How to Choose The Best Digital Marketing Channels for e-Learning and EdTech Companies

Over the past few years, we have been very fortunate to work with a number of brilliant e-Learning and EdTech companies. We’ve seen time and again eLearning or EdTech businesses struggling to come up with an accurate value proposition. As a result, they often picked digital marketing channels that were not right for them.

As a marketing agency, we have run digital campaigns in multiple markets such as the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, the USA, India and even Brazil. This global experience taught us a thing or two about what works and what does not for B2C services, which is what we would like to share with you in this article.

Some of the questions to ask yourself are: “Is my course an essential learning material?”, “Is this something that will directly help one do better in school, or pass exams, or get an admission to a university?”, “Is this just a ‘nice to have’ education material?” or “Is this a soft skills course?”

Once you have identified what is your value proposition and how it fits into the lives and priority list of your target audience, you will then be in a much better position to choose the correct marketing channels to promote your courses.

If you realise that your course isn’t a ‘must have’, this does not necessarily mean that your offering is wrong. It simply means that you need to ensure you have definitely done all the user research and product-market-fit analysis required before going to market, make sure you communicate your value proposition in a way that resonates with your audience and ensure you choose marketing channels that would work for products with low search intent.

Once you have a clear understanding of what it is that you are offering, it is important to understand what your audience will be getting out of it. Put yourself in their shoes and try to assess what is the likelihood of them specifically looking for your courses or solutions online.

Let’s say that someone is looking to become a qualified paralegal or a Project Manager, they would most likely look for a course online. But say you are offering cutting edge online training courses for teenagers to become more self-confident, this type of course does not directly strike as something teenagers would actively ‘search for’ online.

One way of understanding the search intent for your type of course is by directly asking your potential customers instead of guessing. Run a quick online survey and ask them to get all the answers you need.

You should choose the channels for your marketing offensive depending on the answers you get to the 2 questions above and not based on what you heard in a Marketing Mastermind group or read in a generic blog like the “5 Best Digital Marketing Techniques.”

When it comes to marketing, one size does not fit all and it is important to adjust your strategy to your business needs keeping variables like your industry, value proposition, price-point, markets you are after, the target audience, etc. in mind.

Truth be told, if your e-Learning course material or EdTech proposition is not ‘essential’ to your target audience and is not about covering their most pressing needs, your potential customers will be unlikely to look for it – simply because they would have no idea such a proposition exists in the first place.

In this case, paid advertising will simply not be right for you. Instead, you should focus your resources on educating your audience by creating and distributing value added content and doing a stellar job with your SEO. In addition, you should also be building your email database and social media following. This would give you a chance to build a community and catch their attention before you start selling your course to them.

If your value proposition is essential to the success of your target audience (be it for learner or career progression), it is highly likely it will be directly searched for online.

In this case Google ads and social ads will be your best bets! You could start by doing a keyword research for Google ads to capture as much high intent research as possible. Next thing you can do is raise awareness of your value proposition through engaging social media ads like video content. (According to a 2020 Marketing Survey by Wyzolwl State University, 92% of marketers think video is an important element for social media marketing, so make sure not to neglect it!)

In addition, it would still make sense to invest in SEO and content creation, especially if you are an e-Learning business. Once you kickstarted your business with paid ads, you should start focusing on driving more organic traffic over time, tactically supported by ads…

This is by no means an exhaustive list of all possible scenarios. As we said above, one size fits all just does not work in marketing and everything must be tailored to your particular business and its needs.

If you are looking for help in figuring out what type of digital marketing channels would work best for your e-Learning or EdTech business, do not hesitate to get in touch with us here. We would love to help.