We think that the filmmaking business and training business have two great similarities:
1- Both good actors/actresses and good training professionals are stars → they are impressing their audience with their amazing performance.
2- Pre-launch marketing directly affects the success of both businesses. As we all know, a movie’s success is highly correlated with pre-launch marketing, and movie trailers are playing a critical role during pre-launch PR activities. Similar to this analogy, training professionals can use mini-courses for their PR activities like the film industry uses movie trailers.
We love this analogy yet think that it is missing some key points. Apart from showing only a small part for your main course, mini-courses can contribute much more value than that.
So can you use mini-courses for your big show and can those help your marketing?
We would like to share common uses that can be used for promoting your online course.
Release free mini-courses for marketing experiments
A common way to get people interested is to give them access to a free mini-course that showcases your topic. Then invite students to continue with your full course for a deeper dive into the topic.
Yet, this approach can be improved. minicoursegenerator.com helps you prepare and present mini-courses in a fast way so you do not have to stuck with one free course. Offering more than one free course enables you to experiment with which topic attracts more attention. Start lean and smart to understand your audience’s reactions before you dive into your big course.
No camera, no professional lighting, no prompter, no set-up. Get into the action without waiting to speed up your marketing.
Improve try-before-you-buy experience for better visitor-to-customer conversion.
Depending on the reactions you get from your audience, it might be better to change the free course content to optimize this lead magnet’s power. You can even find out that some content (which does not necessarily directly take part directly in your main course flow) might impress visitors better and drives them to purchase your course. In other words, free course samples should not always be a small part of a course. You can use engaging funny moments from the production, “did you know that ..” facts, and your interpretation of big news in your domain, and so on. Optimizing the content of your free mini-courses is super-fast compared to the free previews of your main course.
Identify your audience’s needs and get to know them.
Mini-courses should not necessarily be like sequential video series. Using assessment, survey, and feedback questions inside the mini-course not only enriches the user experience thanks to the interactivity, but also answers to these questions. They are great assets for evaluating your marketing strategy because you understand your audience and have a chance to capture what they already know, what their expectations are, and so on. Since marketing is all about being closer to the customer and understanding the market, your free mini-courses are much more powerful for their ability to offer these insights instead of using them just for collecting emails. It’s good to create a course based on what they want, not on what you want to create.
Fire-up enthusiasm by using the power of questions.
The main goal of a landing page for a training event or an online course is to inspire someone to think of their own reasons as to why they might want to purchase your training, and how it will improve their life. That’s where “questions” come into play. It isn’t easy to convince people to slow down, think more, and spend time gathering and weighing evidence before deciding to take out their wallets and commit to a purchase. Offering mini-courses that contain quiz questions can help your audience get aware of their knowledge gaps and be more inclined to get true value for your course.
In addition to these, there are other use cases for benefiting from mini-courses to improve lead conversion depending on the context of your knowledge business. Some of them are as follows:
Optimize paid marketing
Ask open-ended questions in your mini-course regarding the concepts you are not for sure how your audience defines and searches for them. Get keyword ideas to optimize SEO and paid marketing.
Enrich email newsletters
Use mini-courses in your email content to make them more engaging and interactive. Even preparing seven steps of a mini-course for a week does not take so much of your time since you are the domain expert yet it will be highly appreciated by your audience.
No pain, no gain
People are more likely to value something if they put any effort into it. Make people deserve the promo code for your online course – like completing a mini-course and receiving a promo code at the end of it.
Hola, やあ, Ciao, Merhaba, Привет
Perhaps it is tough to prepare a multi-language course or adding proper subtitles to video lessons, yet you can make your mini-course available in different languages at least to see reactions. Since it is a mini-course, you can use GIFs instead of videos, and translate texts easily with great AI-powered translators to dive into the market fast and be ready to test it for possible target markets.
Support your social-media presence
We assume that you are highly active in social media marketing with PR activities. You can share mini-courses in key places like the description area in your YouTube video page to impress prospective learners even further for more engagement.
One for all, all for one
You can cross-promote through all your courses with mini-course series and give direct links to each of their landing pages. If you have other online courses, include links to your new course in relevant places in your content. Cross-promotion can be very effective because your existing customers would know what to expect from you.
Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions for your specific use cases or if we can help with anything! → [email protected]