Online courses are a valuable method of delivering instructional content well beyond the education space. We’ve identified three unique ways in which companies can utilize online courses to revolutionize their business strategies.

business strategy
Photo by Stefan Erschwendner / CC BY
 

  1. Offer a new product – Consider how e-commerce retailer Amazon.com has diversified over the years; it may be hard to remember when the company was known almost solely as a bookseller. There are many reasons to diversify your company’s product line: changes in the market, customer expansion, competitive advantages. Online courses are a great way to grow your business by introducing a new product offering. And by using an all-in-one technology solution to deliver your courses, you don’t have to spend the resources to build a solution yourself, so the time to market is reduced to the time it takes to create the course content.
  2. Content marketing – What is content marketing? It’s a type of marketing in which a company create and distributes valuable content to customers to drive brand awareness, thought leadership, and build/retain customer relationships. A recent article from Forbes states that an estimated 60% of businesses incorporated content marketing in their marketing strategies in 2013, and predicts this number will only increase in 2014. Convert the content that you have already created into online courses for a new way to deliver your information. Offering online courses in addition to other forms of content can reach additional customers that prefer that format.
  3. End-user training – Delivering training for a new technology comes with many challenges. What’s the best way to gain a high adoption rate while using your resources efficiently? Using online courses to deliver end-user training may be a more efficient method for training. And because end-users can define the pace by which they take a course, the training may be more effective as well.

Are you using online courses in your business strategy? Leave a comment and let us know what’s working for you.