It goes without saying that you want your online business to be successful. That much is obvious. What’s less apparent is how your success should be measured. Certainly, generating revenue and attaining high ROI have earned their place as key success factors for every business. But what makes your online training business successful beyond the money?
Are you ready for your answer?
Building and delivering courses that matter through a relevant and engaging online learning experience for your students.
Selling courses that matter—that are really, truly meaningful—will prove to be a game changer for your business.
So how can you sell courses that make you money and that leave an impact on your students?
Don’t worry. It’s not as difficult or as time consuming as you think. We’ve simplified the process for you and narrowed it down to 3 Ways to Cultivate the Best Online Learning Experience.
Ready?
Here we go!
1. Create an amazingly detailed student persona.
What’s a persona, you ask? A persona is an in-depth profile of your ideal student that moves beyond basic demographic data like age and gender into psychographic data, like likes, dislikes, problems, questions, roadblocks, pain points, etc.
Before you do anything else, you need to determine who your ideal student is. When you know who your audience is, you will know where to find them, how to speak to them, and how to sell your courses to them.
Let’s look at an example.
Imagine for a moment that your online business sells real estate continuing education units (CEUs). Who is your customer persona?
Well, first let’s give them a name. We’ll go with Alex. Who is Alex?
Alex may be a couple different people, but for the sake of example, let’s say that Alex is an individual student, a real estate agent needing to renew her license through continuing education. What are some things we know about Alex? Well, in this scenario, Alex is a 35-45 year old woman well-ingrained in her profession. She is a fixture at her real estate office, and without her skills and expertise, her agency would not have sold nearly as many homes as they have. Between her busy work life and taking care of her young family, Alex has little time to spare, so she needs to be able to renew her license quickly and efficiently. Knowing what you know about Alex, you can be sure that your course content needs to make a quick impact. It has to be to-the-point, and it has to provide an engaging experience for Alex. These are the kinds of things you need to know when creating your student persona.
It goes much more in-depth than that, and the topic of student personas warrants its own blog post, probably even its own series of blog posts. For now, when you’re creating your ideal student profile, ask yourself these questions: Who are they? What position do they hold? What are their needs and goals? What are their wants? Where can I find them? How do I speak to them? What excites them?
Ultimately, there will be few things more valuable for you than having an awesome, pinpointed student persona. If you don’t know who your target audience is, you will not foster a good learning experience. On the other hand, if you have a well-formed persona, you will know exactly what kind of course content provides a solution to the questions, pain points, problems, and roadblocks of your ideal customer.
Trust us. A well-developed customer persona will take your business from a decently performing online training solution that gets the job done to an organization that becomes the industry model for courses that offer successful learning results.
2. Author relevant online course content.
Now that you know who your ideal customer is, you need to ensure that every piece of course content you author is relevant to that person. Remember how we said that your customer persona has questions, pain points, problems, and roadblocks? Your course material needs to speak to those.
Beyond the written or scripted content of your courses, you will also want to ensure that the actual experience of taking the course keeps your students engaged. For example, if you create a course in DigitalChalk and you use our Chalkboard feature, you can set checkpoints that interrupt the video and require the student to complete an action like taking a brief section quiz or reading a text recap of that section. Even better, gamify your courses with leaderboards, badges, and certificates. Nothing like good old fashioned fun to increase student engagement.
So, as you move forward in your journey to create the best experience for your students, remember that when it comes to content, keep it relevant, and keep it engaging. It needs to provide an answer to the problems and pain points of your customer persona, and it needs to be fun and engaging.
3. Choose an all-in-one toolkit that provides your students a successful learning experience.
Have you ever purchased a service that makes all these promises about how it will save you time and money, and then you end up having to purchase multiple 3rd party services or add-ons to actually get your work done? That’s the worst.
You’re too busy for that. After all, you have an online training business to run. You don’t have the time to track down multiple different services in multiple different places. You need solution that gives you everything all in one place, it needs to look good, and it needs to be easy to use.
Don’t know where to look?
No worries. We’ve got you covered. DigitalChalk is the solution you’re looking for.