Having a great product or course doesn’t cut it anymore.
You need to have an amazing marketing strategy so people actually know about your product or online course.
And not only know about your product - but also love it.
But I’ll share my marketing strategy (and how I came up with one) another day…
This blog post is all about the types of marketing and how we implement them at EntryLevel.
These marketing tips helped EntryLevel grow our student base from 1k to 7.2k+ over 7 months.
In case you don’t know already, EntryLevel aims to reskill 1 billion people by 2030. We have online courses like Data Analyst, Product Management, and Marketing. The best part? You get a refund if you finish the course.
Content creation can be fun…if you don’t let it overwhelm you.
I categorize a lot under content marketing:
This can be very easy to do on your own. I recommend setting up a process or system for this especially if you’re doing it more than once.
An example could be getting your team involved in the feedback process for creating an outline for your blog posts, and asking for direction when it comes to the goals of the pieces you publish.
If you’re a founder, this might look like posting in communities and getting feedback from other founders (or even your users).
Now, let’s break down the main types of content we do at EntryLevel.
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I’ll confess - right now, our blog posts are published very intermittently.
Writing a blog can be intimidating.
Keyword research alone took me ages (but that’s a blog post for another day…Tweet me if you want to read the blog post and I’ll write it).
But I had a lot of ideas.
And I kept a lot of documentation of the work I did with EntryLevel.
Why not just turn that into blog posts?
Heck, even this blog post started out as a Slack message, prompted by one of EntryLevel’s student’s questions.
Anything can be repurposed into a blog - just sit down and write. Don’t overthink it…because sometimes quantity is better than quality (like programmatic SEO…yet another blog post in the backlog).
Just get started now.
P.S. if you’re a job seeker…same thing applies to you.
We have a free career newsletter called Level Up.
In this email newsletter, we share tips on getting mentors, landing the job, networking, and more.
The whole team at EntryLevel contributes to this every week.
(I even wrote one about aliens - I can’t believe they let me publish that. And it had the highest open rate of all our previous newsletters at 33%.)
The key here is to be consistent.
We send out the newsletter every single week via email.
Then, a week later, we republish the content publicly on our website.
(I’m still figuring out how to automate this and distribute it better…but content distribution is a whole different beast.)
Email is the best way to reach your audience - leverage it by keeping them engaged with a newsletter that’s consistent and value-packed.
If you haven’t collected email addresses, start now.
If you have emails but aren’t doing anything with them, send an email offering to help. Collect responses
I love creating resources to help our audience reach their goals.
For context, EntryLevel’s audience wants to break into tech (without needing to code). They’re looking for ways to learn tech skills and get their first job in tech.
That’s why I created job search workbooks, shared EntryLevel students’ success stories, created a resource hub, made a tech career quiz, and more.
All of this is content that can be shared everywhere - from email to social media to our website.
(Again, I’m still figuring out the whole content distribution thing.)
Some of these resources acted as lead magnets.
For example, the tech career quiz showed our audience which tech career is best suited for them. Then, we recommend one of our courses if they want to learn more and pursue that tech career.
“So you get to go on social media all day?”
This is the part of my job that others envy.
But actually, it doesn’t even take up 20% of my time.
Here are the main tasks I do for social media:
A lot of this can be automated.
It gets a lot easier after you have experience with it, so I highly encourage you to try it out now. If you don’t have any social media to manage, try creating a new account and marketing for something random (or even a hobby of yours).
I love using Metricool for this because it has beautiful analytics (including website and ads) AND you can schedule Twitter threads.
Here’s what the analytics for our Twitter account look like:
Some social media platforms work better than others for edtech companies.
Tweet me if I should do a breakdown of which platforms work best for EntryLevel: https://twitter.com/EntryLevelNet
This is kind of related to blog writing and social media marketing, but a lot more research-oriented.
I noticed a lot (~7%) of people were finding us through organic search. I was confident we could increase this number - especially for our Venture Capital Analyst program, which is one of our most popular online programs.
If you’re an edtech startup founder, I suggest getting Google Search Console set up if you haven’t already.
I read a lot of blog articles from AHrefs and SEMRush about keyword research and SEO, but it was very overwhelming.
I ended up sticking to https://trends.google.com/ and https://ads.google.com/home/ for keyword research. You don’t need to pay for ads, just do the keyword research there first.
I also learned a lot of meta titles and descriptions best practices, so edited EntryLevel’s website accordingly.
We’re on Webflow, so for CMS collection pages I made sure to add a “meta description” field.
Another easy SEO fix for your website is to add alt text to images on your website. Make sure the alt text has keywords describing the image.
This is my favourite.
Not only do I get to chat with EntryLevel’s amazing students, I also get to repurpose the content many different ways.
There are different types of events EntryLevel does:
These are 1-on-1 chats with previous EntryLevel students. I always ask 3 questions:
This is a great way to leverage social proof and build trust with people who haven’t heard of your company yet.
Our students have shared amazing advice and even acted as mentors for other students.
You can listen/read their wisdom here: https://www.entrylevel.net/interviews
We sometimes get an expert to answer questions from our students live.
This way, students can get personalized advice or just hear about what it’s like working in a specific field.
It’s not only great for community engagement, but also great for SEO. Panelists will help promote your collaborative event with their audience, who may not have known about your company.
Sometimes our team members do workshops. We had a LinkedIn workshop and one of our students, Christiana, had recruiters reaching out to her after she implemented our tips.
You can always expect to learn something new in workshops. It’s a way for us to give back to the community and teach them in the span of an hour or so (rather than our usual 6-week online courses).
There you have it - the marketing behind EntryLevel.
We’ve used:
Want me to share more details about my marketing tech stack or processes?
Tweet us at @EntryLevelNet: https://twitter.com/EntryLevelNet
We help you learn and get experience so you can get hired.
To make learning more affordable, we offer a full refund for our programs once you complete them. You’ll also end the program with a portfolio of work that you can show off to recruiters.
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