Are you finding that the things you once knew as tried and true marketing tactics are now falling short? Do you have a hard time hitting those monthly or quarterly marketing numbers?
Are you left wondering what you should do to turn the marketing and sales ship around and head it in the right direction?
Then never fear, in this article, we'll share three ways you can leverage a learning management system or LMS as your new marketing and sales machine.
We're going to show you how to get more eyeballs, more conversion, and more revenue to help you grow smarter by using an LMS in your marketing and sales strategy.
The perception of a course is way different than that of a white paper or an ebook. Meaning, a free course holds more perceived value to your visitors than the once magical ebook or white paper download — especially if your audience is truly interested in learning something more deeply.
Give the people what they want!
Provide your customers with a more in-depth educational experience by taking your already created white papers and ebooks and turning them into free, easy-to-watch or read courses.
Gather your team together and divvy out the chapters of that premium content.
Each team member can break their ebook chapters into mini 2 to 4-minute video sections and even find areas to update the content. As the marketing and/or sales team leader, you could break the chapters into sections for them.
Then, sprinkle a little bit of personal or brand flair to each video script, record, edit, and add them to your Learning Management System.
Moving forward, take the time to create free courses from your top performing lead generation materials. Then, start to promote them by replacing your old content offer call to actions (CTAs) on your relevant blog articles and share them with your social channels as you would with new content.
This is a great opportunity for your sales team to introduce your new content to leads as a reengagement opportunity or to add value add in conversations.
Ensure you promote your new course or courses through email to the people who originally downloaded the original ebook or white paper too.
While many prospects have good intentions, the content may not have been fully consumed the first time.
Once you have your free courses in place and see one or a couple of them catching fire, make follow-up courses that go into more deep-dive or intermediate-level learning.
Pro tip: Save the advanced materials for your paid course! But, more on that later.
These lead conversion courses should be gated for a powerful lead generating opportunity. How light or heavy you make the form (amount of fields/questions asked) to unlock the course is up to you. In our experience, using it as a conversation starter and keeping it on the lighter side works best.
Think of the same field count as that ebook or white paper was vs. a demo or request a quote style form.
Pro tip: With this lead conversion course strategy, you'll need an LMS that will allow you to have a course conversion based on a simple form fill.
The problem you may face here is that many LMS systems will require a credit card, and this is a hurdle that some contacts won't be able to or want to do.
Impulse Creative created the HubLMS to achieve exactly this functionality because it's built within HubSpot and uses your own existing (or new) HubSpot landing pages, forms & lists for gating or un-gating your course content.
These lead generating courses should be easy for the contact to complete. Keeping your course to a one to three-hour time frame should be manageable for most folks trying to learn more about a topic of importance.
One main thing to focus on is to make your courses easily digestible by breaking the content into smaller chunks.
Don't just slap three 1-hour webinars into your learning management system and call it a day.
Your LMS marketing and sales machine should be an experience for the learner. You should build your course(s) in a way where the viewer can watch sections, take a break, and then quickly come back to the on-demand learning on their timetable.
You'll want to look for an LMS that allows for a chaptering feature or advanced organization that makes it easy to create that fantastic learning experience for your learner/viewer.
A couple of things to have in place for these LMS powered marketing courses are:
Additional resources
Full transcripts
Mini polls
Short quizzes
Now we finally get to the marketing LMS promise land!
Paid courses give your marketing and sales teams the ability to drive positive ROI with their own 24/7 on-demand paid courses.
So, what do you do to build your paid course?
Take your free course and your lead conversion courses and create an ultimate learning path that leverages the confidence that the first two courses allowed for. From there, create your advanced topic course that leverages the tactics, strategies, tools, and whatever else you have that will help your learner master the content.
Two things we must point out here:
By bundling the course topics, you will be able to create value and also have conversion opportunities to pay throughout.
Most people will watch the free course and then purchase your paid course or see your more comprehensive paid course and purchase it from the start.
If you want to generate more eyeballs, convert more leads, and generate more revenue, adding a learning path to your marketing mix can be a winning strategy for your company's growth.
If you’re a HubSpot user, adding the HubLMS into your marketing st
ra
tegy is a no-brainer. All the features you need to use HubSpot for your marketing, sales, and even internal training built right in.
Ready to grow better? Add a learning management system to your marketing mix today!