Rethinking Your Premium Content: How to Build a Guided Learning Course

By ceridon+rbegg@hubspot.com (Remington Begg)

Are you seeing a lower return of effort for traditional premium content like whitepapers, webinars, ebooks and more?

Alternatively, do you find the biggest results just aren’t there for the amount of work you put into the creation? If so, you’re not alone. While these offers can provide in-depth insights for prospects, not every prospect sees the value in them.

Still, we continue offering premium content to build trust throughout the buyer’s journey and learn information about prospects along the way.

And yet, the problem remains: Where do you draw the line between offering free, useful content and charging for your expert knowledge and insight?

Some brands are beginning to define this blurry line by developing their own learning management systems (LMS), as a private hub for paid access to their best educational resources.

And yes, you can even build an LMS in HubSpot. Here, we’ll explore what a learning management system is, the benefits of using one, and how you can repurpose content into your own guided learning course.

Let’s dive in.

What’s a learning management system (LMS)?

First, let’s first make sure we’re on the same page with a definition.

A learning management system (LMS) is a software application to administer, document, track, report on and deliver educational courses, training programs, or learning and development programs.

It’s a portal that users can log into to exclusively access the premium content you develop specifically for your paid audience. (Paid can mean literal financial payment or the currency of data/membership).

While online courses aren’t new, using a learning management system (LMS) to deliver premium content is still uncharted territory for most brands.

As marketers, we’re always trying to create valuable content. But in a crowded marketplace, it can be difficult to demonstrate value in your content even if you have a strong content marketing strategy.

That’s where a guided learning course can prove beneficial. A guided learning course can offer in-depth solutions to your prospects’ challenges, and ultimately, can provide your company with higher-quality leads.

Which makes LMS’ invaluable to anyone wanting to create a guided learning course, since courses need to be built on a LMS.

To explore the importance of guided learning courses, let’s consider an example. Let’s say you have two competitors, and both offer a webinar on “Email Marketing Strategy”.

To differentiate your own brand, imagine instead you take an hour-long webinar and split it up into a dozen topics for five-to-seven minutes each. That could easily be offered as a 12-module course.

Your prospect can now go through the content on their own time and only explore the sections that feel relevant to them, versus having to sit and listen to an hour-long webinar. The perception and value is magnified and fits the nature of how your prospect actually wants to consume the content.