How to Decide on your Course Audience (+ free course audience worksheet!)
If you’ve decided that you want to build an online or in-person course, you may have started to draft out ideas of what could be in the course. Maybe you’ve even started to draft out a course outline! Wherever you are in your course-building process, one of the first things you will want to get clear on who your ideal course audience is. Your course audience is the group of people you are creating your course for.
Two reasons it’s important to get clear on your audience are:
So that the right people take your course
So that the wrong people don’t take your course (and thus avoid lots of cancellations/refunds/issues!)
My goal is to make getting started easier for you and to set you in the right direction for a professional, impeccable course. So let’s take a closer look at how you can decide on your course audience.
How to Decide on your Course Audience
While you may initially think that your course is for everyone, really there must be a smaller subset of people you are writing for. Starting to narrow in on your potential audience will help you to get clear and concise on the content that will be in your online course.
If you’re not totally sure about the audience of your course, that’s ok! Try to just be a little more specific than “this course is for everyone”. An audience can be based on experience level (i.e. beginners, intermediate skills, advanced skills), job type (managers, marketers, developers, etc), topic interest, or a combination of the three.
Some questions that you can ask yourself to identify your ideal audience are:
Who am I writing this course for?
What job type do they have?
What interests do my ideal audience have?
What would my ideal audience want to achieve by the end of this course?
How in-depth does my ideal audience want me to go into my course topic?
What is the level of skill/knowledge related to the course topic my audience should have before taking my course (beginners, intermediate skills, advanced skills)?
Example audience: This course is for aspiring and early-career graphic designers. They have 0-1 years of experience with Adobe Illustrator and want to learn fundamental techniques to create their first logo project.
Course audience worksheet!
Now that you’ve learned how to decide on your course audience, take a look at the FREE downloadable worksheet below to organize your thoughts!
