Do you need a marketing professional to help you boost your leads and sales? When hunting for a marketing expert to help market your online course, there are a few qualities you need to look for.
Although they may be known as experts in the industry, hiring the wrong marketing expert could be quite costly. Don’t waste time on people who can’t assist your company’s growth or who don’t produce results.
To help you find the right marketing expert, we’ve rounded up four qualities for you to look out for before you start hiring.
1. They pay attention to the Audience over Marketing Channels
Common advice is to simply pick some channels and get good at them.
In other words, do online lead generation through various digital marketing channels, such as social media, referral marketing, and paid advertising, to generate quality leads and increase your sales funnel.
There are so many digital channels and social media platforms available, but what 99% do not teach is how to go about determining where your audience may be and the best way to reach them.
Usually the channels mentioned are whatever the marketing person themselves are familiar with.
Five billion people used the internet as of April 2022, representing 63% of the world’s population.
This is not your audience.
Some of our clients (after our research) realized that they only have 80-150k possible clients. That changed the way we go about the marketing efforts.
2. They can explain the difference between Pull VS Push marketing
The easiest way to explain this is that pull marketing is where you attract the audience (already searching for a solution) and push marketing is where you interrupt the audience (and try to position yourself as the solution).
This is one question that will show whether you’re speaking to a genuine marketer or a technician.
3. They’re not technicians masquerading as a marketers
You can spot a technician by their offering or advice.
- You should post 3 times a day on Instagram
- We can do an organic campaign on Pinterest
- I recommend to upgrade your sales page so it looks better
- Your email campaign is not long enough
All of these focus on what they know how to do instead of what will bring in the audience and have them convert.
I often say this would be like hiring one of my employees instead of me for the job. If they specialize in copywriting… their only solution will be that.
If you push back with a couple “why” based questions their plans fall apart.
4. They understand the challenges your course faces
- Selling courses is different than selling products.
- Large companies have different sales processes and cycles than a small company.
- The b2b way of selling is not the same as selling to consumers.
- Advertising works different than social.
- Cold outreach is not inbound marketing.
The #1 task of a marketer is to pinpoint who you need to target and how. Then adjust the plan accordingly.
Although they’re good at what they do, an expert who only has the experience of dealing with colleges & universities will not understand the challenges and strategies required to sell an individual’s course to consumers.
Wrong choices here will cost you time and money.
Has this person already helped others like you face various challenges in selling their courses and have seen them succeed.
3. They can analyze data & implement solutions
Marketing is nothing more but tests that bring back data which is used to create new iterations of tests.
The overall goal is the same (to make a sale) but the sub-tests are very different.
Let me walk you through a simple funnel
- Ad (testing images, headlines, body copy) → goal Click to opt in page
- Opt-in page (testing design, buttons, copy) → goal to sign up for emails
- Sent emails (testing headlines) → goal to open email
- Opened emails (testing copy, buttons,CTAs) → goal to click over to sales page
- Sales page (testing design, buttons, copy) —> goal to checkout
This continues all the way until the conversion is made. These are just some examples as we test much more.
The data needs to (1) be tracked properly (2) analyzed (3) solutions designed & implemented.
Without measurement, marketing is useless, so a marketing expert must be able to also determine the return on investment (ROI) and performance of their marketing initiatives.
One who can work with data from multiple sources and campaigns, discern what information is important and irrelevant, and uses their analysis to guide future decisions will be crucial to your online course’s success.
4. They are creative and can think outside the box
Although marketers usually work off of data there’s still a ton of creativity involved.
Some examples:
Where is our audience?
This will break of make the campaign and is often harder than it sounds. Let’s say you’re told your audience is on Facebook. Fine, but how targeted will they be. Just because some of your demographic is interested in cars it doesn’t mean they will take your “how to be a mechanic” class.
Intent is very different.
When this happens, all of the data you’re getting back on your funnel might be wrong. Not because your funnel is bad but because 90% of this audience does not care.
You might ask.
“Then why did they click on the ad?”
- They like clicking on things
- People are weird
How do we pitch them?
Will we use:
- Pain points or solutions
- Pull marketing or push marketing
- Videos or images
- Opt in offer or webinar
- etc..
The key to effective marketing is to deliver a message that resonates with your target audience. One of the qualities of an expert marketer is their ability to be creative, and problem solve to find innovative solutions.
Marketing requires the capacity to approach issues from fresh perspectives and develop unique solutions to growing concerns. Find a course marketing expert with creative problem-solving skills, and you will likely find solutions to many challenges you may have faced in the past.
Conclusion
Your aim as an online course creator is to get in front of the right audience, with a compelling message, generate leads and convert those into sales. It’s a simple process that’s also extremely difficult.
Finding a good course marketing expert can be challenging, but using these qualities as a guide will help you find someone who is a good fit for your online course business.
