Educators and content creators will spend three years on creating a course without a clue whether anyone wants to buy it.
They do not validate, specify their audience or research what they want.
Then when its time to start selling, and when nothing happens… get stuck. Sound familiar? So what to do next?
Let me walk you through the different routes that I’ve seen course creators take and how hiring an agency stacks against them.
The decision to keep struggling yourself (after all, you can do it)
Doing the digital marketing yourself means you get complete control of all aspects of the digital marketing process. You decide the voice, tone, and pattern of your campaigns. You can work at your own pace and save money.
On the other hand you might notice that you are putting in way too much work for too long and none of it is working as it should. The learning curve to marketing is brutal. A good course marketing team will save you a ton of time and money in the long run. Don’t forget that your time is worth money as well.
You also already wear a lot of hats. Handling the core activity of your business (content creation, course upgrades, costumer service etc..) is already a lot. Coupled with digital marketing campaigns can be a lot of work for you.
The decision to hire a VA that says they know marketing
This is usually done with the thought of “they can figure it out” and “it will save me money”.
You will never find a good marketer this way.
Worst case scenario is you now have a person you need to train (on what you don’t know) or they’re simply googling things.
Best case scenario is you hired a technician and they have some idea of what marketing is.
Decision to hire in-house (as you have a large budget)
After going through the hiring process (which will take a while) and finally building out your in-house digital marketing team, you will find that having all the specialists together is a lot of expense.
If it is not then you don’t have a good team.
The best marketers & copywriters will rarely work for anyone else and when they do it is not cheap.
What happens when you hire a digital marketing agency?
I’ll pre-empt this by saying that all of the statements below only apply if it is a good agency.
1. Specialists do the job.
Digital marketing is diverse and involves many techniques. Sometimes, you need to create an online video, Facebook Advertising SEO, Social Media Marketing, Google Ads, Email Marketing, and much more. And each of these needs a separate team to handle. It is a complex method, and it’s hard for a single person to handle it.
Moreover, every marketing technique requires the use of several tools. And these tools are costly. Digital marketing agencies have their set of tools they use for all projects. You can get results much faster with the right resource working on the right things.
2. Audience specific strategies
Content creators who have their in-house teams have large knowledge gaps. They’ve at most launched a handful of courses and only used a channel or two.
Focusing on the channel you know and not on how to the most efficient way of getting in front of your audience is not the right strategy. It’s these simple mistakes that derail conversions and sales while using up a ton of resources.
Agencies such as mine that’ve worked with 200+ courses have already dealt with most of the issues your course will ever face. We learned how important it is to get obsessed about getting the right people to see your offer. Feedback from anyone else is just noise.
We also know when its important to diversify vs going in one one marketing channel.
3. You’re buying experience
A good agency can shave you years of testing different methods. If they worked with a lot of different courses then they have an idea of the challenges yours will face and how to speed up the testing process. Marketing is all tests.
They will help you get in front of the right audience, find best message, tweak your funnel until it converts and come up with strategies on how to scale.
You will save costs when you outsource all the tasks to a specialized digital marketing agency. Having and maintaining a team of digital marketing specialists can be pretty taxing financially and requires much effort.
Conclusion
Although I highly recommend working with an agency there’s always some risk involved. If you find a digital course marketing agency that lacks experience or is simply a group of technicians then your results will vary by a lot. Everything that I’ve stated above is only true when the agency has the experience and know how.
It’ll be up to you to ask the right questions and I get that this is very tough, but I’ll give you the quickest giveaway of one to avoid. They’re too confident or excited to take on the job AND they keep selling you on certain strategies instead of focusing on the audience.
