Yaaay… You’ve finally created your online course. But, there’s more to creating a course. It’s easier to create a course, the hard part is how to get people to buy your course.

In this post, I will be highlighting marketing strategies you can use to sell out your course in Nigeria.

But before then, let’s look at things you need to put in place to prepare for a marketing campaign.

What To Do Before Going on to Market Your Online Course

• Know your target audience’s persona

If you don’t know who your target audience is, you won’t be able to know the right channel to direct your marketing towards.

You are not targeting everyone because not everyone will buy from you. 

Your target audience is people who are interested in your subject topic and will be interested to learn from you.

Here are some tips to help you understand who your target audience is:

• What’s their age?
• What do they find interest in?
• What influences their purchase?
• Where do they live?
• How much do they earn?
• What do they do for a living?
• What pain point will they be looking to solve?

Write these down in at least one paragraph and put them in mind as you implement the strategy that we are about to mention in this guide.

• Understand your unique selling point

What thing will make them buy from you instead of your competitors?

What will make your online course stand out from other courses that talk about the same thing as yours?

How do you achieve this? 

Research some of the existing courses that also tackle the same subject topic, look at what they had done and determine how to differentiate your course from theirs.

Look at what you can add more to yours that your competitors did not add.

• Establish an authority in your field.

For people to buy a course, they need to be convinced enough that the creator is more than capable to teach that particular topic.

So how do you achieve that?

You can only achieve that when you have established authority in your field 

And how do you establish authority?

You can establish  authority by:

• Listing some of your accomplishments, degrees, and award on your social media pages, website, etc
• Educate and give value on your social media pages, blogs, podcast, etc
• Collaborate with bigger experts in your industry by sharing knowledge with their audience.

Now let’s move to some strategies you can use to sell out your online course in Nigeria.

1. Pre-Launching your course

Pre-launching your course before creating is a great way to build the right audience for your course: the type of audience that’s interested in your teachings and is already anxious about your proposed course, the type of audience that will most likely tell their friends and colleagues about your course. 

There’s no best time to pre-launch your course, whether you are just drafting your course now or you are just halfway to the course, or even if you only have the idea, you can always pre-launch your course during these times.

You can as well pre-launch your products when you have already created them (although this might be a little bit too late)

Read more >>> How To Make Massive Sales From Pre-launching Your Online Course

2. Use Facebook Sponsored Ads.

Facebook ads are one of the trusted ways to generate more sales for your online courses because it gives you the avenue to acquire new audiences that are totally different from your existing audience.

Although Facebook ads are not free, free it’s really an investment worth paying for.

Facebook ads will help you to reach a wider audience that is more likely to be interested in buying your products.

There are tips that guide you when you are about to use Facebook ads to sell your courses.

To know more about how to use Facebook ads to sell out your online course in Nigeria, read more HERE

3. Making use of Affiliates

An online course affiliate program involves incentivizing someone to promote your course in exchange for a commission. You select the courses you want the affiliate to promote and from each sale; you share a piece of the profit.

Affiliate marketing helps you leverage the power of influence. Partnering with many affiliates gives you the chance to tap into their audience and sell to them. It’s one of the very effective ways to sell your products to people you don’t have access to.

Also, because you pay affiliates only when a customer makes a purchase through them, it makes affiliate marketing a great marketing strategy for digital creators who have a low marketing budget.

Your affiliates can be influencers, marketers with a high following rate, but they can also be anyone who likes your products and has to have an audience to promote to e.g your students, clients, and colleagues.

How to use Selar.co Platform for Affiliate Marketing 

There are two ways you can use the selar platform for affiliate marketing for your online course.

• Manual Approach

Here you go in search of Affiliates yourself. You can throw it open to the public for anyone who wants to affiliate with your online course.

Once people have shown interest in becoming an affiliate for your online course, you can now move forward to onboarding them.

Onboarding can be done on any platform either via Email, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.

Here are what you need to ensure is included in your onboarding details;

• Commission structure and payment details. What’s their commission? 
• Your product details, policies and terms of service, marketing materials, resources, and every other detail they need to know about your digital products.

You can then go ahead to manually create affiliate links for each of your affiliates using selar.co.

Here’s how to create affiliate links on your Selar store.

1. Enter the email address of the affiliate, set a commission they should get when anyone buys from their link.

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2. Selar automatically sends them an email when a sale comes in and you get an email too.

• Using the Selar Affiliate Network.

This is the sweetest deal ever, you don’t need to go about looking for affiliates.

Selar already has everything done for you. 

Selar Affiliate network is an affiliate marketing platform with over 10,000 qualified affiliates. Anyone can sign up on Selar’s affiliate network, pick a product from our 70,000 products on Selar, start selling it and you get a commission for every sale you make.

Our interface is super easy to use and you do not require any training to start.

All you need to do is to subscribe to selar pro plan, log in to the affiliate marketplace, put the products you would like people to affiliate for, and set the commission. 

Our set of Affiliates will search through your products, pick and start advertising for you.

It’s as simple as that.

4. Email Marketing

Email Marketing is a very good marketing strategy to sell out your online course. Although email marketing might not be really fast to produce results, when it produces the results, it’s always a continuous positive result.

Here is a quick guideline to use an email marketing strategy to sell out your online course:

• The first step is to get people to subscribe to your email list. Here you can make use of a lead magnet, a lead magnet is something valuable that you can give to your audience free of charge in exchange for their email address. There are tools that can help you set this up automatically. They are convertkit, MailChimp, Sendiblue, sendpulse, etc.
• The next step after getting enough subscribers is to nurture your subscribers from a cold audience to a warm audience. Nurturing your audience to get ready for your online course, you need to create an email sequence. An email sequence is a series of emails automatically sent to people on your email list to trigger them to buy your online course.
• Market your course to them by using either the scarcity marketing strategies, urgency marketing strategies, or any other marketing strategies.

5. Influencer Marketing

Imagine someone who has almost 300k followers on Instagram or Twitter advertises your course?

What will happen?

A great increase in the turnout rate for your course.

That’s exactly what influencer marketing is about.

Some people have large and engaged audiences on their social media platforms. Their audience trusts their judgment and will go for anything that they recommend.

Influencer marketing basically means, looking for such people and letting them Advertise the products on their platform.

But influencer marketing is not only about working with people who have a large audience, it’s more about working with people who have the right audience so you can make connections with the people most likely to further connect with your brand.

To use an influencer Marketing Strategy effectively to sell out your online course in Nigeria, you need to put certain measures in place.

• Define your end goal

Know what you want in an influencer, do you want to gain brand awareness? Do you want to get more people to subscribe to your email list? Or do you want to make more sales?

Defining your goals will help you understand who exactly you should use as your influencer.

• Define the type of influencer marketing strategy you will be using. 

There are several influencer Marketing Strategies you can make use of, you can either mix all of them or use one at a time.

The strategies include:

Free Gift: Here you give the influencer something for free in exchange for a mention or a review.

Guest Posting: You create and contribute content for an influencer’s blog, social media pages, YouTube channels, etc.

Influencer Ad: Here, you pay an influencer to promote your products on their platform.

Contest: Running a giveaway solely for the influencer’s audience e.g you tell the audience to use the influencer’s promo code. 

Ambassadorial: Taking the influencer as your ambassador, wherein they mention or promote your brand, products, and services in exchange for exclusive offers like payments, free subscription, etc.

Which of these strategies will you be implementing?

Now that we have highlighted 5 strategies you can use to sell out your online course in Nigeria, it’s time to implement everything you’ve learned.

However, always have it in the back of your mind that you can’t implement everything at once, commit to implementing a few of them and measure the results before implementing more.

This way you will be able to know which one works and which one doesn’t. Then you can double down on the one that gives the most positive results.