Last month, we told you that 2018 is going to be the year you’ll need to make your customer experience top notch. Here at Thinkific, we want to make sure that if you’re selling an online course to your first customer or to 1000’s of employees at a client-organization, you’ve got the tools and support you need to make amazing experiences.
This month you’re getting features and training designed to help you make and deliver epic course content, manage users with clarity and efficiency, and best of all, bulk sell your courses to companies, organizations and develop cohort reporting to show your service’s ROI.
Let’s kick off this overview with a few freebies that will take your course creation to the next level:
New Free Training and Resources
How to create epic content for customers
You and I both know that content is king. Attention is the new currency for online businesses and your content better be getting eyeballs on it. That means being relevant, timely, and useful. A tall order!
Not only that, but the content you sell must provide significant benefits to your customers. Benefits worth a referral. So, how do you capture attention and deliver on your content promises?
Updated: Online course marketing in 2018
Marketing an online course is one of the most difficult things for anyone to figure out and feel confident in when you’re breaking into online education. As well, making sure your marketing in all of your audiences channels is tough when you’re out of the loop.
If you found our 55 marketing tactics for 2017 article useful, you’re going to love our updated version for 2018! We scoured the web for the best moves marketers are making and translated it back to knowledge products so you can level up your promotional planning this year.
Mitigate the new Facebook News Feed updates
Facebook Pages used to be a fantastic way for online educators to achieve organic reach with their audiences. Now, more so than ever, your organic reach is going to decline dramatically, according to Mark Zuckerberg and his News Feed team.
Don’t worry! We’ve got you covered with our own analysis and recommendations custom fit for course creators. Explore our latest article to learn more about the update, and what you can do to avoid losing your shirt if you derive most of your business through your Facebook Page and/or Ads.
Follow each Thinkific Instagram takeover
We’re letting some of our favorite course creators and entrepreneurs take over our Instagram account. You get a behind-the-scenes look at the life of an entrepreneur using online courses to drive their business.
This month we’re letting Elizabeth Rider take the wheel for a glimpse into her life as a modern health expert. Catch up on Xayli Barclay’s takeover, and get ready for Halley Gray’s while you’re there!
What’s new to Thinkific?
Bulk sell online courses with Groups
The biggest trend for established course creators using Thinkific this year will be offering bulk sales to organizations, companies, and other cohorts. Every Thinkific course creator gets access to groups. It’s a game changer!
With our newest feature, Groups, you can sell hundreds or thousands of seats in your online course with a unique link, offer organizations private discounts, provide private, branded experiences, and quickly generate and send progress reports for each to show client organizations their ROI.
Learn more about using Groups here »
Take the guesswork out of curriculums
Creating an amazing student experience is a lot harder than most people realize. If you are not an instructional designer or don’t have much experience developing five-star courses, you can now rely on Course Templates to help you get there.
Course Templates are fill-in-the-blank outlines that can help you rapidly test course topics through pre-sales, develop a lead generating or nurturing mini-course, or help you produce your magnum opus i.e. you flagship course. Beyond courses, we also included a few templates for membership sites, webinars replays, and digital downloads to help build out bonuses for promotional offers.
Each template comes with its own instructions, and swipe copy for your course content, quizzes, surveys, student walkthroughs, and more.
Learn more about Course Templates here »
Other updates to Thinkific this January
We were also hard at work building out tiny wins for you and your students. This month we released three feature updates and a refreshed help resource:
- Filter your students by Enrollment Status to sort out your active and expired enrollments from user reports.
- We added a few presets to your search bookmarks to help you grab important insights from your user reports.
- Video lessons now autocomplete for your students when they reach a 100% watch rate in the updated Course Player.
- We revamped the Getting Started section of the Thinkific Knowledgebase to help you make every course launch a success.
What’s happening at Thinkific HQ?
Connecting with the community
Our very own Amanda Nagy spoke at BC Jobs about how hiring works in the tech space. Vancouver is often thought of as Silicon North, and competition is hot, so every little tidbit helps. Go Amanda!
We had a few stretch goals…
Our resident yogi, Eric Winkelaar (who you might know from that email from the Thinkific support team that saved your bacon) taught us a few things about stretching our resources. Thanks Eric!
That’s it for January!
Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next month for another round-up of the best Thinkific has to offer.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we develop features, resources, or what we’ve been up to, don’t hesitate to drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you!
