E-learning as a Content Marketing

This article is for you if:

• you create marketing campaigns through customer education (tips, insights …);
• you use digital tools — emails, video blogs, blog posts;
• you constantly face the challenge of creating inclusive content.

This article is not for you if:

• you create and publish ads;
• you use e-learning programs for the purpose of earning from subscriptions;

Digital marketing is fascinating in a way that allows us to create advertising campaigns for free or at a low cost. Currently, more easily available technical solutions have been developed than ever before: YouTube, Linkedin, Medium, Mailchimp, and others.

However, the abundance and availability of free tools and content create an avalanche of information that results in a new effect: followers’ inflation, which means that every “digital” user is less and less likely to be a potential customer. They Like, Clap, Follow, and quickly disappear.

Grabbing consumers’ attention every day is getting harder and harder. Research shows that 65% of creators are constantly challenged to create compelling content.

BUYER PERSONA

Let’s get back to the customer. Today’s buyer persona wants to be smart, able to make their own decisions and to have a professional consultant at hand — all of this at the same time.

The conclusion is that e-learning would be an ideal tool that would give what today’s buyer needs.

However, e-learning is not used in marketing because:

• e-learning is by nature a learning system. Customers really won’t want to learn the theory just to be able to make the right choice of a service or a product;
• training is usually conducted by professional coaches who are not salespeople;
• the existing e-learning platforms (Learning Management System) are complicated to use, usually require professional content, are paid, etc.

HOW TO MODERNIZE?

Now let’s try to modernize the e-learning principle to adapt it to today’s buyer persona. Let’s take a look at what the buyer wants and what we need to change:

1. The buyer wants very specific advice to resolve his/her situation. Then let us replace long and complex training programs with micro-training that solves only that particular problem.
2. The buyer wants to choose for himself/herself. Let us supplement the micro-training with simple tasks that will satisfy the buyer’s ego.
3. The buyer wants to have a professional nearby at the time of making the choice. Let’s provide a tool with which the program author (vendor) can communicate directly with the buyer in a training environment, i.e., be close by during the decision-making process.
4. There is more. It’s no secret that a buyer secretly dreams of knowing what other buyers don’t know. This is why it makes sense to create a small challenge by charging for content (e.g. $ 0.5), at the same time providing, let’s say, 72 hours of free access (FOMO).

Let’s look at specific cases.

E-LEARNING AND E-MAIL MARKETING

With e-mail marketing, we can only see the customer’s reaction from whether they opened the email or not. Without knowing their reaction, we do not know their level of maturity (buyer’s journey), so all we can do is keep trying to raise the client’s interest with new articles. Again and again.

After transferring educational letters to the e-learning platform, three levels of customer interest can be seen immediately:

1. Opened but not interested in the content.

2. Opened and subscribed to the content.

3. Opened, subscribed to content, and live chat with the author.

This method of creating micro-training programs (vs. newsletters) provides an opportunity to segment customers and provide them with even more accurate content, thus speeding up their journey to purchase.

E-LEARNING AND BLOG, VLOG

Articles or videos are a great way to be visible in a search engine. Medium, Linkedin, YouTube attract high traffic from potential customers. But as I have mentioned before, they Like, Clap, Follow, and quickly disappear.

By supplementing your articles or video with an information summary that includes simple homework assignments, you will be able to filter the flow of Likes on the e-learning platform and focus on target customers, clearly see their needs, create interactivity (by solving tasks) and speed up their journey to purchase accordingly.

The modernized E-learning principle has a huge untapped potential in content marketing as it is an efficient tool that helps to grab customer attention and increase sales. You will find all the necessary tools free of charge on the platform www.sebtember.com