#207: Workshop – Develop an Online Course Tailored to Your Audience

Welcome back to another edition of the Course Creation Incubator podcast. I’m your host, Gina Onativia, here to help you move forward and take the next step in whatever you need in terms of your course creation or whatever you’re building for your online based business. I am here for it. I’m here to push you to help you get going.

And by the way, a lot of times when we’re building our courses, the first question for marketing or course creation is who is this for? We’re always thinking about our audience because when you know your audience, you can teach to how they learn best. And that’s where learning styles come in, because let’s be honest, we are all built differently.

I have friends who are completely auditory, who want to get all the instructions via audio. They listen to podcasts and they just get it from the get go. I have a hard time listening. Well, ask my husband about that, but I have a hard time listening and knowing what I need to move forward because I’m very visual. I would rather get a checklist or a PDF or watch a video and then get a PDF to learn what I need to do to move forward.

I remember a friend was trying to teach me a card game and he was trying to talk me through it and talking and talking and finally I had to stop him and said, Hey, do you have a step by step guide in your pocket? Right. Something I could follow a visual that I could follow. And then maybe you can demo it for me because this is how I learn.

Even when I listen to podcasts. I usually do some research to figure out, okay, what’s a visual that I can put against the podcast? Now we’re all wired differently, and that’s something that we need to keep in mind when building out our courses. Are you reaching out in different ways for different styles? And I was thinking about this because last year we wrapped up a really special, an awesome course for American Council, an exercise in collaboration with Special Olympics.

It was called Foundations for Community Physical Activity Leaders. I know it’s a bit of a mouthful, but great course serving communities all over the country. And I’m excited because it’s a free course. Now you can sign up and take it yourself. So if you teach physical activity in any way, for example, I volunteered for air. So soccer or if you want to get a group together to play tennis on the regular or maybe you organize group like here in La mesa, I see a walking group once a week.

They meet at town hall and then they walk from there. You can take this course and become a better physical activity leader. And I’m going to link to it in the show notes because again, it’s totally free. And it was initially built for Special Olympics. It was built via a grant for Special Olympics. It was built for people with intellectual disabilities.

So the whole time we’re building out the course. The consideration was, does this work for this audience? We were hyper focused in a way that honestly, I’ve never been in a bigger course like this. And we always came back to this Northstar, to this guiding principle, and we built the course with that in mind. And it got me thinking, how do you approach building a course when your audience has really specific needs?

Maybe you’ve got a group of CEOs in mind who don’t have time or the focus and don’t really want to process a lot of information. They want quick hits. How do you build it out for them? Or maybe you’re doing a workshop or training coming up and you’ve got to keep a specific audience member in mind. So that’s what we’re going to unpack for you today, how to work with specific groups.

And we’re going to work through five parts of this program. Of this course that we built that we really considered. And I thought it’d be helpful for you, too, in assessing your own course. And we’re going to workshop this together because I love doing these workshops with you. Now, before we dive in, if you want someone to partner with you and collaborate and guide you through every step of building and marketing your course, hold you accountable.

Take the guesswork out of the process. Check out our done for you services from strategy to site design to launch. We’ve got you covered so you can focus shining up as the talent as the expert go to course creation boutique dot com slash course and you could set up a call we’ll have a chat about what you’re thinking where you’d like to take your course and how we can help you.

When we were looking at the Special Olympics course, we looked at five bigger pieces in terms of how to approach it for folks with intellectual disabilities. So the first was the outline or the flow, and we had this collaborator. Her name was Amy, who designed everything. She’s an absolutely brilliant content developer and she was fully qualified to come up with the content for this.

She came up with the five pronged outline and include one, What it means to be a successful community physical activity leader. The module two was the actual physical activity basics and guidelines. Three were the benefits of physical activity. So they can own that and talk to their people. In terms of why it’s such a great idea to go for that walk once a week to play tennis, play soccer, whatever that looks like yoga, just running around.

Module four was thinking about different types of programs and different types of physical activities and ways that you can change it up, giving you some creative ideas of how to present to your group. And then Module five was really about bringing it all together. It was a simple, streamlined outline, and I love that she came up with five steps or five parts, and that’s what I absolutely recommend for you listening right now.

So I would love to start with four five and if you got to go there, six steps. But people resonate with five steps. It doesn’t feel overwhelming. It feels like they can do it, something they can remember. And especially when it’s sitting on your sales page, it’s more memorable when it’s a tidy five steps. So keep that in mind.

And what I loved about what Amy had put together for this course was that she wasn’t going to get into jargon. She wasn’t going to make it super complex because again, we’re remembering our audience and always bringing it back to them. So first and foremost, that clear, simple, streamlined outline and simple flow. If you don’t have a streamlined outline, go back.

Think about where are you going to trim the fat? I’ve got to trim the fat episode that you can go and listen to. You want to make sure that what you’re presenting is absolutely what they need. If it’s something more advanced, because she did have more advanced content, as you can imagine. Leave it for another training. Leave it for another workshop.

You want to make sure that your outline is tidy, that you’re not going to overwhelm them, that you’re bringing them exactly what you’ve promised them. So really hone in on that in terms of your outline, especially when you’re focusing on a specific group. Second part, we wanted to have clear, concise, not complex language meaning copy. So Amy would come up with these great scripts and then I would add a little bit of fun or flair to them.

She was awesome about keeping words and simple phrases and not making it too high level. And if we introduced a word or a concept, I would flag it and say, Hey, can we break it down a little bit more? Is this going to be easy to understand? And I’m a good barometer for this because I like to keep my communication really simple.

This is where I’ve always been. I’m not big on ten words. And I also knew that if I didn’t understand it, the audience likely wouldn’t understand that because I’m not big on a physical activity. Leadership, right? This isn’t my zone of genius and where I live day in and day out, I’m not taking fitness credentials every week. I’m not a trainer.

I’m not a certified trainer. So I knew if I got it and I could teacher say to my air, So kids, then this audience could get it. We would drill down on the copy as part of step two and looking at scripts, this is what you’re going to present. Make sure it’s simple enough that somebody can learn it from the get go.

And I was just talking to a client today. We’re teaching a live course and she was saying, Gina, we have to understand that these clients are not five or ten years down the line. They’re coming in here from the very beginning and we have to make it teachable for them and palatable for them. And this is such a great learning process for us, especially as we teach this live course, because we have to go back and realize, okay, what are we doing here?

Because it’s become unconscious at this point and it might be unconscious for you, too, If I asked you, Hey, how did you do that? You might not have an answer right away. You might have to think about it because it’s part of your body now, right? It’s just something you do. But when we’re teaching courses, we’ve got to take a step back and think, okay, well, way back in the day, I had to figure out how to do this when I was figuring out how to teach courses.

It’s kind of meta, but when I always figure out how to teach or create courses with Tony Robbins, I do kind of break it down and figure out, okay, this is how we teach it, this is how we have exercises. These are the components that go into the course. And I do think through it now it’s unconscious. For me, it’s just part of who I am.

But really go back and think through, okay, what are the specific steps? Reflect that in your copy and in the copy for Special Olympics? Sometimes something when creep in about breathing or, you know, heart rate and things like that, we would check ourselves, okay, is this simple enough that someone with intellectual disabilities can figure it out? So always having that metric or that benchmark, right, that we need to hit.

So copy is the second part. So first part is your outline, making sure it’s streamlined and it flows. Copy is your second part that you’re checking. Okay, Is this good for this group? Then part three we looked at the design and typically for handouts. My husband, Alex does our handouts. He’s the art director on the done for you agency side.

He does all of our beautiful handouts and templates and graphics and we tend to use a lot of white space. And for this group we were thinking pops of color to make it more attractive. How about some icons? Now note here we didn’t want to use photos in the handouts because we knew they were going to be printing them out and putting them in a binder.

That’s something that you want to consider. Are they just going to be beautiful PDF set sit online or is your audience going to want to print them out ahead of time? I’ve got clients who print everything out ahead of time because that’s how they learn, that’s how they practice. So you want to know that ahead of time. We didn’t want to have photos on the downloads because that’s a lot of ink and saturation and we don’t want to make the headers too big.

So think through again. Here’s the theme of this episode What does your audience really need? So for the font sizes and now getting really specific and drilling down, we might use an 11.4, the font for this audience. We went up to 14, we went bigger because we knew be easier to read. We did a lot of quick read information.

We kept the sentences short. We didn’t have huge paragraphs of information because that’s not fun, right? We want to keep it too short. Bullets. Pithy. Again, you got to think about where people need. By the way, this is for any audience, right? Do you does your audience want to read paragraph one paragraph? I see some things in academia and I don’t read it because I don’t have the tolerance to do that.

And again, that’s the way my brain is wired. I’m looking for quick read information, things with icons, ways to break it up. That’s what I’m looking for in terms of design. So that’s what we wanted to bring for them. Keep it short, keep it easy to read, keep it light. The fourth place we looked at for usability is the learning management system, making sure that the instructions were clear, or if they’re taking an assessment, does it make sense?

We had photos with different graphic call outs on them. Was it easy to use again? Did it make sense for them? So again, I’m a great tester in this place because I’m a great tester for this as well, because I don’t have a high tolerance for if I don’t understand things, ask my husband. I get frustrated really easily.

So because I have such a low tolerance, I’m a great quality control person to see. Okay, does this work for a person processing this course? Then the fifth piece was we thought about the added value. What is some additional bonus content to help explain what we’re trying to teach? And we had five clear modules like I talked about earlier, and we wanted to have examples of great community leaders, great physical activity leaders.

So we did zoom interviews from people, these leaders from all walks of life and asked them, Hey, why did you get into this? Why do you volunteer? How do you organize your programs? How do you change it up? And I’ve got to tell you, these interviews were some of the best parts of this course, because it really made it come alive.

Like we had somebody who taught yoga. We had somebody who does physical training with men on a weekly basis. And we had somebody who kids who works with kids in the morning before school. And they all had a different perspective and it was cool. You wanted to model their behavior. You wanted to think about how you could become a leader like these guys.

So remember, simple flow, simple language, smart design, easy usability, and think about a little bonus content. And this could all go a long way in really serving your audience. Hopefully this episode has been helpful. Give you a few new ideas for how to think about your audience and build a course that really connects. Thank you so much for tuning in today.

Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss one future workshop episode. And if this episode got you thinking differently, or maybe even gave you a spark of inspiration, I would love for you to leave me a review and until next time, go create, be you and be brilliant and get it done.