Don't Forget This When Launching Your Academy
The moment of launching an Academy on your website can feel exciting. This new section can help you a lot in making your product more understandable for users, attracting new leads and converting current ones into “warmer” leads or customers.
But you should keep in mind some important points to receive best results from your Academy.
Content is important
What do you think would happen if you launch an Academy and leave it empty for a while? Well, eh, nothing. At all. No new leads will be attracted to your website until you fill your Academy.
There is a big difference between SaaS that don’t rely on content and those that do. Academies belong to the second type. To launch it, you should fill your Academy with content.
Sometimes it’s enough to rewrite some of your texts. In other cases, you will need to create new content that requires both designer and writer skills. But the result is totally worth it!
Customize a welcome page
When one website section is very different from the others, it is at the least puzzling. To avoid confusion, don’t forget to customize your Academy’s landing page.
A well-customized landing page can attract learners, inspire interest and involve them in education.
You can change your landing page in the settings section of your Academy: add your description, logos etc instead of the default ones. A customized Academy will be truly well-integrated into your site structure.
Add a clear call to action
Do you want your learners to simply pass all lessons and leave your site forever? Of course, not! Then you should create a clear call to action.
Here are some options:
- Pass more courses. Then you should offer them to go to the course list page.
- Lead them to your website. You can redirect your learners at the end of their education.
- Make a purchase. Why not offer them a promo code, discount or extended trial period for completing a course?
It’s quite possible that your learners would be glad to do something after finishing their education, but they don’t know what to do. All you need to do is to help them out a bit.
Promote your Academy
You can make the coolest Academy, but if you will tell no one about it, nobody will know you have it.
How can your readers learn about your Academy?
Of course, it’s not all about ads: at the very least, you should add a link to your Academy on your website. You can also mention it in a newsletter and on your blog. Promote it everywhere your target audience can see it or answer their questions by linking them to the Academy.
Oops, it’s too big!
The other problem is when Academy creator tries to add all the possible content to one course and makes it too big. Despite the fact that Academies are interactive and help to learn content step by step, too long texts are still hard to read.
In some cases, an author can add all the information on a subject to a course, mixing advice for beginners and difficult technical information. Such a content wouldn’t engage any segment of an auditory. You can easily solve this issue by dividing large courses into smaller ones. You can use Academies corner ribbon feature to mark these different courses according to their complexity, topic etc.
Wishing for quick results
PPC ads are able to bring you results in a day. But when it comes to content marketing, it always takes more time. Content marketing has one important feature: it brings you slower but steady and long-term traffic increase. Similarly, your Academy’s content nurtures your users and your leads along their customer’s journey. And this takes time.
Even with a well-promoted Academy, your leads need to take a closer look at your product. People need time to hear from you, consume your content, and pass lessons in your Academy before trust can be built. But this is a worthy long-term investment in great relationships with your clients.
Extra tip for best results
Do you have content and documentation about your SaaS product in an FAQ section, whitepaper, e-book, knowledge base, simple google document? Then, why not to put it all in one place - a well-structured, easy to use, interesting Academy.