Quick Overview

Launched in 2007, Market Motive has become a premier provider of online video training for Internet marketing disciplines such as SEO and Social Media. The key to their success, which includes 80% conversion rates on some outreach efforts, is the way they distinguish themselves from the pack of free and paid online training options: They feature instruction from well-known subject matter experts whose names draw the crowd, but maintain a staff of former college-level educators to manage a rigorous online curriculum that offers subscribers certification in their chosen discipline. Read on for more about their training model and marketing tactics…

Target Market

The primary target is marketing professionals at companies or agencies, marketing consultants, and entrepreneurs looking to improve their skills in a specific Internet marketing discipline, such as PPC.

A secondary market is universities, marketing associations, and subscription sites in relevant areas that want to license courses for their own audiences.

Content Model

The site offers video training courses in seven Internet marketing topics: SEO, PPC, Social Media, Web Analytics, Conversion, Fundamentals, and Online PR.

Each course is broken into seven or eight lesson modules, which include three to five online videos, study guides, weekly conference calls, and an online test at the end to achieve certification in the specific discipline.

Video length ranges from 7 minutes to one hour. But the team’s average target is 20 minutes, because users typically don’t have the attention span for longer videos. “What you put in that 20 minutes, it all needs to be actionable… something they can view and put into action immediately,” says Stebbins.

Course instructors are well-known subject matter experts and practitioners in the field. In addition to recorded video training, these instructors conduct at least one workshop webinar each quarter. Faculty-led “master” courses also provide additional coaching and assigned projects designed to help students put lessons into action.

The site uses curriculum experts to help instructors create the content for each course. Curriculum experts are generally former college-level educators who left academia to pursue a career in online marketing.

“The role for those people is to put together course structure,” Stebbins said. “We rely on topic experts for the content. Our curriculum experts know how to apply psychometrics and create the quizzes and tests.”

Revenue Streams

The site has three primary revenue sources:

1. Individual Subscriptions

These are sold at $299 per month for a “practitioner” level course, or $3,500 per semester for “master” courses and complete certification.

Subscribers pay one rate for access to all seven online courses, rather than paying $299 or $3,500 per course. The team adopted that model to encourage subscribers — particularly those on monthly memberships — to stay with the site longer and try new courses after completing their first program.

2. Group Subscriptions

The site offers both group subscriptions and site licensing. Each requires custom pricing based on volume. Some companies pay for multiple logins that employees use to access the courses hosted on Market Motive’s site. Larger companies that have an internal structure for online learning can host the courses on their site.

3. Licensing Courses to Other Sites

The company also licenses its courses to third-party organizations, including universities, marketing associations and subscription sites offering content related to the seven course topics.

How it works: Licensees pay Market Motive a per-student fee to offer the online courses on their own sites under their own brand names. Pricing per student, per course depends on volume. Some licensees pre-pay a year based on the estimated number of students who will access a course in a year. If the number of students goes over the estimate, they pay more. (Note: Insider’s sister publication, Which Test Won, is a marketing partner for one of Market Motive’s training courses.)

Stebbins says third-party licensing revenues are absolutely necessary to cover the production costs for the high-quality online videos and quizzes. Quizzes are expensive to create because they require hiring additional test-creation consultants. Still, the bulk of production costs lie in the production of videos.

“Production work requires people who understand Internet marketing, especially when zooming in on screenshots.” Stebbins said. “You have to pay a lot. If they know one aspect (either video production or Internet marketing) really well, you have to train them in the other.”

Marketing Tactics

Stebbins said the company’s most successful marketing efforts include:

Website Design

The company recently redesigned its homepage to highlight the seven courses offered. Previously, the homepage had focused on the site’s overall learning methodology. The redesign increased conversions significantly, demonstrating that explaining “what you learn” and “how you’ll learn” belonged on secondary pages, while the homepage focused tightly on course offerings.

“We learned that our audience has a topic in mind when they come to Market Motive,” Stebbins said.

Adding better navigation to the “Start Here” page, which is the first page paying members see after log-in, boosted the average lifetime of a subscriber from 111 days to 124 days. The major learning: “navigation to the content is a key to retention,” Stebbins said.

Offer Testing

The team also recommends testing offers to determine the best approach to attracting subscribers. For example, their attempts at offering a one- or two-week free trial have been disappointing.

“We didn’t quite understand what was wrong until we polled some of our customers,” Stebbins said. What was happening? People were gorging themselves on videos within a 4- to 6-hour time period.

“They would pack themselves sick,” he said. “That concept of glut and go was not a propos to a structured course. We learned that someone who pays even a little, they have an investment, a reason to go through a structured course.”

They also discovered that prospects more likely to convert were prospects who “didn’t know what they didn’t know,” says Stebbins. In other words, they might know there’s a discipline called web analytics, but they don’t know how to get started.

To find those prospects, they partnered with magazines to attract industry newbies. For example, a promotion with Practical eCommerce magazine offering readers $1 for their first month of classes converted way more prospects into paying subscribers than offering a free week of classes.

After that, the team applied the $1 trial offer through several other channels and has achieved an 80% conversion rate from that type of offer.

Technology and Vendors Used

Market Motive is constantly testing new video production technology to streamline costs. They use a mix of vendors and technologies to produce videos and other learning tools, but declined to share details on those platforms.

GoToWebinar — Webinar platform the site uses for workshops.
http://www.gotowebinar.com

About Michael Stebbins

Stebbins started his career as a marketing manager in the computer software industry, gradually working his way to VP of Marketing at ClickTracks Analytics. That’s where he met Market Motive Co-Founder Avinash Kaushik, a famous web analytics expert, author, and speaker.

Stebbins had heard speakers at marketing conferences teach some compelling workshops. Some of them even tried to offer online courses, but no one was doing it consistently or very well. That’s when he, Kaushik, and ClickTracks founder John Marshall decided the market needed a site like Market Motive. “We knew there was an absence of quality courses,” Stebbins said.

Subscription Site Insider’s Analysis

Market Motive understands that online education sites have be perceived as legitimate, quality outlets if they are going to attract paying customers. The team’s use of high-profile industry experts as instructors, combined with a certification component that subscribers can take back to their bosses and display on their own website, likely gives them an edge over free or other paid competitors when prospects are deciding which training site deserves their time and money.

However, the team might need to test new ways of explaining that subscribers have access to all seven courses with their monthly or semester membership. It’s not immediately clear that the $299 or $3,500 fee allows subscribers to move onto new courses once they complete their first offering. Adding copy to the registration page that clearly explains this benefit could help convert more prospects — and keep them around longer. As it stands now, some members might leave the site upon completion of their first course, not realizing they could start another that same month or semester.

http://www.marketmotive.com/