Making a profit during seasonal sales periods – such as during the holiday shopping period from Black Friday to Christmas – is important for many businesses, especially those that rely on holiday shopping to get “in the black” for the year.
If you provide any kinds of online courses, you might wonder how you can market those courses effectively during major market seasons, like Black Friday. After all, your other marketing efforts, like social media marketing, online ads, and so on, serve you well during the rest of the year.
But the right seasonal marketing tips and techniques can make a huge difference in your profits for the year and even surpass the results from other marketing campaigns. Let’s take a look at how you can leverage seasonal marketing to its maximum effect.
Market During Seasonal Sales Periods
For starters, it might be a good idea to market your online courses during significant seasonal sales windows. For example, Christmas time, Boxing Day in Canada and Australia, and the Black Friday weekend after Thanksgiving are all major seasonal sales periods when people spend a lot of money to take advantage of limited-time sales and discounts.
You should also market your courses during these time frames. Try to:
- Offer limited-time discounts on your courses.
- Make new ads that are seasonal specific or that include seasonal marketing copy (i.e., “Get 20% off our online courses for marketing techniques for Black Friday!”)
- Use email marketing techniques to remind people about upcoming sales or discounts.
Even better, marketing during seasonal sales periods could convince people to try your online courses throughout the rest of the year if they’re convinced by the value your seasonal deals offer. After all, if you can convince potential customers of the benefits your course offers, it becomes an easy sell from there on.
Related: “Social Media Marketing: What Is It, and Is It Right for You?”
Use Season-Specific Marketing Hooks
When marketing during major selling seasons, try to use season-specific marketing hooks to draw attention to your courses. For instance:
- Use ad copy that specifically references the season in which you are selling. For example, if you use customizable Boxing Day templates for your online posters, be sure to mention Boxing Day in the ad copy – “20% off until Boxing Day, so buy now!”
- Use seasonal-specific aesthetics or decorations for your posters, ads, and other marketing materials. For example, if you are advertising during the Christmas season, throwing a couple of snowflakes or a Santa decoration on your digital poster certainly can’t hurt! This makes your marketing materials look more interesting and stand out from their competition.
- If possible, throw in some statistics about online shopping to prove your authority in this niche. If you’re advertising a sales course during Black Friday, put a single line about how many businesses make the majority of their profits during the Black Friday season at the bottom of the ad. This proves that you know what you’re talking about and further cements the idea that your course can be very valuable to another online business owner. Plus, the marketing copy relates to the season at hand!
Leverage Seasonal Social Media Marketing
In this day and age, social media marketing is far from an option. In fact, it’s practically required for any online business that wants to thrive in the modern economy.
That counts for you, too. You should use aggressive and seemingly seasonal social media marketing to get the word out about all your courses during these limited-time selling windows. Many people engage with social media ads very frequently during big shopping seasons, like around the holidays.
The right seasonal social media marketing will allow you to communicate with your potential customers and your target audience, building a rapport and a long-term relationship that could cause many students to buy each course you release over time.
Your seasonal social media marketing should be consistent, include a variety of ads, and become even more active during major seasonal sales periods, such as Black Friday or Boxing Day weekends.
Related: What is The Significance of Social Media Marketing For New Businesses And Startups
Offer Free Trials/Lessons
Your online courses have tons of specific information and unique perspectives to offer your students. However, your students don’t know that (yet!). Because of this, it may be wise to provide free lessons or trials of your course materials to get people interested in your courses, especially since free trials are some of the most popular seasonal discounts or special offers across industries.
Free trials and lessons are also great because they offer a sample of your teaching techniques, how your courses are laid out, and what technology you use to provide your educational materials. In many cases, offering a free trial or a single free class can get prospective customers to buy more of your courses.
Advertise Ahead of Time
While it’s always wise to advertise all your online courses when they’re most applicable or needed for your target audience, marketing ahead of time is also smart.
Why? Simply put, if a business wants to use the information included in one of your courses, they need to absorb the information early. For example, if you have a great sales or marketing techniques course, advertising that it’ll be discounted on Cyber Monday a month in advance gives any prospective student time to decide whether they want to make a purchase for your course or not.
If they buy the course early, they’ll benefit from your information that much more quickly, then possibly come back and make another purchase of your courses using your seasonal marketing. Think of it as a “double-dipping” sales situation.
Create an Easy Sales Funnel
Last but not least, be sure to create an easy sales funnel from your ad to your website to your course buy button.
Lots of would-be customers are lost in the sales funnel because it’s either too hard to purchase a course or the course creator’s website isn’t well-designed/intuitive to navigate. An easy sales funnel should:
- Allow a customer to buy a course within 5-10 clicks at most.
- Make it hard for a prospective customer to get lost.
- Have an excellent landing page that further convinces the customer of the value of your course content
To that end, go through the customer journey yourself and click through one of your online posters or digital ads. Pretend that you’re a customer looking to buy one of your courses. Is the process easy, or are there roadblocks that may dissuade someone from making a purchase? If so, redo your landing page and sales funnel and make getting to the “buy” button as easy as possible.
As you can see, there are lots of ways to sell your online courses during major selling seasons like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holidays – you just have to plan ahead and make your courses’ strengths obvious.
Remember to leverage a variety of online ads, ranging from banner ads to digital posters, to get the word out there in time for your students to use your course materials!
