Identifying the Best Audience for Your Online Course

And having that audience in mind from the start makes it easier to focus the course, to use relevant examples and to talk to the right people to sanity check your ideas.

If you already have strong relationships with corporate clients, start there:
your marketing will focus on contacting a small number of potential clients personally.

Ideally, you can sell an online course as an add-on to current or previous work with a corporate client. At minimum, you can harness your existing goodwill and relationships to start conversations to talk about online courses.

If you don’t have pre-existing relationships with corporates then no matter how lucrative the corporate market looks, it’s going to be tough going. Especially in the current situation where you can't meet potential clients face to face to build relationships with them.

If you already work with smaller businesses or are starting from scratch, they should be your main target. In this case your marketing is going to focus on reaching a large number of potential customers via email marketing, your website, social media, adverts, etc.

Your next step is to brainstorm specific buyers to target. Remember, you’re aiming for your course to deliver a specific result or outcome for this audience.

And you also need to be able to reach this audience in order to be able to market to them.

Think broadly in terms of audience - it could be people in a specific industry, with a specific job title, a specific demographic, people with specific interests, etc.

Use the following questions to trigger ideas for your audience:

Your next step is to evaluate the audiences of potential buyers you brainstormed to see which ones are viable.

Unlike selecting topics, you don’t need to narrow down to just one audience. Depending on how you do our marketing you can target more than one audience or target different audiences at different times. So when you evaluate your audiences you're going to create a ranking rather than just selecting one.

There are two key criteria to look at:

Evaluate your potential audiences against each of these criteria on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high). Use the following guidelines to help:

Do your evaluation and rank the different potential audiences. Keep the top audiences in mind as you develop the content of the course and especially when you create examples and case studies. You want them to resonate with these top audiences.

When you pilot and launch the course, you'll do it primarily for the top ranking audience (unless you can also reach other audiences with little extra effort and without diluting your marketing).

Then when the course is launched you can decide whether to expand within that initial audience or to add further audiences. If the latter, you'll use the ranked list of audiences to decide which to move on to next.

For now, move on to the next step of creating an outline for your course.