How to get people to buy your course or coaching programme

Rachel Klaver is a marketing coach at Identify Marketing, podcast host, and author. She is a regular opinion contributor.

OPINION: For those of us who work as coaches, strategists and consultants, adding a course to our offering feels like it makes a lot of sense.

After all, there are so many ads that appear in front of us all the time on social media telling us how easy it is to “scale up your business” and make money while you sleep.

It feels too good to be true, but it also feels too enticing to avoid. Create a framework, record some videos, pop it into an online learning platform, and you’ve got something you can sell on autopilot. So easy!

Except it’s not that easy, and often that course just sits there, not making you the income you thought it would.

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I’ve lost count of how many business owners I’ve worked with since the beginning of 2020 who used lockdowns to create a course, a membership programme or a coaching programme, hoping it would be the golden ticket of passive income they were hoping for. It rarely has been

I’m not against creating courses as part of our business model. We have them ourselves. We have several short, low-cost options, and we fully re-launched our blended learning marketing strategy course last year, mainly online training with some one-on-one time with me.

This year I also launched my first ever group coaching, working with small business owners on their content marketing.

I feel I’ve cracked the code more than I did the first few times I tried online courses and other scalable offers. Initial launches have been successful, as has getting ongoing sales. But it’s not happening by magic. It’s working because I’m working hard to promote it.

This promotion definitely ebbs and flows depending on what else is happening in our business. The busier we are on other projects, the less we talk about our courses.

Linda Reed-Enever, a marketing coach specialising in course creation says that is an all too common problem. “When someone tells me they’re not selling any of their courses, the first thing I ask is whether they’ve talked about the course on social media, and to their list within the last seven days.”

I felt a little bit uncomfortable about that statement. I knew that sounded a little bit like me at the moment. It got worse.

“And then,” she continued, “I ask if they’ve mentioned it in the last 14 days, or even in the last 30 days. Social media moves fast. People are easily distracted. Our job is to put our offer in front of them over and over again.” Yes. Definitely felt uncomfortable. I have several courses I’ve created then never talked about. She’s right.

Reed-Enever’s coaching programme The Course Creator Circle specifically helps small business owners plan, create and then promote their courses and programmes. Her focus is on sustainable sales growth from your scalable offers, that sits nicely within the rest of your business. “Anything you do in business needs to fit with the rest of what you offer. Anything else will lead to burn out.”

As a guest on the MAP IT Marketing podcast, Reed-Enever shared some of the common mistakes people make in creating courses to sell. The biggest was to invest all your energy into creating the course itself.

“The process of building the course itself should only be 20% of the job. But most people put 80% of their effort into this. Even with an engaged online community, and a big email list, you need more focus on marketing than on course creation. “

New Zealand business owners often feel uncomfortable talking about what they’re selling more than a few times. We feel that we’re talking about it all the time, and people will get sick of it. Reed-Enever says “when you get sick of marketing your product or course, that’s the time you need to ramp it up. Because if you don’t, you’re going to sit there and not move forward.”

One of the key contributions to our reluctance is not understanding how social media algorithms work. Our post about our course on a Tuesday may only be seen by 5% to 10% of our audience. If we post about it again next Thursday, some of the same people may see it plus a new segment of our audience.

If we’re talking about our course all the time and still not getting sales, it might be because we’ve got caught in the features versus benefits trap.

It’s really easy to list off what the course or programme includes. But what really makes someone want to buy from you is understanding what transformation they’ll get from buying from you. Reed-Enever suggests using this framework; “By the end of this course you will get x, or know how to do x,x, and x”

To add to that, she also suggests adding a video to your sales page. “The number one thing that annoys me is when there is no video of you as the instructor connecting, sharing insight and showing people who you are, and what you are going to teach.” It helps people get a sense of how the information might be delivered and what they will expect once in the course.

While Reed-Enever agrees that talking through slides on a video than talking to the camera can feel less confronting, she says it devalues your content. “As much as your knowledge is credible, people want to see your face. It’s all about that constant connection between you and the student.”

One of the most important parts of your marketing is your sales page. Make sure there are more than one calls to purchase, and if possible include testimonials from previous customers to help people feel at ease.

While some of us use regular launches and intakes of our courses and coaching programmes, Reed-Enever recommends adopting a rolling enrolment option where possible instead. Part of this is due to the immense energy levels you need to put into each launch. “And remember we’re keeping this sustainable!” Part of it is due to simplifying the sales process.

“I used to do the limited intake option myself. People would come in and then sales would be dead in the water because it was such a long wait until the next intake.”

While my online course has a rolling enrolment, I found this concept really challenging to get my head around for my group coaching programme. How could I have a rolling 12-month programme without people feeling overwhelmed if they came in at the wrong time? After several long beach walks working through options in my head I found a way to adapt my current offer to one that will give us the option to create monthly intakes in 2023. It’s a reminder that we’re able to change up our course or coaching model as we roll it out, to make it best fit the needs of our students.

Many people, myself included, have used a waitlist list-building approach pre course launch to hopefully get better sales on launch day. Reed-Enever says this can create a false sense of success as the waitlist doesn’t always convert to sales as much as we expect it to. “I like to compare it to a child in a lolly shop. When they saw the page about your course they were totally in. But when the course finally comes out they might now be on the street, and the urgency to go buy those lollies has passed.”

Instead, Reed-Enever recommends finding a way to get a commitment from people earlier in the journey. “You might offer them an early bird discount. They pay now, and then get full access on launch day.”

Reed-Enever has built out a course and coaching system that allows people to pay for more depending on what level of care, group or individual coaching they want to have. It’s now a core part of her business, and replaced much of her one-to-one consulting she used to do. “I don’t ever see me stopping. I’ve got the formula right about how I want to serve my audience, and I’m loving it.”

That’s motivation for the rest of us to take a look at how we’re going to market our own programmes and courses too.