Course marketing

To get course enrolments, you need to build awareness and generate interest and applications. This is where marketing efforts come in. And for online courses, your pool of potential learners is global

Having followed the previous steps, you will have already defined who your target learner is and have outlined a course designed to suit their needs. Now it’s time to make sure those potential learners know your course is available and to persuade them of its value.

Course marketing guide and downloadable resources 

At the end of this course marketing phase, you will have: 

  • Reviewed your options for approaching marketing for your course in order to gain successful applicants 
  • Defined a marketing plan that you can action within your department 
  • Planned how to track and review the success of your marketing efforts. 

Reflect on each of the following questions with your team and use the downloadable resources to aid your planning. 

The approach you take to course marketing will firstly depend on your available budget and resource: 

  • Limited budget and resource: Whilst this is not ideal, there are still things you can do to help your course gain applicants. Consider who you already have as an audience that you can reach out to, e.g. via Social Media, LinkedIn, mailing lists of alumni, previous or current students, conferences you are attending. You could host webinars to create engagement and awareness and send out follow-up emails (being mindful of GDPR). 
  • Working with your marketing team: Though they may have limited capacity, you can still make use of your department’s existing in-house marketing team with an initial conversation. Discuss to what extent they could support you with marketing your course. Share with them the personas you have created and any information you have on where best to find your potential learners, and they may be able to contribute their recommendations.  
  • Working with a digital marketing agency: If you have some available budget, Oxford has an existing working partnership with Seed Marketing who can support you with creating awareness and generating leads for your course via digital marketing such as Google Ads, email campaigns, etc. 

A marketing plan is a project plan for all of your defined marketing activities. For those new to marketing, this can be a daunting task especially when there are so many priorities competing for your time. Below is a marketing plan template which will help you to organise your information and create a schedule for activity.  

A good rule of thumb is to consider how you will generate a large enough pool of potential applicants so that you eventually end up meeting your target number, e.g. if you are looking for 20 learners, you will need to generate several hundred leads in order to get the 50 applicants from which 20 will be successful.  

Download template: Marketing plan (Word) 

Download template: Marketing plan (PDF) 

Download template: Marketing Gantt chart (Excel spreadsheet) 

As part of your plan, build in when and how you will review the success of your marketing efforts. For example, can you track which activities generated leads, and which in turn gave you the most successful applicants (perhaps by asking applicants how they heard about your course)? This will help you to ensure you spend your marketing efforts wisely and can refine them moving forward. It will also help you to show things like Customer Acquisition Cost. This is how much it costs for you to acquire new customers. A simple method for calculating this is as follows:  

Customer Acquisition Cost = Marketing Campaign Costs ÷ Customers Acquired 

You can make the marketing spend most efficient by factoring in how long you can keep those customers acquired with you, for example by creating a learning pathway that builds from a non-award bearing short course to a PGCert>PGDip>Masters. This helps to reduce the overall marketing spend across all courses, as you retain the students as they move through their learning journey with you. 

Combined with your course feedback, this information may help to reveal where you might tweak the value proposition for your course and where to target potential learners e.g. a different market segment, such as different job role or industry or modality of the course.