How to market your continuing education units and find the most valuable professionals in tv space without adding personnel.
These are the 5 pillars to scaling your CEU Provider Business.
Index
- Quality Content First
- FREE Content That Gives A Taste
- Roadmap for Free -> Paid
- Promotional Schedule Matching your Governing Body
- Customer Service That Is helpful
- Summary
A Bit About Us; We have worked with Continuing Education companies to help market their CEUs to a wide array of industries. These principals will apply regardless of your industry from acupuncture to massage to audiology.
Quality Content Is how to Begin Marketing your CEUs.
If your CEUs are just a way to sell certifications to your audience then that is exactly what you will attract. Cheap professionals who just want the units and to be gone. These people will generate sales, but not long-term growth. They will offer hop from sale to sale across companies.
You want to attack high Lifetime value educational pursuers. This is our strategy on Lifetime Value
Your CEUs have to be great in order to market them because about 30% of your marketing strategy will be word of mouth.
We find that a model of the “Unlimited Learning Subscription” paired with individual purchases performs best. Some employers do not want to pay for unlimited subscriptions so it is good to offer single one-off courses, but many individuals love “unlimited options”.
If you do go the unlimited route, be sure to not fall into the Cellphone Carrier Trap.
Gives Users a “Taste” of Your CEUs For Free
This is usually referred to as a Lead Magnet and for this article we will do the same.
Your lead magnet has to convey the value that your CEUs provide.
For example: if you offer 500+ video courses like SpeechTherapyPd.com does then you can give away 1 course for free without automatic CEU Reporting. This way you are giving a free trial without offering a free trial.
A few options are,
- Free Course
- Checklist for your profession
- PDF of Course Materials
Below are a few of our favorite ways to do this.
LeadPages A Landing Page Application For Courses
LeadPages allows you to easily test multiple free checklists, offers, and opt-ins. They are continually adding to their services and are a more pricy option, but they are great!
Page Builder For Custom Workflows
If you are using WordPress for your marketing site you can build lead magnets directly into the site as a whole. This allows you to not add any extra expenses to your monthly recurring expenses. We use Elementor for the majority of our lead magnet page build-outs.
Develop a Marketing Roadmap from Free -> Paid
You now have a roadmap of how to get new people in your industry to your site. Now we are going to focus on converting those “Free” users into Paying Patrons.
Using Paid Media to Onboard
If you go down the path of utilizing Paid Media to accelerate your growth you need to focus on three key areas.
- Acquiring Leads utilizing your lead magnet
- Acquiring Users by retargeting your leads
- Getting new users from cold audiences
If you focus on these three buckets it is much easier to quantify your growth in this marketplace as well as increase Monthly Recurring Revenue! We have a whole post on MRR here
Using Email to Onboard
Once you have a way for people to get into your system, make sure you have welcome sequences that are able to convert your free users into paid ones.
If you can segment users by their interest it will usually increase click rates by 10-25%.
Example: If you are in the acupuncture CEU space, you can segment by area of expertise by asking a question. Are you focused on; Traditional acupuncture, Laser acupuncture, or Cupping/Scrapping?
This not only allows you to have a welcome sequence, but also have a way to segment your audience by their specific area of expertise.
Promotional Schedule that Matches your governing body
Depending on your licensing body your CEUs will either be semi-yearly, yearly, or something else (everyone is different).
If that is the case, you can have promotions quarterly or yearly.
Note: it 100% depends on how many leads you are adding into your system a month as to your promotional schedule. If you are not frequently adding new people then your promotions will not be effective. They will actually alienate your audience by asking too much.
Customer Service That Is helpful
The last thing that I can not iterate enough is having a solid customer service team. If someone calls your customer service number, you should answer. No matter what.
Have a help desk as well as helpful articles that answer questions about your CEUs
In Summary,
It is important to focus on your core product of CEUs as those can help your company both grow as well as provide a service that is needed once you have a system you can really start to grow your acquisition channel!
If you did need extra help in creating a journey feel free to contact us and we’ll be sure to put you on a roadmap for success!
