How to define your target audience for online courses

When you fill in information on course platforms, one of the first things that comes up is defining your target audience for online courses. Let's understand what that is and how to define your target audience.

There are countless motivations for deciding to create an online course. But what should be the central focus? Helping your learners achieve their goals. Only when you put the learner at the center of the process will you be a more effective teacher.

When your learners see results, they'll be happier, more likely to recommend your course to friends and more likely to buy from you again. The key to helping your learners see results is making sure you're selling to the right people, which means finding the right audience for your online course.

It's easy to be tempted to sell your online course to anyone willing to pay. But narrowing your audience, and your marketing plan, can help you reach the people who are likely to be happy with their purchase. The second most common mistake I see aspiring education influencers make is not knowing who they're selling to. It's hard to deliver a product to your audience when you don't even know who your audience is.

The first mistake, which I've mentioned here before, is not defining the main goal of the online course.

In this article, I'll outline everything you need to know about the process of defining a target audience for online courses and how to build your audience.

What is a target audience, anyway?

Defining who your target audience is for your online course means knowing who you want to persuade, convert or communicate with. This step shows how to narrow your focus to a specific target audience.

A target audience is a group of people who share specific demographics or behaviors.

Although social media offers the potential to reach a mass audience, marketers are more likely to reach their campaign goals when content is aimed at a more specific audience. The same applies to you as an online teacher.

You can help narrow your target audience by looking at the following factors:

Demographics Gender, age, location, profession, income and education. Lifestyle or life stage, such as starting college or university, new parents, or parents whose kids have moved out.

Behavioral information: What does your target audience do? Where do they hang out? What is their attitude toward certain brands, services and products? What do they use the most? Who are they? Why do they use it? What are their ambitions?

Any message or content can be tailored to these characteristics. It's also easier to show messages specifically to them by choosing relevant platforms, scheduling posts or running paid campaigns. Of course, here we're already getting more into marketing territory, but you'll inevitably end up thinking about it.

Defining the target audience of an online course is often a broader marketing question, although social media can provide additional ways to reach them.

By examining these attributes, you can build a set of "personas" for a brand. Personas can be really useful as shorthand for audience segments.

Some examples of target audiences for online courses

I'll share a few examples of how I defined the target audience for online courses I teach. They were taken from our course pages, so they don't include all the research behind them.

Notice that in none of them do I say "anyone," "everyone" or appeal to pain points and difficulties, as many courses do. I always try to leave something exciting or frame it as if the person taking my courses is at a moment of personal or professional challenge.

For example, for one of our courses, Event Planning, we defined the target audience as:

• People and companies who have never organized an event or want to improve their creation and planning processes.
• Marketing professionals who want to incorporate events as a customer acquisition strategy.
• People and organizations who want to organize an event as a marketing strategy.

Effective Communication course:

• Professionals who work with the public, whether in customer service or sales, who need to understand how to deal with very different types of people.
• People who depend on good communication to present ideas, debate solutions and interact with coworkers every day.
• People dedicated to personal development who would like to better understand the techniques and structures behind good communication.

My First Leadership Role course:

• People who are about to take on a leadership role for the first time and need to prepare to deliver results.
• First-time leaders who feel challenged by the position and want to be productive.
• People who manage projects and have final responsibility, not as formal managers but taking on informal leadership.

How do you decide who your online course is for?

Okay, now that you understand the concept of a target audience a bit better, let's go through a more detailed step-by-step.

The first step is to define who you want to help. You can list the audience as in the examples. Maybe you already have an idea of who you're best suited to help. If not, ask yourself some of these questions:

• Which group do you understand better than anyone else?
• What do you care about most deeply?
• Is there a specific community that could really benefit from your knowledge? A group you belong to and understand deeply?

For example, you might teach a gardening course. Your instinct might say, "My online course is for everyone interested in gardening." But think again.

There will be advanced gardeners who won't benefit from your course. And there will be others so new to it that your course won't help them either. Instead, your course may be aimed at amateur gardeners who want to expand their gardening skills and grow all their own produce.

The next step is to research your audience. Research is the fun part of finding the right audience for online courses. First, search Google for your course topic and related words and phrases. Look at the results.

• Which sites are showing up?
• What similarities do you see?
• Is there a certain group of people interested in your topic?

At the bottom of Google, there's usually a related searches section. Does that give you any insight? Similarly, Udemy has a section dedicated just to course and topic ideas. Obviously take a look at your competitors: who are the people leaving comments? How do those teachers and schools define the target audience in the "Who this course is for" section?

The 5 best ways to research the target audience for your online course

Although it may seem absurd to plan an online course without the end learner in mind, audience analysis is an extremely important, if often forgotten, element of instructional design.

Before creating an online course, you should find out as much as possible about your learners. This information should directly shape your design and content choices. For example, your audience's experience levels will affect the types of activities built into the course.

During the design stage of the course audience analysis, it's important to think of learners as a group of individuals with specific goals.

Remember that the demographic profiles of your target audience don't always paint the full picture. You have to look beyond statistics such as age, educational qualifications and occupation to understand the learner. The learner is the sum of their past experiences, desires, aspirations and expectations. Their learning styles and media preferences are shaped by their familiarity with and access to technology. Their cultural upbringing influences their perception of symbols, images, words or analogies. Learners are complex, multidimensional human beings; a few numbers don't define them.

Let's look at some techniques for getting to know your audience.

1) Interview stakeholders

The first place to start researching your learners is with the project's stakeholders. If you're building a course for a company, find out who is asking for the training and why. What do they want from it? That will give you insight into the audience and the knowledge gaps that exist.

Direct managers can provide experience history, training background and specific information about the individuals who will take the course. HR managers can also help fill in the gaps by explaining the need for training at the organizational level. Do your research by asking these key people directly for information about their learners, including their experience, job levels and areas to work on.

2) Use past performance as an indicator of current needs

When you need to identify knowledge gaps and current learning objectives for a course, it can be extremely helpful to analyze previous results and performance data.

If you can talk to the manager or HR contact, ask them to provide information that can be used as a tool to analyze your learners. Use the existing information as a reference for what they know and compare it with the expected results to identify the areas where training is needed.

You can also use workplace skills testing to identify current skill gaps. This can give you a baseline so you can clearly see what your employees know before you start.

3) Observation

Once you understand the audience's background, find a way to watch them in action. Don't let others tell you, see for yourself! Observe your learners in their native environments. Note job responsibilities and see how different people carry out similar tasks.

Through observation, you can identify desired outcomes, best practices and common challenges. This setting also lets you see the tools available to learners.

4) Run a survey

To get to know your learners (what they like, how they learn and which learning format they prefer), you have to ask questions. Remember that your learners are your customers too.

Start by identifying what information you want to know and use it to create a pre-course survey.

The information that will directly affect your training includes:

• Current job title and work experience.
• Tools used at work.
• Work motivators.
• Which learning format they prefer, such as slides, videos, infographics, activities and so on.
• To better understand what they like and dislike, use fill-in-the-blank scenarios.

For example:

• I learn the most when...
• I don't like it when training is...
• The ideal training course would be...
• Keep all survey and knowledge questions short and vary them by job role if possible.

5) Talk to them directly

The best way to find out what your learners need is to talk to them directly. Schedule interviews with the individuals who will take your online course. Ask what they need to accomplish and what problems they face along the way.

You can also ask about previous training experiences to find out what worked and what didn't. Relate this information to what you observed about the work to gain insights and create content from the learner's perspective.

There's no denying the importance of knowing your audience. Learner analysis can be done in many ways, including interviews and surveys. Be creative and find ways to relate to the needs of the people who will take your course.

How to define your target audience for online courses

Here we've only covered defining the target audience for online courses, but there are other facets to the same subject. If you've already created your course content, think about how you can adapt it with this audience in mind. If you haven't created anything yet, you're off to a good start: now you can develop your material with your target audience in focus.

Developing online courses is only one side of the coin, while promotion is the other. They go hand in hand and both need careful attention. The more value you add to your content, the more word-of-mouth recommendations your course will get. However, if your online course doesn't reach an interested audience, it will never generate word-of-mouth sales.

Taking the time to properly plan and execute your marketing strategies is essential. When I talk about giving this part quality time, I mean constantly testing, analyzing and optimizing your online marketing campaigns until they deliver positive results; you will certainly see many benefits from a solid strategy. Take today's strategies into account and use them wisely to attract your target audience and increase sales!

Now that your target audience is better defined, start studying more about instructional design to personalize learning even further.