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No matter which industry you’re in, creating and marketing an online course is a great way to build your brand. Fitness instructors, therapists, language or culinary arts teachers—anyone with knowledge and expertise to share can use online courses to grow their business.
Online courses can:
Attract new customers or clients
Create a passive income stream
Increase brand awareness
Position you as a subject matter expert
Here’s how to create a course that fits your personal brand, helps you build a community, and allows you to earn by sharing what you know.
How can online courses increase your brand visibility?
Whether you’re just launching your online business or are looking to develop your existing brand, online courses are an ideal way to drive awareness.
Developing targeted educational content that showcases what you do will help you generate positive brand sentiment from the beginning of the customer journey. It will enable your target audience to learn who you are, what you’re about, where they can find you online, and how your brand message applies to them.
For example, imagine you’re launching a brand of boutique teas and you run a three-part course on how to identify the qualities of different styles of tea. By pushing that course out on social media to an audience identified as being interested in this subject matter, you not only give them the chance to learn something new, but you also introduce your brand to them and demonstrate your expertise.
Teaching a course grows your personal brand
Online courses are a chance to position yourself as a thought leader on subjects related to your brand or area of business. Based on what you want to teach and how you want to grow your brand, you can create and run a course that’s focused on the following end goals.
Sharing your expertise: With this type of course, your unique point of view is the draw, including industry analysis, product reviews, or education. You’ll build a reputation for your perspective and knowledge.
Product support: Support courses are guides for a product you sell, including demos, instructions, feature deep dives, and product comparisons. This helps build the brand for your product and ties you to it.
Marketing: If you built your business around a first-to-market service or product, your courses may be key in explaining the benefits of your business and turning browsers into users. That’ll build a brand for you as a representative of the product and an innovator.
Online courses build a loyal community
Fans drive brands. A community of loyal followers or customers is key to building a successful business and online courses are one way to start creating that loyalty.
Courses give customers a shared experience and a place to gather regularly. If you create ways for them to interact, they can meet and bond over their shared interests and experience with your brand.
That natural community interaction creates a positive sentiment, produces a sense of being one of a select number, and provides the opportunity for mutual celebration and respect.
Your online course students can essentially become brand advocates. When someone’s having a good time, they’re more likely to go out into the world and sing the praises of your business or course. And, because they’ve taken your course, you can trust that they’ll be “on message” in terms of how they talk about you to their peers.
There is no greater brand-building tool than word of mouth since we’re more inclined to trust the opinions of people we know.
See tools to encourage community in your courses
Courses let you digitize your services
For client-first businesses, like personal finance coaches and fitness trainers, online courses are a simple way to build and maintain connections with clients. They allow you to deliver personalized service in a way that’s perfectly adapted to an audience that wants to work with you from the comfort of their home.
Imagine you’re a piano teacher whose students currently live within a 10-mile radius of your physical place of work. Creating and promoting a series of video courses targeting different levels of learners means you can keep teaching one-on-one in person and:
Attract more students from outside of your area
Give people an opportunity to try out your teaching before meeting in person
Reach students who want a more affordable lesson
How to monetize your online course
Once you have a course planned, filmed, and online, it can become a source of passive income. But the upfront work takes time and money. Make sure you charge enough to recoup your costs over time and take marketing your courses seriously.
When you charge a fee for your courses, you can invest profits from your courses back into your brand and fund your future business growth. You can charge for your courses by offering paywalled content on your website. This will give your courses an exclusive, must-have quality.
This post was updated on August 21, 2023.