Recently, taking educational courses has become increasingly popular. Being educated in different areas and gaining new skills are now fashionable. And though the demand for education is growing, the supply is not lagging behind: courses are created not only to share knowledge but also to develop and maintain personal brands and promote products. How can you create a course that will draw attention to your product? What can be done to make the course stand out among the variety? Follow this article to find out. 

Suppose you produce a product that is not in as high demand as you would like. What can be done about it? The simplest solution is to advertise the product in the traditional way, forcefully spreading information about it until a potential buyer decides they need it. A more complex, often-used approach is to artificially create demand by demonstrating how your product can help solve a specific task or problem. This method works better than the previous one, giving the customer a clear understanding of how the product can be used. But another factor arises: does your potential buyer actually face the issue described in your advertisement? If not, you need to make sure they encounter it. This is where the educational approach comes to aid.

How to Decide On the Course Topic

As an expert in the field of your product, you know best how it can be used. This is what your course will be about. However, you may wonder: can my product be sold through a course? Almost certainly, the answer will be “yes”. Of course, some products inherently suggest their use; for example, if you’ve produced a program for editing graphics, the course could directly involve graphics and be titled something like “How to Create the Perfect Photo for Social Media”. But what if you produce, for example, water filters? Should you just inform people about the benefits of drinking clean water? Maybe. But it's better to look broader. People can use purified water for a variety of needs – cooking, feeding children or pets, and watering plants. Focus on one of these points and consider the needs of your potential audience that may be related to it. And create a course called “Caring for Indoor Plants: Make Them Bloom, not Wilt”, remembering to mention in the course how important proper watering is!

Try to come up with a course topic related to, but not limited to, your product. Highlight an issue or a task that can be solved perfectly with its help. And – voilà! – you have just created a base for artificial demand.

What to Focus On

So, you've come to the conclusion that a course is what you need, and maybe you even already know what it could be about. Below, you will find general recommendations on the qualities that a successful course should have. Let's see if your idea matches them.

• Practical orientation: What does this mean, and why is it important? In most cases, people decide to take a course if it gives them skills and ultimately improves their lives. That's why “Caring for Indoor Plants” will be more popular than “Water and Its Properties”. Certainly, there's always someone who buys courses for general education on topics like “The History of Ancient Rome”. But another important point is that people enrolling in practically oriented courses are usually ready for active actions, including introducing a new product into their lives.
• Relevance for a broad audience: Of course, some products are so specific that it's impossible to make them popular with everyone, but since the course's audience is your potential buyers, it should not be small. After all, if no one wants to take your course, where will the buyers come from?
• Logic: The course needs to be logically structured and easily understandable because if you advertise a product directly in the course, the audience's engagement will affect how it is perceived and whether they will miss this vital information. For a proficient representation of information, you can turn to specialists – learning experience designers.
• Balance between simplicity and complexity: Consider the information you want to include in the course. It should be truly useful, not just something everyone already knows. At the same time, try not to make the course too complex – you might lose a part of your audience. Base it on the knowledge level of potential clients: a "for everyone" course should be more straightforward, while for specialists in a certain area, it can be more complex.

And remember – when you create a course to sell a product, it should still fulfil its primary educational function. Any educational solution primarily teaches, and this is something not to be overlooked. The better you organise your course, the more trust you will get as a specialist among your potential buyers.

Creating a high-quality educational product, like any other product, takes a lot of energy and time: an average course production contains 100 to 300 hours of effort by various specialists. Сompanies with a custom e-learning production profile (for instance, Seturon) can facilitate this process, create a solution from scratch, or provide consulting.

Further Actions

If you are still reading this article, it looks like you're almost ready! After you've more or less decided on the topic and tested your idea using the above recommendations, it's time to define the action plan and figure out the resources. The main resource for creating an educational solution, apart from time and money, is the specialists responsible for different aspects of the course creation. Let's go through them and their functions one by one.

• Expert (content author). Although you are well-versed in your product, your course may touch on points that do not directly relate to it. Before starting to create the course, answer honestly whether your expertise is enough to make an informative and valuable educational solution on your own or if it's necessary to involve external experts.
• Learning experience designer. High-quality materials are essential, but consistent and clear presentation in the course is equally significant. How materials are organised will affect the overall impression of the course, how attentively the audience will go through it, and whether they will complete it. Another serious issue is that experts, due to their high professionalism in their field, often can't assess how comprehensible their material is – and the learning experience designer also performs a review at this level.
• Graphic designer. Courses are often accompanied by images, diagrams, and even videos, which help ease comprehension and increase engagement. Despite the fantastic abilities of artificial intelligence in graphics, achieving the desired result, including in terms of style, is often not possible with its help, and most high-quality educational products are still produced with the help of live specialists.
• LMS administrator. In the case where the educational solution is available online, it is located in a learning management system (LMS) – a platform that provides course formatting and a user-friendly interface for going through it, with the ability to regulate access and assess progress. A separate specialist usually adds the course to the platform and supports it.

To create a course, the specialists mentioned above need to work together as a team. The course creation process can vary, but its plan is usually organised as follows:

1. The expert prepares the initial material.
2. The learning experience designer reworks the material into course content and asks the graphic designer to create graphics.
3. The graphic designer creates the graphics and inserts them into the correct places in the course materials with the help of the learning experience designer.
4. The expert evaluates the accuracy of the training materials.
5. The LMS administrator uploads the training materials onto the platform.
6. The learning experience designer and the expert evaluate the proper presentation of the training materials on the platform.
7. The course is ready! The client evaluates the course on the platform.
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A natural question arises: how long all these processes might take? Check on the article “How long does it take to create an online course” to find the answer.

Often, a single person can perform the roles of different specialists involved in creating a course. Deciding whether you can take on the roles of various course creation specialists, remember the ratio of results to efforts invested. It's no secret that if necessary, you can learn a lot and apply these skills or knowledge in practice, but often, an invited expert will prepare materials faster and cheaper, and a professional learning experience designer will reformat your material without difficulty according to the principles of andragogy and new educational trends.

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