How To Run A Digital Course Academy And Avoid Common Pitfalls

So, you want to create a digital course academy. Maybe it's for your customers to help them learn how to use your products and services. Maybe it's for your internal team members to get them up to speed on specific skills or important business updates.

Whatever the reason, if you're going to run a digital training program of any kind, you're going to want to do it right. 

Let's go over some tips for successfully launching and managing a digital course academy while sidestepping some training program mistakes that could hinder your progress.

Define Your Goals for the Digital Course Academy

To quote Simon Sinek, "Start with Why." What is the goal of your digital course academy? Before you sink time and resources into creating any kind of training program, you need to define what it is you're hoping to accomplish. 

Some examples of goals you might want to start with include:

• Getting more employees certified in a specific skill.
• Reducing workplace safety incidents.
• Improving employee performance.
• Attracting customers with thought leadership content.
• Teaching customers how to use a particular product or service.
• Minimizing the frequency of common support requests.
• Generating extra revenue with a subscription-based training service.

These are just a few examples of potential goals for internal or external-facing digital academy programs. By starting with a goal, you can then move on to the next step: identifying your intended audience niche.

Identifying Your Niche and Understanding Your Audience

Diving into the bustling world of digital education requires a sharp focus, and that begins with pinpointing your niche. Who is your audience? Even if you're creating a digital academy for your own internal team, it's important to know who they are and what kind of training would be most beneficial to them.

To truly resonate with your audience, you'll need to know their interests, challenges, and aspirations like the back of your hand.

Here are some tips for getting to know your audience:

• Engage directly with potential learners through surveys and social media to gauge their needs. This helps you discover what their interests and current knowledge levels are.
• Create a buyer persona that describes some of the general traits of your target audience. This document can serve as a guide for creating a digital academy curriculum that will engage your audience.
• Analyze competitor offerings to identify areas where you can differentiate. This can mean taking a look at what training programs your competitors are offering, reviews of those programs, and even trying out the training yourself to see what is or isn't working. 
• Consult with subject matter experts prior to creating the training course. Ideally, any training course you assemble should be in a subject that you have hands-on experience and expertise in. However, if you aren't a master of the niche you're creating the training program for, it's imperative that you consult with relevant subject matter experts. If possible, work with the experts to get that invaluable hands-on expertise to build your authority and understand the challenges and needs of those going through the training.
• Stay agile and adapt to feedback as you refine your approach to ensure you're always on the pulse of your audience's desires. Conducting post-training surveys and incorporating that feedback into the training program can help you create a digital course academy that constantly improves.

Want to Engage Your Learners? Keep Track of These Digital Academy Metrics

Engagement is a key part of any successful training program. After all, if learners aren't engaged, they aren't going to pay attention to or retain information from digital course content.

But how do you ensure that your online courses engage your learners? Here's where the magic of metrics comes into play. Tracking metrics helps you assess learner engagement and identify opportunities to improve course content.

Some digital course metrics to keep a close eye on include:

• Course completion rates. How many students are crossing the finish line? If completion rates are low, odds are that there's a problem with the course's content keeping learners from retaining lessons or finishing course modules.
• Video views and average watch time. How many times are course attendees watching videos? Of those views, how many are watching the video to completion? Having this information lets you know if the video content in your training course is engaging your audience or losing them quickly.
• Feedback scores and testimonials. If you have a post-training survey (and you should), what are the feedback scores from your audience? Are they leaving positive testimonials or criticisms? Tracking feedback metrics can provide quantitative insights into the learning experience while testimonials can give you qualitative insights.
• Course completion rates. Which courses are learners taking and what percentage of learners are finishing the training? Tracking course completion rates can help to identify sticking points or content that may need adjusting.
• Post-course performance data. What impact is the academy having on your organization? For an internal digital training academy, you might track performance metrics related to course content to see if there's an improvement. For an external training course, you might want to track customer engagement metrics like net promoter score to measure the impact of the digital academy.

By monitoring these metrics, you can adjust your courses to keep them as engaging as the latest binge-worthy series.

Choosing the Right Technology and Platform for Your Academy

Selecting the tech foundation for your academy is like building the stage for your performance—it needs to be rock solid.

Whether you opt to use a premade Learning Management System (LMS) or a custom-built platform, are a few things to look for:

• User-friendliness. Because if it isn't easy to use, learners will bounce harder than a basketball fired out of a party cannon.
• Compatibility with various media types to cater to different learning styles. Not all learners have the same preferences. Some respond better to video content, others might enjoy reading more. Try to address the different learning styles as much as possible. 
• Robust analytics tools to track and measure success. Remember, if you don't measure it, you can't make informed decisions about how to improve it.
• Integration capabilities with other tools and systems for a seamless experience. You may want to incorporate other platforms into your digital course academy to provide a more robust learning experience. So, integration capabilities will be vital.
• Mobile responsiveness to cater to learners on the go. One estimate featured in a CAPPS article states that nearly "67 percent of students now use mobile devices to complete their online coursework." As more people switch to mobile devices, providing mobile-friendly training becomes more important than ever.
• Strong customer support to help you troubleshoot any technical issues. Even in the best-conceived and constructed online training programs, users are going to experience issues—whether they be purely technical issues or the result of human error. Keep your learners engaged by providing technical support resources that can help resolve these issues quickly.

Choose wisely, and your platform will be the silent hero of your digital course academy.

Marketing Strategies for Promoting Your Digital Courses

If a course launches in the digital forest and no one hears about it, does it make a sound?

Ensure your courses make a resounding boom with these marketing strategies:

• Leverage social media to create buzz and engage with your target audience.
• Utilize content marketing by blogging and creating resources that demonstrate your expertise.
• Include CTAs to online course content in relevant articles in your blog or knowledge base.
• Offer free mini-courses or webinars to give a taste of your content's flavor.
• Partner with influencers or industry experts to extend your reach.
• Implement Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to make sure your courses are discoverable.
• Craft compelling email campaigns to nurture leads and keep your audience informed.

With the right marketing mix, you'll not only attract learners but create loyal advocates for your brand.

Common Pitfalls: What Not to Do in Your Digital Course Academy

In the journey of running a digital course academy, there are a few 'tripping hazards' that you'll want to watch out for.

Amy Porterfield shared some of her personal mistakes in a HubSpot article on the subject of Digital Course Pitfalls—here's the abbreviated list:

1. Launching without hands-on experience. Without practical knowledge of a course topic, it's hard to create credible, effective, and engaging content. Worst-case scenario: you can actively hurt your credibility with learners.
2. Letting imposter syndrome rule. When you do have relevant experience built up over a long time of doing something, it can be hard to appreciate the value of that skill. However, you shouldn't let "impostor syndrome" prevent you from creating an online course on a topic you know well.
3. Creating courses you aren't passionate about. If you aren't enthusiastic about the content you're making, your learners might pick up on that. This, in turn, can make them disengaged with your course content.
4. Spending too much time outside of your "zone of genius". Try to focus on course topics where you have passion and skill or can at least make a meaningful impact on your learners.
5. Thinking the first course would be the "end-all, be-all". Your learners have limited time, resources, and patience for online training. Creating the world's most comprehensive digital training course won't do you any good if it's so long and complicated that nobody finishes it. Your first course doesn't have to be the perfect, doctorate-level course on a subject. Keep in mind that you can always expand your course content or create additional courses to complement the first training as needed. 
6. Playing it too small. On the other end of the spectrum from doing too much in one course is playing it too small and failing to deliver value or not promoting your course content enough. 
7. Not nurturing your audience. Promoting a digital training academy isn't just a matter of sending out a single email blast and setting up an academy page. You need consistent effort to put virtual butts in virtual seats and get learners to complete your academy content.

To these, let's add:

• Overlooking the importance of a supportive community for learners. One easy way to increase engagement for anything is to create a community space for it. LinkedIn and Facebook groups, Reddit communities, or any other social media platform groups can all be easy places to set up a free online community for your learners to drive engagement and build a sense of comradery.
• Underestimating the time and effort required to create high-quality content. Creating a quality piece of course content takes time. Not just formulating questions or writing out lesson content, but uploading that content into your LMS, editing videos, and reviewing feedback to make improvements—it all takes time and effort. Be sure to budget for that time investment and the effort it will take.
• Neglecting the need for ongoing course updates and learner feedback. No course is going to be perfect from day one. Be sure to collect feedback and see if there are any issues affecting the majority of your learners so you can make improvements as needed.
• Failing to provide clear learning paths and objectives. When a learner completes a piece of course content, what's next? How do they know? Be sure to create a clear path from start to finish for your learners so they can finish your academy content without unnecessary frustration.
• Ignoring the usefulness of data analytics for informed decision-making. HubSpot makes it easy to gather data about how visitors interact with your website and subdomains—be sure to use it! Collecting information like time-on-page or page views can help you assess the effectiveness of your online academy so you can make more informed decisions about how to improve it.
• Forgetting to make courses accessible and inclusive for all learners. Accessibility is a key concern for online training courses. Making content easy to interpret for learners who may have visual or hearing impairments is a good start, but also consider what languages your course content should be in. Do you have a lot of learners who primarily speak Spanish? Consider setting up multiple language variations of your content so they can easily understand it.

By avoiding these pitfalls, you'll pave a smoother path to success for your digital course academy.

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