Articulate 360 Has Taken Over the eLearning Space — Here’s How Competitors Can Push Back

The eLearning industry is a rising star in the SaaS space. It exploded in both popularity and value during the pandemic as schools, government organizations, and companies scrambled to find digital channels for in-person learning. This catalyst, alongside the resounding preference for remote-hybrid work in the post-pandemic landscape, has propelled the industry to a $100-billion valuation. 

Unlike any other industry, the SaaS space affords companies the opportunity to quickly pivot and scale. This provides companies the opportunity to experience massive growth and cement their position atop specific niches. Some companies have been around long enough that they can help shape their market, influencing what customers look for and how competitors approach them. 

This is exactly what we see with Articulate: What started as a PowerPoint plug-in in the early 2000s has now raised over $1.5 billion and is the eLearning tool of choice for all of the Fortune 100.

In this piece, we’ll look at the product and marketing strategies that propelled Articulate to its high status in the eLearning industry and the opportunities competitors like iSpring Solutions, Udemy Business, and 360Learning can take to close the gap. 

Before we dive in, let’s take a quick look at the state of the eLearning industry. 

Understanding the Growing $100-Billion eLearning Industry

This category of SaaS tool often goes by its other name: learning management systems (LMSs). In the same way that content management systems like WordPress, Webflow, and Wix help people create websites more effectively, LMSs like Articulate help organizations manage and deliver educational content to a workforce that is in constant need of upskilling. 

Within the nine-figure eLearning umbrella, there’s a niche with a 14% CAGR that’s projected to go from just under $1 billion to more than $3 billion from 2022-2032: course authoring software.

While LMS platforms give organizations the tools to organize and deliver educational material, course authoring tools help with the actual creation of the educational content itself. And according to G2, it’s a pretty tight race for the top spot in the industry: 

Articulate 360 — the company’s comprehensive new offering — sits in the top quadrant of this market alongside competitors. 

Articulate 360 Zeros-in on Enterprise Customers With a Consolidated Platform

Articulate’s product offering has expanded alongside the market and changing consumer demands over its near two-decade existence. Naturally, such a head start has helped the eLearning brand fine-tune a suite of tools to meet all the major needs of its enterprise customer base.

The course authoring and LMS platform now has over 120,000 customers across the world, including major organizations like Oracle, Wells Fargo, Visa, Amazon.com, Publix, and Morgan Stanley. 

It’s created tools for every step of the online learning process: 

• Course content creation
• A library of templates, characters, and images
• Collaborative stakeholder review 
• Live online training to improve course delivery

After building up a strong enough user base among its enterprise client base, Articulate initiated the next phase of its growth plan — rolling all these powerful tools into a single offering. Now the only way to access these tools is through Articulate 360, the company’s “holistic suite of interconnected apps” for all eLearning needs.

It’s definitely risky rolling a series of individual tools into a single package. There’s the potential to lose out on customers who only need a library of content or individual course creation tool. But to cement Articulate 360 as the leading eLearning solution for large organizations, it’s a worthwhile investment. 

The Articulate team helps quell any unease from its customers by breaking down how its new offering stacks up against other “industry solutions.” It’s a clever SaaS pricing strategy. By stacking up Articulate 360 against an industry average in terms of pricing, the brand demonstrates its edge without calling out specific competitors or comparing across specific tool categories:

So, how is the Articulate team bringing in potential customers to its new consolidated offering?

Popping the Hood on Articulate’s Marketing Engine

According to SimilarWeb, Articulate currently brings in over 3.5 million visitors to its website across all traffic channels. About 68% of this traffic comes through direct search, while referrals and organic search bring in 17% and 9%, respectively. 

Because the company has been around for so long and is used by 128 million users across 120,000 organizations, it’s no surprise that direct traffic leads the way. Articulate has built up its brand strength over the past two decades, meaning there’s enough familiarity in the industry for people to search it out directly. 

This brand strength is further solidified by all the equity passed along to Articulate through its strong backlink network. 

Articulate currently has over 4.5 million backlinks directing traffic and link equity to its homepage. Filtering the referring domains with backlinks to Articulate by domain authority, and you can immediately see why this EdTech platform has achieved such a high level of brand strength: 

The list of referring domains is full of incredibly high-value websites, from tech giants to prestigious universities and government agencies.

The Articulate 360 subfolder alone has over 15.7K backlinks, including ones from leading post-secondary institutions like Dartmouth, the University of Florida, and Michigan State University.

Some of Articulate’s other marketing strengths include: 

• Its large catalog of YouTube content, which has brought in over 6 million views
• A strong LinkedIn presence that’s earned over 73,000 followers

However, there’s definitely still room for improvement in terms of Articulate’s marketing strategy. For instance, its website has over 21,000 organic pages, and yet it only brings in just shy of 40,000 visits in organic traffic every month. A brand of Articulate’s caliber should be able to bring in more than two visits per page. 

With that in mind, here’s how three top competitors — Udemy Business, 360Learning, and iSpring Solutions — can make gains on the top dog. 

How eLearning Competitors Can Close the Gap on Articulate 360

On paper, the battle between Articulate and other leading course authoring and LMS platforms appears very one-sided. The head start that Articulate has had in the industry to fine-tune its products and marketing engine, plus the roster of high-end clients, have given it a bigger traffic pull than its next three competitors combined:

But remember, not all traffic is created equal. 

Udemy, 360Learning, and iSpring Solutions each have a unique opportunity to increase their pipeline of high-quality leads by leveraging different channels.

Udemy Business — Internal Linking and LinkedIn

Udemy Business is a subscription-based learning solution that the EdTech company created specifically for companies and organizations. It currently helps nearly 15,000 businesses enhance the skills and knowledge of their employees through access to a curated selection of Udemy courses. Businesses also have the option of creating their own courses to meet specific needs.

While the Udemy Business product may be lagging behind Articulate 360, a comparison of the two overall brands shows a different story.

Udemy Business has the most widely distributed marketing channel usage of all the leading eLearning brands. It gets nearly half of its web traffic from referrals, but paid, direct, and organic search all make up a sizable chunk, with 17.9%, 16.3%, and 14.1%, respectively. 

The fact that the majority of potential customers reach Udemy Business through referral isn’t surprising: The course authoring and LMS service website is a subdomain of the core Udemy brand. Overall, Business.udemy.com receives a staggering 1,225,466 internal backlinks from the main Udemy site. That opens up the business service to the 113 million visitors that visit Udemy every month.  

Here’s a look at how Udemy passes along its link equity to the business subdomain through links from its country-specific home pages:

That’s a massive amount of link equity, and traffic, flowing from the freemium Udemy platform to its paid business counterpart. It’s somewhat analogous to Zoho’s strategy of flanking the CRM industry by passing on link equity to its down-market solution, Bigin.

According to Search Engine Journal, there are benefits to using a subdomain to create what is essentially a stand-alone site in the eyes of Google. 

Another opportunity that Udemy has to increase traffic to its business subscription is by further leveraging its LinkedIn presence — with a following of 1.2 million, the company has a massive edge over Articulate and the rest of the eLearning platforms. That’s over 16x the size of Articulate’s. 

Most of the company’s recent top posts have been about its general eLearning course offerings, but it does have some Udemy Business–related posts that help boost the subscription offering. The marketing team recently posted a customer story carousel about how Capital One is using Udemy Business to upskill its employees: 

The main Udemy brand has built up a massive following that towers over Articulate on key web and social media platforms. In July alone, the Udemy website brought in over 110 million visitors to its website.

How Udemy Business Can Gain on Articulate

If the company can continue to direct some of its influence from the individual learners towards its paid business offering, Udemy Business has a great opportunity to eat into Articulate 360’s customer base. 

360Learning — Strategic Partnership

360Learning is an eLearning platform that offers tools for authoring, learning management, learning experiences, and AI-assisted learning. Founded in 2014, it’s one of the younger Articulate competitors out there. 

360Learning has one of the most diversified marketing approaches of the top course-authoring and eLearning competitors in this piece. Though it also brings in the majority of its traffic through direct search, organic search, email, referrals, and paid search also provides a consistent flow of visitors to the site. 

When doing my audit of the 360Learning marketing engine, the channel that stands out most to me is actually the 5.7% of traffic that comes via referral. Though the brand has thousands of different websites directing traffic to its pages through backlinks, there’s a single high-authority domain that contributes over 8,000 backlinks alone: the EdTech marketing brand elearningindustry.com (eLI).

According to its own website, “eLI is a leading publishing platform that delivers inspiring, industry-specific content to eLearning professionals.” It’s essentially a marketing platform for eLearning companies, creators, and customers to find content and information about the industry. The site offers the following: 

• Articles, eBooks, and webinars on industry-related topics
• Publishing options that provide access to a large community
• Lists of top vendors, content creators, and specific tools
• Services for content, outbound, and performance marketing

With over 125,000 organic visits a month, elearningindustry.com gets more organic traffic than 360Learning, Articulate, and the rest of its competitors. 

How 360Learning Can Gain on Articulate 

You don’t need to reach Buffer-like levels of backlink success to make gains in your industry (although it probably doesn’t hurt). By continuing to leverage, and expand, strategic partnerships with brands like eLI, 360Learning can directly reach the audience of corporate training decision-makers who look to topic experts to conduct their research. 

iSpring Suite — Content Creation

iSpring Solutions is another veteran in the eLearning space with early ties to Microsoft. The company started as FlashSpring Pro and was used to convert PowerPoint to Flash. Over the last decade, the company has launched a suite of LMS and course-authoring tools used by the likes of MIT, IBM, and Boeing. 

In terms of marketing, iSpring has a sizable edge over the rest of the course-authoring platforms in a key department: organic content. Nearly 70% of its traffic comes organically, according to SimilarWeb.

The iSpring Solutions landing page brings in nearly 105K organic visitors every month at a value of over $200,000. But the most interesting part is that the brand accomplishes this across just 901 web pages. Instead of just churning out content in the hopes of capturing a few leads, the company invests in content that truly shapes the culture of the eLearning industry. 

Of iSpring’s top 10 pages by organic traffic, nine of them are from the blog subfolder, and the other is the home page. 

Let’s take a look at iSpring’s most visited page, a simple listicle about the 16 best options for screen recording. The page brings in 42K visits a month, representing 40% of all traffic to the site — that’s some powerful content.

Here are some of the highlights that make this post such an effective marketing tool for iSpring:

• Highly educational content that goes over the pros, cons, technical information, and pricing of each tool
• Dynamic content like screenshots and screen recording to show the uses and benefits of, well, screen recording 
• User-friendly page design with links to each product and a table of contents for easy navigation
• At over 4,000 words, the post provides a truly in-depth analysis that other brands can’t match

How iSpring Can Gain on Articulate 

iSpring has a massive bank of blog and video content at its disposal. If you’ve been following Foundation long enough, you know what the next step is: distribution. 

Creating a content distribution strategy that maximizes the use of iSpring’s assets is a perfect opportunity to expose more enterprise stakeholders to the benefits of an eLearning suite. 

If you want to hear some marketing pros chop it up over the benefits of distributing content whenever possible, check out this episode of Create Like the Greats.