LMS Growth Strategy to Expand Your Business Quickly

The main goal of every Learning Management System Chief Executive Officer or Director is to grow their business. One of the best ways to grow any type of company is by having an effective marketing and sales strategy. Traditional marketing depended on spending lots of money on print ads and other types of display marketing. Traditional sales usually meant cold-calling and making sales pitches to those who weren’t even ready to hear about the product or service. Key influencers and decision-makers in companies or educational institutions have it no different.

Nowadays, though, more effort has been placed on a new approach called “Inbound Methodology.” This marketing and sales technique concentrates on bringing in potential customers online (where they already are) and converting them into clients using informative, valuable content and reliable nurturing strategies. Research by Hubspot found that 93% of companies using Inbound saw a greater return on investment (ROI).

Here are seven ways to grow your Learning Management System company using the Inbound Methodology:

1. Understand and identify your ideal customer

Growing your company will require having an extensive understanding of your ideal customers. This will change a bit as the business grows and establishes its services. Take time to produce Buyer Personas of your optimal clients. This should be an in-depth exercise, with a baseline level of understanding to include:

• What are your prospect’s work obligations?
• What are their objectives?
• What are their biggest obstacles?
• How do they make decisions?
• Where do they get their information?

Once you have a better understanding of who your Learning Management System company is targeting, your marketing and sales teams can work together to build content to inform and nurture your leads appropriately.

2. Develop clear objectives for company development

If you don’t have a goal, you can’t grade it. Establish clear objectives that you intend to accomplish within a set amount of time. For example, you could set a goal of bringing in 300 new leads in the next six months. This means you need 50 leads a month and ten leads a week. You should also have clear goals on the variety of clients you want to obtain and your desired revenue. Keep an eye on your profess and make changes as needed.

3. Create a targeted content strategy to engage

An effective content strategy will help bring in new site visitors and convert them into leads. You should make sure that the content your marketing and sales teams create lines up to every phase of the Buyer’s Journey: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.

Prospective customers in the Awareness Phase are just starting to understand that they have a need. Content for this phase should give as much information as possible (not a sales pitch) to better understand your prospective client’s needs. Blogs, videos, and infographics are great for this phase. A current State of Marketing research by Hubspot found that 92% of companies that blog many times a day get customers through their blog.

Leads in the Consideration Phase know what they need and are looking for services to meet that need. In order to help them find different options, premium content like ebooks, overviews, slideshares, and guides are great types of content for this phase. You can ask leads to send their contact information in exchange for this content. Continue to send them more valuable information through email as you nurture them in the direction of converting them to leads.

In the Decision Phase, leads have compared their choices and are ready to buy. This is where you can talk about your product or service and show them why they should pick you over others in the Learning Management System market. You can support your claims using case studies, whitepapers, and reports.

4. Find the keywords and phrases consumers are looking for

GE Capital Retail Bank found that 81% of buyers research online before making a purchasing choice. Enhancing your content for internet search will help improve your site’s ranking and make you more visible online. Your marketing group should do some research to find the keywords your leads are looking for online. These keywords could be used in headlines, page content, meta summaries, URLs, and photo alt messages. A simple suggestion: long-tail keywords that have less competition will improve your chances of success. Nevertheless, stay away from the lure to overuse these phrases, as this may just get you penalized in online search.

5. Advertise your content with the right networks

Just having informative and optimized content will not automatically bring people to your site. You need to advertise your content to produce web traffic. Share links to your blogs on social media networks. Premium content like ebooks and whitepapers could be promoted in your emails. Targeted social media advertising and marketing could also be a great way to showcase your content.

6. Take advantage of marketing automation

According to Hubspot, marketing automation is using software programs to automate marketing procedures like project management, customer information collection, and customer segmentation. Using marketing automation allows processes that would have otherwise been done by hand to be done more effectively. You could pick from a wide range of marketing automation systems like Marketo, MailChimp, GetResponse, Hubspot, and Eloqua. Many of these systems include functions for Lead Nurturing, website visitor monitoring, CRM, social media, and analytics. Using automation will help simplify your marketing tasks, save you time, and increase your earnings.

7. Align your marketing and sales groups

Of course, it is essential to create excellent content. It is also vital to plan for efficient lead nurturing. But, if you have a marketing team and a sales team who both have different objectives, you will have a little trouble. That’s where “smarketing” comes in. As the supervisor of all tasks, it’s a good idea to hold regular meetings for your marketing and sales teams to help them update each other on new information, go over goals, and make sure everyone is on the same page. Make sure they are working together instead of competing by offering rewards that benefit both groups.

The bottom line

There you have it: 7 ways you could grow your Learning Management System (LMS) business. Inbound Marketing and Sales is relatively new, and if you make the most of it you will certainly not just have the ability to scale your organization, but also have happy employees that work well together.

We’ve helped many owners and CEOs include Inbound right into their marketing and sales methods. Don’t hesitate to ask for a cost-free strategy session to help you assess your current methods and find ways to better grow your company and engage your team!