How To Find a Target Audience For Your Course

The elearning scene has changed significantly over the years, so it’s no surprise if you're struggling to sell your courses online. It’s almost impossible to achieve the expected sales in this industry without identifying the target audience for your course. 

But that’s easier said than done! 

The majority of online instructors struggle with finding the target audience for their courses. The reasons for this include: 

• Lack of online presence
• Limited understanding of audience needs and preferences
• Ineffective use of social media and online platforms

But in this blog, we’ll show you how to address all these issues and find a target audience for your course. We’ll also talk about the tools that might help you along the way.

Benefits of Identifying the Target Audience for Your Course

Figuring out your course's target audience is crucial for ensuring the success of your online course. Understanding the right audience also helps you spend time and money wisely in the right sector. 

As a result, you’ll get the expected return on investment (ROI) from every investment you make. Here are some of the top benefits of finding a target audience for your course. 

Increased Course Enrollment

When you know who you want to attract, you can tailor your marketing efforts, which makes it easier to attract the right people. If you know who will gain the most from your course, you can create content that speaks to them, increasing the number of people enrolling in it. 

Improved Course Content

Understanding your target audience allows you to know their preferences and interests. As a result, it becomes easier for you to build your courses in a way the audience can relate to. By creating the courses keeping the audience in mind, you automatically level up the course content quality. 

Efficient Marketing Strategy

Your marketing strategy will work better if you know exactly who you want to reach. You can put your efforts into the channels and platforms where your potential students are mostly active. This will reduce wasted time and effort and boost your return on investment.

Enhanced Student Engagement

Once you know who the right audience is for your LMS, it also becomes easier to add interactive elements to your course. You can add quizzes, discussion forums, progress bars, etc. to keep your students engaged and motivated. 

Stronger Brand Loyalty

By consistently meeting the needs of your target audience, you build trust and loyalty. Satisfied students are more likely to recommend your courses to others, leading to word-of-mouth marketing and a stronger brand reputation.

Find Target Audience for Your Course: Step-by-Step Process

While the importance of finding a target audience for your course goes without saying, the process is not the same for everyone. How you're going to find the right audience will entirely depend on your niche. 

It’ll also depend on the marketing platforms you use and whether your target audience is active there. But we've done some research and prepared a step-by-step process for you.

Step 1: Understand Your Course Niche

Understanding your course niche is critical to determining your course's target audience. Figure out where you stand among your competitors and what your unique selling point (USP) is. 

Say you've created a course on Advanced Graphic Design Techniques. Now, there are undoubtedly hundreds of graphic design courses available online. So, your niche can’t just be graphic design, as this niche may also include beginners. 

So, once you figure out that your niche is more related to people already familiar with graphic design, it becomes easier to plan ahead. 

Step 2: Analyze Your Competition

Now that you know your niche, it's time to analyze what your competitors are doing. If your niche is already super competitive, it’s always better to determine where the gap is and what courses your competitors are not offering. 

Look at other courses similar to yours and examine their strengths and weaknesses. For instance, if you notice that most photography courses available are focused on traditional DSLR photography, but few cover the growing interest in mobile photography, this insight becomes an opportunity. 

Offering a course explicitly targeting mobile photographers can help you stand out and attract a unique market segment. Analyzing competitors can also help you refine your niche and find untapped market opportunities.

Step 3: Identify Demographics and Psychographics

With a clear understanding of your niche and the competition, the next step is to identify the demographics and psychographics of your potential students. 

But what exactly is that?

Well, it can be anything from the age, gender, education level, where the students are living, their interests, etc. Say you've created an online fitness course who has been struggling to make the desired sales because of the lack of information about who the target audience for your course is. 

To find the right audience, you can consider metrics like age, profession, and type of workout. For example, a teenager or older person is more likely to go to the gym if they want to. That’s why the chances of them enrolling in your course are less. 

But what about busy professionals aged 25-40 who prioritize efficient, effective workouts? This demographic likely values time-saving solutions and may prefer courses that offer quick, high-intensity workout routines. 

By understanding these details, you can tailor your marketing and course content to appeal specifically to their needs and preferences.

Step 4: Evaluate Preferred Learning Styles and Mediums

Just finding the right audience is not enough to make the sales you're after! You need to consider what type of content and learning style they’d prefer to make more students enrol in your courses. 

While some students find written materials useful, others prefer live sessions, online lessons, or interactive quizzes. To create an interesting and useful course, you need to figure out what form of content will bring better engagement on your platform. 

For example, if your course is aimed at busy professionals who might not have time to sit through long lectures, it might be better to offer short video lessons and downloadable materials that can be used on the go. 

On the other hand, adding live Q&As or hands-on activities can make the learning process enjoyable for those who prefer interactive methods. When you match your teaching methods to the way your students learn, they will be more engaged and satisfied.

Step 5: Assess Marketing Platform Suitability

If your target audience consists of Gen Z or young individuals, platforms like TikTok or Instagram are likely more effective than LinkedIn or Twitter, where they are generally less active.

On the other hand, LinkedIn might be the best place to promote your course if you want to reach young professionals interested in job growth. This is why it's important to choose the right platform for reaching your target audience.

Tools That Can Help You Find Target Audience for Your Course

Needless to say, finding a target audience for your course is a very complex task and requires time and effort. But this job can be made a bit easier if you've access to the right tools. There are various analytics tools available that can help you find the target audience for your course. 

On top of that, various LMS tools are also available to make the whole process of creating and maintaining online courses easier for you. Let’s get you familiar with them. 

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides insights into the demographics, interests, and behaviours of website visitors, helping you understand your current audience and identify potential new students. 

Additionally, by using this tool, you can determine which web pages on your site are attracting the most traffic. Here are some of the key features of Google Analytics for a course instructor:

• Provides detailed data on visitor age, gender, location, and interests.
• Identifies website traffic sources, such as search engines, social media, or referrals.
• Tracks visitor navigation and identifies popular pages and drop-off points.
• Monitors key actions like course sign-ups and measures marketing effectiveness.
• Offers live updates on visitor activity and campaign impacts

And most importantly, you can get all this information for free. 

Facebook Audience Insights

If you have a Facebook page for your online courses, you can use Facebook Audience Insights to explore the demographics and interests of your target audience. Based on that, you can refine your social media marketing strategies based on the data you find. 

This tool can help you: 

• Identify audience behavior patterns, including page likes and engagement metrics.
• Compare your audience to the broader Facebook user base for market insights.
• By providing insights into the devices your audience uses, aiding in optimizing content formats.

Like Google Analytics, you can use this tool for free. 

Keyword and Competitor Research Tools (e.g., SEMrush, Ahrefs)

If you want to do competitor and keyword research, the free tools are just not enough. And that’s where tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs become invaluable. These SEO tools give you a better understanding of how you can optimize your LMS website for better visibility. 

These tools can help you by: 

• Identifying high-traffic keywords relevant to your courses and niche.
• Analyzing competitors' SEO strategies, including their top-performing keywords and backlinks.
• Tracking your website's ranking for specific keywords over time.
• Providing insights into keyword difficulty and search volume to prioritize SEO efforts.
• Discovering content gaps and opportunities based on competitor analysis and market trends

MemberMouse for Selling Online Courses 

Often, the tool you're using becomes the determining factor in how successful your course will be. Since features vary from platform to platform, you need to choose software that offers all the possible features you’ll need in a learning management system (LMS). 

That's where MemberMouse comes into play. As a WordPress plugin, it not only helps you sell courses but also enables you to build them. Furthermore, it offers interactive materials such as quizzes, leaderboards, and progress bars, making the learning experience more engaging and interesting for your students.

With MemberMouse, you can: 

• Easily build and organize course materials, including videos and quizzes with Courses for MemberMouse.
• Set up one-time payments, subscriptions, or tiered membership levels.
• Monitor student engagement with progress bars and leaderboards.
• Restrict course access based on membership levels or purchases.
• Access detailed reports on sales, member retention, and course completion rates.

Check out MemberMouse pricing page to choose the plan that perfectly fits your needs. 

Start Making More Sales by Finding the Target Audience for Your Course!

We hope this blog has helped you learn how to find a target audience for your course.

But the steps we mentioned definitely will shape the process for you. Once you use them, the overall task will be easier and smoother. If you've got a strategy for reaching your course’s target audience, don’t forget to share it with us in the comments. 

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