Looking for the best way to advertise a class as a TEFL course provider? Social media is the answer! ☆ To teach English as a foreign language (aka TEFL) in a foreign country, an average candidate must have a minimum of 100 hours of coursework. In addition, they need to hold an accredited certificate from a recognized course creator in the field. And that’s where you enter the scene!
Spoiler Alert: The best way to advertise a class is going to have a lot to do with your social media strategy.
Thanks to digital globalization, popular media, and an English-speaking entertainment industry, TEFL will never stop growing in popularity. There will always be people who want to learn English, just as there will always be people who know how to impart their knowledge.
For TEFL course providers, this means two things:
You’ll never be short on opportunities, and the competition will always be fierce.
Since TEFL is all about digital globalization, the best way to advertise a class is where all the digitally native learners are—on social media.
Here’s how to develop and boost your social media strategy for online TEFL courses, in no more than seven easy steps.
How to promote classes online with social media
1. Invest some time in brand building
Figuring out how to market education courses as another TEFL course provider among many will involve your brand being instantly recognizable.
Brand building is a broad subject and an even broader practice, but let’s just cover this: to make your brand noticeable on social media, you must find a consistent identity and voice. Based on your niche, you should take an authoritative, yet fun and informal approach. Be genuine and responsive. Develop that heavily sought-after “aesthetic” on Instagram that everyone wants for their brand.
You are the cool professor now, and that’s how you should be talking to your students.
2. Target the right audience for TEFL courses online
Social media allows you to target a highly specific audience for your ad campaigns, but first, you need to know what social network will serve your marketing efforts the best. Luckily for you, TEFL students are everywhere around, coming from all demographic groups.
So, focus your efforts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. That way, you’ll be able to cover a broad range of potential learners. However, measure your efforts as well; if a certain channel isn’t gaining any traction, consider putting your time and energy elsewhere.
As for audience targeting, that too depends on your brand. You can aim your message at different audience groups and segments, but then you won’t have as many opportunities for personalization. And on social media, personalized marketing is everything.
Learn to define your ideal buyer persona and then explore the many targeting options that different social media offer to businesses. For example, Facebook lets you find look-alike audiences that are demographically and psychographically similar to your ideal buyer.
3. Spread the message across channels
Another best way to advertise a class? Employing marketing automation.
Since you’ll be spreading your message about TEFL courses online across channels (which means not only posting original content but also sharing industry insights and communicating with your current and potential learners) you’ll need a reliable tool for multichannel multitasking.
Multichannel marketing and marketing automation make a powerful pair when it comes to how to promote classes. Using this approach, you will be able to amplify your reach and get more personal with individual learners at the same time. To put it in simpler words, this allows you to be everywhere at once.
And that’s powerful ammo against the competition in every niche.
Spread your message about TEFL courses online across your social media channels to reach the most potential students possible!
4. Boost your social engagement rates
With multichannel marketing, your brand (and thus, your TEFL courses online) can become omnipresent.
But how do you make it visible too?
Being everywhere at once means little-to-nothing if your posts get buried in the social media noise. Most of these networks give priority to posts that users are interacting with the most, which means that you need to start earning likes, comments, and reshares by cutting through the noise.
Here are a couple of ideas for boosting social engagement rates for TEFL courses online:
- Post highly informative articles on how to teach English as a foreign language
- Share instructions on how to find a job as an English teacher, both offline and online
- Share positive experiences from certified TEFL students
- Create quick online quizzes for people to see whether they qualify for TEFL
Content is still the king of marketing, but modern-day audiences demand it to be very versatile and adjusted to their consumption habits. What this means is that informative articles should be presented in other forms as well—primarily video and infographics. Easy-to-digest information like that is exactly how to promote classes online with social media.
5. Find creative ways to delight people
Unfortunately, boosting engagement rates isn’t the same as converting leads.
Some of your post commentators and blog readers will turn into leads and then into paying course takers, but some of them won’t. You need to find a way to maximize not only your social media reach but also your sales potential. You need to find a way to delight people.
The following social selling techniques can prove highly effective for your niche:
- Every post should be value-driven, useful, and helpful to the audience
- Interact with your audience regularly, on every post and message
- Teach a social media chatbot to answer to your leads’ questions
- Every once in a while, surprise your audience with a discount
- Throw contests and reward winners
Whatever you do, stay creative and unique in how you approach and interact with your audience.
Employing a social listening tool is another smart idea. It will help you track all your brand mentions, including those without a tag, and thus address the concerns of your learners.
6. Leverage somebody else’s influence
You might have heard of influencers and influencer marketing. They just might be integral in learning how to market education courses with social media.
This innovative promotional strategy allows you to extend your reach to somebody else’s social media audience, but not only that—people deem their favorite influencers as highly trustworthy and they take their product and service recommendations as objective reviews.
It’s like being endorsed by a field leader in front of millions of interested leads.
When choosing an influencer to team up with, make sure that this person is reliable and holds a high credit score with the audience from your niche. An influencer’s integrity is far more important than the size of their follower base, so search for respectable figures only.
7. Measure your strategy’s effectiveness
You cannot hope to make any significant progress with your social media marketing strategy if you don’t measure the effectiveness of your campaign. Some marketing automation tools come with built-in analytical features, but others don’t. Make sure you have one in your kit.
Robust reporting is key to marketing success for TEFL courses online, and here’s why:
The more insight you have into your campaign, the more likely you’ll hit the target.
Monitoring, tracking, data analysis, and reporting allow you to stay on top of your campaign at every single moment. Even if you start making mistakes, you’ll be able to fix them before they make any expensive brand reputation damage. The analysis is about continual improvement.
Ready to market your TEFL courses online?
In a nutshell: It’s not enough to create a course and put it online.
When it comes to highly competitive niches such as yours, the build-it-and-they-will-come attitude doesn’t suffice. You need a carefully researched and developed social media marketing strategy as well. But most importantly, you need to know how to keep TEFL students engaged. And an effective social media strategy for advertising TEFL courses online will show you the way!
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Kamy Anderson is an ed-tech enthusiast with a passion for writing on emerging technologies in the areas of corporate training and education. He is an expert in learning management systems & eLearning authoring tools. He is currently associated with ProProfs Training Maker.