad to feel. What is your brand voice? What does it mean to be a marketer of your degree program?
Hopefully, this article gave you some good ideas about the right audience to target and how you can narrow down the choices. Once you’ve got this part down, the rest is just a matter of following the proven methods for marketing.
Pro-act
Once you’ve found the right audience, you need to engage with them. The best way to do this is by acting. Simply put, when you’re acting, you’re putting into practice what you’ve learned. Students in your chosen field will most likely have a number of professors they can turn to for help or advice. If you’ve managed to catch their attention, you can encourage them to take the next step by giving them more information or connecting them with people who may be able to help.
To further engage with your audience, you can:
- Create content to attract potential students (e.g., case studies, videos, or podcasts).
- Use interactive elements on your website (e.g., quizzes, forums, or blog comments).
- Use social media platforms to engage with your audience (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn).
- Create advertisements (e.g., on Google or Bing) and test various versions to find the best results.
- Use retargeting to keep people on your website (e.g., when they visit other sites, Facebook will show them ads on that site as well).
- Use affiliate marketing to earn a commission when someone clicks a sponsored link or buys a product that’s been promoted on your website (e.g., Amazon Associates, Reverb).
- Use social media to comment on relevant blogs and websites (e.g., when someone writes an article about your niche, comment on that article with helpful information).
- Use your own email list to keep in touch with your audience (e.g., send out a weekly newsletter).
- Join relevant social groups on Facebook and other platforms (e.g., business administration groups on Facebook).
- Put together an email newsletter to keep people up-to-date on news and information relevant to your niche.
Just remember: Your audience is out there, somewhere. You just need to find them.