Rules for Creating Popular Online Course Products

In July this year, the "double reduction" policy triggered a sudden change in the education and training industry. In an instant, the sunrise of the education and training industry turned into sunset. In two trading days, the market value of at least 200 billion yuan of education-related listed companies was wiped out.

Plummeting stock prices, massive layoffs, collective transformation... Where will the education and training industry go amid the turmoil? Where should the millions of education and training practitioners go? In this context, Wen Bin, the founder of 24K community, brings you the "core methodology of online course products" that must be mastered in the online transformation of education and training.

1. Four ideas for online transformation

The transformation of offline education and training institutions to online is nothing more than four onlineizations: onlineization of products, onlineization of services, onlineization of marketing, and onlineization of operations. How to understand it?

1. Online product

In the past, when teaching was offline, the products were mostly products for offline scenarios. If you want to do some online courses, online training camps, or even some online community products, they are essentially your online products. The transition from offline products to online products is the onlineization of products.

2. Online services

Many educational institutions or training organizations do a very good job in providing services to students offline. They are good at supervising and teaching, etc. But if they put students online to take online classes, or serve them in a group, how do they provide such services? What is the service system like? How to make him valuable? This is the gap in online services.

3. Online marketing

In the past, some offline methods, such as distributing flyers, channel cooperation, and referrals, are relatively mature marketing promotion methods. But have you ever used Douyin to post videos to recruit students, build personal IP, expand your circle of friends, promote each other, or even place advertisements for other marketing promotions? This is the modernization of marketing.

4. Online operations

What is being transformed? The operation of the organization is more based on project operations based on offline scenarios. If you adjust the team structure to online team operations, what capabilities do you need to match? For example, writing copy, building communities, doing fission, online sales, etc. You need to think about what your SOP is, including in the process of operating your users.

Based on these underlying logics, let’s continue to expand:

Suppose you used to teach offline classes and charged 22,000 yuan per class, then this product is your offline product. Enrollment and traffic generation may be achieved through channel cooperation, distribution of flyers, etc. Your previous conversions were through offline experience classes, where you concentrated on taking an experience class to achieve conversion; or you invited people to a training institution, communicated with them one-on-one, and finally closed the deal. When it comes to playing online, the style of play is completely different.

The purpose of doing these things is to increase our revenue under this new trend and new context. The key is still to monetize and generate revenue. When it comes to revenue, it also has an underlying logic. Whether it is offline products or online products, its essential logic is revenue = product X traffic X conversion.

The four online transformation steps are all based on our underlying revenue formula. All transformation and upgrading strategies, methodologies, and ideas are essentially based on this formula.

2. Core Logic for Creating Popular Course Products

The following will explain the four product dimensions of online transformation, how to make an online product, and then explain in detail how to make a popular online course to solve your product problems.

First of all, I have to emphasize that not everyone can create a hit online course. It does require a certain combination of timing, location and people, as well as some luck, to sell 50,000, 100,000, or even 500,000 courses.

If we want to create a hit course, in addition to external conditions, there are still many methodologies and underlying logic, so we will directly benchmark how to create a hit online course.

1. Nine steps before launching a hit online course

Let me first tell you about online course platforms. How were the top 100 popular courses on the Qianliao platform polished? There are many links before these popular courses are released. They need to be polished and iterated repeatedly before they can become a popular product.

What are the steps of polishing? I have summarized nine aspects for you:

1) Topic selection

The topic selection needs to go through some user research and analysis to see what kind of topics users want to hear.

Let me give you a simple example. I had a student who taught children to practice mind mapping. Later, he launched a course on an online knowledge service platform. There were not many users, so I optimized the topic for him and changed it to teaching children how to exercise logical thinking and make good use of the mind mapping tool.

The essence is also to teach the skill of mind mapping, but there are some changes in the topic selection, and the points that users care about are different. Choose a topic based on what you can say, and then polish it.

2) Course Outline

The course outline of a popular course must solve users’ problems from the user’s perspective. So if you look at the course outlines of some popular courses on the Qianliao platform, you will feel a sense of achievement before you even buy the course.

3) Packaging

In the process of course promotion, there must be some eye-catching marketing copy and marketing structure to sell the course well.

4) Content

The course is actionable and practical and can really help users solve problems.

In the process of content screening, two factors are mainly considered: one is user needs, and the other is the control of course quality. Demand is the reason for the existence of a product. Only by meeting the needs of users can a course have the potential to become a hit.

In terms of course quality, from the qualifications of the lecturers to the course content and format, multiple levels of scrutiny are carried out before presenting the course to the students.

5) Lecturer

When it comes to instructor packaging, a relatively large amount of space will be used to highlight the teacher's strengths and endorsements, or some data will be used to display the teacher's achievements, or even some pictures and user reviews will be used to highlight that the teacher is indeed professional.

6) Iteration

High-quality courses must be continuously iterated and upgraded, and course details are often polished through multiple iterations.

7) Pricing

Price might want to go do some ab testing. Assuming that your course is priced at 99 yuan, the testing method is to set four prices for your course product: 99, 199, 299, and 399. Then send the four prices based on user tags to see if the price affects the user in the process from click to purchase.

If the course is sent to a certain number of users at the same time and the price of the course does not affect their purchase, then the highest price will be set. During the pricing process, you need to do some testing or user research and not make decisions based on your own ideas.

The prices of popular online courses are not set arbitrarily. They are definitely based on user research, user attributes of the platform, and the price range of the entire network.

8) Vision

When making online products, the visual presentation should have a sense of hierarchy or marketing logic.

Like this online summit on education and training transformation, everyone either saw the copy or posters we posted, or was invited by friends to come in and listen. You will find that our posters are very marketing-oriented, layered and logical.

Then you have to think about this: when you were doing marketing promotions in the past, were your posters able to be as sophisticated and modular as ours? If you can't, think about where you are lacking.

9) Recording

There are many tools that can be used in the process of recording online courses. For example, the Qianliao platform can also be used to record online courses, including live courses, voice courses, pictures and texts, PPT screen recordings, and videos.

2. 6 "Secrets" for Online Popular Courses

When it comes to making popular online courses, there are indeed many skills involved, including topic research, instructor analysis, course positioning, competitor data analysis, topic polishing, the format to use for recording courses, and how to prepare during the recording process. There is a complete set of processes.

1) Find typical cases through user research and quickly gain insights into user needs

When we do user research, we need to look for typical users or typical users of our competitors.

A typical user is a deep, sticky, vertical user, or your loyal fan. What are his concerns, what kind of content is he interested in, and what form is he interested in? If you analyze based on it, you can get something called dimensions.

A typical competitor is someone in this industry or in your category who is doing very well, and how he does it. Look at these popular cases, these popular courses that can sell 100,000 orders. Its title, instructor introduction, layout, and copywriting are much better than your own.

We can check for omissions and fill in the gaps based on other people's cases. The easiest way is to benchmark directly. When you see a category, you need to study the popular courses in this category, including its entire page design, copy structure, speech refinement, price, and instructor introduction.

Suppose the instructor's introduction is just three sentences, the title is just 30 words, the picture design is just three modules, and so on, you can refer to it and then directly benchmark it. After benchmarking, replace your things with your own, and you will be able to make a better page and create an online product.

Let me recommend to you that when we do market research on online hot products, we will use Baidu Index, WeChat Index and 5188 Marketing Big Data to investigate the demand of users across the entire network. Search for data on keywords across the entire web, conduct research and analysis based on the entire web, and find some of the core words that users across the entire web are most concerned about.

2) In-depth analysis of the instructor’s strengths to find the course positioning

The lecturer's analysis is very important. Many teachers have advantages, but their positioning is not clear during the packaging marketing process, or their marketing is not as focused as online knowledge IP.

We need to position ourselves and ask ourselves: Who are you? Who are your users? What can you offer? What are your characteristics? Why can you? To sum it up in one sentence, it is to figure out what unique value you can provide to users.

Some teachers I have met before may have many honors or experiences, but when they teach a painting class, they may post previous honors, experiences and cases that are unrelated to painting in their personal profiles. This is a very big misunderstanding.

When we are making online products or online knowledge IPs, the teacher's packaging and introduction must focus on subtraction and show the core highlights that best fit the theme of this product.

How do we determine the direction of our own courses? Or, what actions have these popular online courses on the market taken in the process of determining their topic selection directions?

First, self-analyze, analyze the teacher's professionalism, what I can teach, where my knowledge lies, and where my resources are. The resource situation is how to quickly launch and monetize the product based on my resources after the product is completed.

Suppose you already have a lot of channels or a lot of loyal students who can’t attend your offline classes, but they can help you bring in new customers. Based on these students or channels, we design and analyze what kind of online courses they want, and then design the online courses. Then after you have created such an online product, the students and channel distribution will be fruitful.

Second, knowledge presentation refers to the way you are suitable to present the content. Some offline teachers have been teaching offline for many years. When they are doing live video broadcasts, they feel that their sense of camera is very poor and they cannot speak well. So it is possible that they are not suitable for this way of presenting knowledge. He could try another approach, or use a transcript during live broadcasts.

Therefore, for this kind of knowledge presentation method, you must analyze what you are good at, or what kind of knowledge presentation method users want, and then you can practice it. There are several types of online courses on the market now, including PPT video courses, live video courses, live voice courses, voice courses, and graphic courses. Find the one that suits you. It is recommended that you record video lessons if possible, which will be much better.

Third, analyze your user base, including user portraits, purchasing power, willingness to buy, topics of interest, expectations for courses, etc.

Fourth, analyze the number and sales volume of competing products. What are their usual sales promotion methods? What are its advantages, what is the core point of promotion, what is the operation process, these are all some of the research links in the direction of your course.

3) Analyze the seven major data of competitive products to avoid pitfalls in topic selection and planning

The purpose of doing these analyses is to have a clear idea in mind, learn from the advantages of others, and then polish your own online products. It will be easier for you to succeed or take fewer detours.

Standing on the foundation of giants and moving forward can help you quickly build from 0 to 1. In the future, you want to go from 1 to 10 or from 10 to 100, and then optimize and adjust according to your own characteristics to create your own characteristics.

When we do preliminary analysis of popular online courses, it actually tests our search capabilities. How do you find some competing products around you, summarize their advantages and disadvantages, why do they do it well, what are the steps they do well, and can you do it? These are all relatively important online abilities. If your training institution wants to recruit some online operations talents, you should also recruit people from these perspectives.

Analyzing competing products can be of great help to you. If you analyze in more detail, I will summarize 7 sales data for you.

Suppose you are confused about how many classes you should teach a new lesson, whether to have a 10-minute class or a one-hour class. Go see how others do it. Its price, promotional materials, and title structure. Especially the promotional materials, including how its posters, headers, pictures, copywriting, and details pages are made, and what the visual presentation and structure are like.

If you can use the reference well, at least you can get 60 points from 0 to 1.

4) What courses are popular? Use "element addition and subtraction" to add points to the topic

The topic selection determines the course direction, user value, and content depth. There is a misunderstanding that the topic should not be too big or broad, but should solve a specific problem of the user, so that it will be more focused.

There are also some methods for polishing the topic. Let's focus on the addition and subtraction of elements and use examples to illustrate:

• Case 1: There is a course called "56-day parent-child education training camp, eliminate anxiety, make children worry-free and parents more at ease". This title is actually a piece of rhetoric. This sales pitch is divided into elements. "56" days is the time or number element, and "parent-child education" is the category element. The "clear" in "clear away anxiety" is a verb, "anxiety" is a noun, and "children are less worried and parents are more at ease" presents a result.
• Case 2: Online courses that teach painting, such as "Teach You Painting in 30 Days" and "Master Painting Shortcuts in 10 Minutes a Day". The titles are a combination of elements. 30 days is a number, teach is a verb, and step by step is also a verb.

5) How to choose among various teaching methods such as live broadcast and recorded broadcast?

Single course: often audio course, video course, graphic course, etc. Single courses are generally used as low-priced courses or as traffic-generating courses.

Series courses: The combination of multiple single courses must form a system. Suppose you have 20 lessons, and there are 20 lessons in a large series of courses. The 20 lessons are systematic like a book and can be connected from beginning to end. Generally, series courses are treated as popular courses or profitable courses, or they can be treated as traffic-generating courses. Compared with a single course, this series of courses can attract customers with higher average order value. Example: A 99-yuan series of courses that teaches you how to pay for knowledge, and it contains 20 individual lessons. My offline training course cost 19,800 yuan. The purpose of this series of courses is to attract traffic to my offline courses. At this time, the purpose of this series of courses is to attract traffic.

Live classes: mainly refer to live video, such as PPT live broadcast + smart camera live broadcast, and some voice live broadcast. When doing live video classes, treat it as a delivery. A delivered course means that users can interact and communicate with the lecturer while listening to the live video. Users will feel that it is more valuable than simply recording and broadcasting a video, and will treat it as a delivered product. Alternatively, I can also treat it as a transformation lesson. When others watch my live video broadcast and interact with me during the live broadcast, the user asks me questions. I tell him that I also have a back-end course that costs 9,800 yuan, so the conversion efficiency will be higher.

Recorded classes: video recording, suitable for students to learn in depth.

Training camp: Generally, there are more people with high average order value, and it also aims at conversion. Suppose I offer a 7-day training camp for 699 yuan. Maybe the purpose is not to get the 699 yuan, but to provide some services or products with higher average order value. In this case, the training camp is a conversion product. Suppose a training camp is also priced at 699 yuan, but there was a live class for 9 yuan or 1 yuan before, and people came in to buy the 699 training camp through the live class. Then I would treat the training camp as a delivery class.

The characteristics of different teaching methods depend on how we use them, and how we make good use of each course or each course product in the marketing process or in the operation process.

6) 4 elements of recording preparation that 80% of lecturers don’t know

• Transcript: When preparing for the recording of an online course, if you want to make it better and of higher quality, it is recommended that you prepare a transcript. When recording a one-hour class, you may have a lot of spoken language, and you may even forget words or get stuck. In this case, you can prepare the script and proofread it in advance, so that you will get a good feel for it during the practice. Maybe after you practiced two or three times, you got it right in one go when you finally recorded it.
• Knowledge presentation: whether the presentation is coherent, whether the speaking speed is fast, pauses and emphasis, and even whether there are subtitles, background music, light music, etc. in the video course recorded for users. These are all things you need to prepare in advance before recording.
• Recording tools: Create a live broadcast room to record, check the quality of the equipment, and whether there is lighting. Turn on the lights and your complexion will look better.
• Camera training: Many teachers find it difficult to use the camera when recording online video courses. Based on this situation, the first option is to prepare a teleprompter, put your manuscript into the prompter, read towards the prompter, and adjust the angle of your camera so that the user cannot sense that you are reading the words; the second option is that you can rehearse in advance. Practice makes perfect. Record this topic three times in a row, and you will definitely do well on the fourth time.

3. How to find the right channel to sell courses

Sell ​​online courses well and increase revenue. Revenue = product x traffic x conversion.

So the product used to be an offline product, but this one is an online product. Online courses are an online product. How do you get traffic? In essence, there are three aspects:

• First, buy traffic. Buying traffic means spending money on advertising
• Second, find traffic. It means writing content and distributing it on various platforms to attract traffic.
• Third, cooperative traffic. Find someone with traffic to cooperate with. He provides traffic and you provide course products to form a cooperation.

Marketing promotion is actually about finding channels to cooperate with and using their traffic to sell courses. There are also some things to pay attention to during channel cooperation.

1. Channel quality over quantity

For example, if you customize an online course product and have a channel that can cover a large number of users, as long as you fully understand this channel, you may be able to bring in good revenue.

At this time, you should work hard to dig deeper into the channel traffic, carry out more refined operations and marketing, and use this channel to produce more content products that users are interested in. It is possible that one or two high-quality channels are better than 100 ordinary channels.

2. Share profits with distributors and grow together

In the process of cooperation with channels, there must be a win-win situation, sharing profits with channel partners, operating together, and expanding on a large scale.

Many teachers feel unwilling to accept that they have spent so much effort on polishing the courses but the channel partners have to share so much of the responsibility. Don't lose the big picture for the small, you should evaluate how to do bigger, even if it means sacrificing a little profit.

3. Set up a model and replicate successful experiences

Learn to find a single breakthrough point in one or two channels. A single breakthrough means that you have successful experience, the key is whether you can replicate it.

Suppose you have developed a course and found a blogger or self-media account owner with 50,000 followers to cooperate with, which generated good profits and good user feedback.

Is it possible to replicate this successful cooperation experience to more bloggers like this? There are many such bloggers and channels on the Internet. The duplication of channels means the duplication of your KOC.

4. Strengthen business supervision and management

You will encounter this problem only if you want to operate channels across the entire network. If you don’t operate the entire network channel, you don’t need to pay attention to this point.

IV. Conclusion

Finally, let me briefly summarize. If we want to make an online transformation or integrate online and offline, the key is the core logic of creating popular online courses. If you go astray, it means you will definitely fall into a trap. If what you are currently doing is too complicated to figure out how to do it, you need to organize your thoughts and actions into the underlying logic that I have summarized for you - products, marketing, services and operations. I hope this sharing can give you some substantial guidance and methodology, or some perceptions at the thinking level.

Author: Xiaobing who loves to study

Source: Private Domain