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3 Ways to Stand Out! How Online Course Providers Win

By March 28, 2017January 27th, 2023No Comments

FullSizeRenderBetween 2004 and 2014, the number of students enrolled in at least one online learning course grew over 260 percent to 5.8 million students. Education technology companies recognize that online courses are a higher-education fixture, and that it’s a very crowded field. Breaking into this market, even with a great product, is challenging. Here are three higher education marketing strategies to help you succeed.

1. Show Your Homework

You’ve put significant effort into building your content, and testing it to make certain it looks great across a variety of devices. When you’re meeting with prospects, make sure you differentiate your content from the competition. Show off how great your product looks on a tablet, then a phone, then a laptop. It may sound silly to bring three devices, but it can be a great sales technique.

Point out every instance your content follows accessibility guidelines. Make certain you understand your competition’s product, and can speak to your advantages on feature set, total cost of ownership and customer service.

2. Enlist an Army

Social media can play an enormous role in adoption of your product. Educators trust other educators, and there are significant communities of professors on social media – especially Twitter. Think of social as a way to participate in conversations your prospects are already having about you. Being helpful and responsive goes a long way to building credibility, offer sneak peaks, surveys and early windows of opportunity for followers to continue to grow audience and loyalty.

3. Act Like a Scout

Be prepared – it’s critical in a crowded, ever-changing environment to stay on top of updates and react as necessary. Monitoring federal and state regulation developments is more important today than it has been in the past 20 years.

Your reputation is incredibly important, and monitoring what others are saying about your company and product is half the battle – the other half is proactively continuing to build positive sentiment about you. Think of it as a reservoir of goodwill that nurtures sales every day, and serves as insurance in case of emergency.

A crowded industry forces providers to create ways to stand out. It’s necessary to differentiate your company and product to avoid getting lost in the mix.

Want to learn more about how to position your company as the leader in the higher education market? Email us at hello@cblohm.com for ideas about your next steps.