A few decades ago, tutoring services and any tutoring business heavily relied on word of mouth. However, since the world is getting digital, the tutoring industry must adopt more effective advertising tactics. Severe competition is another reason for doing so for tutoring services. By 2028, the global private tutoring market is expected to exceed $171 billion.
Nowadays, being a knowledgeable tutor is not enough to succeed — your experience must be boosted with a proper advertising strategy. This article will share some insights on how to advertise tutoring services. Whether you're a private tutor or an agency striving for a higher conversion rate, this guide is for you.
What are tutoring services?
Tutoring services address gaps in the student's knowledge and imply giving lessons to individuals or small groups. Sessions, techniques, and materials are tailored to the client's needs.
Private tutors or agencies' profits depend on the number of learners, so investing in online advertising is essential for them.
6 Strategies to сonsider when advertising your tutoring service
Before you start, you need to get ready. The required steps for private tutors and agencies are similar, with slight differences.
Develop your value
Before you get to the more practical tips that will help you grow your business, let’s discuss the most important part you should begin with. It’s your brand identity and value proposition. These aspects are paramount if you want to stand out among the competition and attract clients to your tutoring services.
What does it mean? It means you should invest your time and effort into analyzing your strengths and other unique capabilities that differentiate you from others. Also, think in advance about preparing branding details such as selecting colors, fonts, and logos that you will use in your advertising materials. These branding you can also utilize when crafting and designing your materials. The main thing is to stay consistent with your visuals so people memorize your brand and recognize it when seeing an ad or checking out your social media.
Identify your UVP
UVP (unique value proposition) is a short statement outlining the value you create for customers. Making it unique is essential since this will help prospective clients choose you over your competitors. A UVP can comprise the following:
- Main area (or areas) of expertise. In your UVP, focus on the primary subject area you're the best at;
- Awards. If you were recently awarded for teaching your main subjects, mention this;
- Techniques and values. Specify your values and teaching practices — learners tend to prefer tutors whose ideas and techniques are relevant to them.
Your UVP should be short but strong at the same time. It must inspire students to choose you while more details can be provided on the website.
For agencies, the suggestions on what should be outlined in a UVP are the same. Highlighting your unique value is important, so consider researching your competitors to detect opportunities.
Polish your tutoring website
As a private tutor learning how to promote tuition business, you can join various platforms like Preply to find clients. However, if you sign up for such a platform, you will likely have to pay a commission for conducting classes.
To protect your income and get rid of any limitations, you need your own place on the Internet — a website.
There are enough website builders that require no coding skills, so you don't have to hire a developer.
What content to add to a private tutor website?
Apart from having a user-friendly interface and being optimized for search engines, your website should deliver the following content and functionality:
- Your portrait
- Experience and the subjects you teach
- Qualifications
- Academic and other awards
- Soft and hard skills
- Availability
- Pricing
- Contact details
- Booking
These are the basic requirements. Apart from providing this information, you should also create a blog section and publish articles that will bring value to visitors and drive traffic.
Learn more about your target audience
The success of any advertising campaign relies on understanding your potential clients, so you need to learn as much about them as possible. This step is crucial for both agencies and private tutors, as knowledge of the audience allows more effective targeting.
Questions to answer:
- What are the demographics of your audience?
- What are your clients' hobbies?
- What challenges do they face, and how can you help to overcome them?
- How much are they willing to pay for the lessons?
- What social networks do they prefer? Are there any other third-party websites they visit often?
- What content formats do they interact with the most?
- What are their preferences in terms of communication?
Where to get this data?
Please note that you may have to prepare not one but several customer persona profiles. If you have already been delivering tutoring services for a while, you can gather this data by analyzing your past and current clients.
If not, analyze your competitors' audiences and consider making assumptions. Then, after you attract some students, make sure to review these assumptions and refine the profiles if needed.
Prepare marketing materials
Before promoting your business, you must create relevant marketing materials. Here are several ideas:
Guest blog posts
Besides writing articles for your website, consider creating guest blog posts for relevant third-party platforms. If you deliver valuable content, it will be easier for you to build trust and drive traffic.
Guest blog posts are also effective in terms of organic marketing for tutors. If a link to your website is published on a reputable platform, search engines will consider your website more credible and relevant so that it will have higher rankings.
Social media posts
You must be active on social networks to build a strong online presence. Publish some content there before advertising.
Make sure to deliver value. For instance, you can share tips on remembering new information or learning your subject more effectively. Do your best to keep your content unique.
Emails
Consider creating a set of cold emails to attract clients as part of marketing tutoring services. Equip every message with a catchy subject line and highlight your UVP.
Don't forget about personalization — address every individual by name and explain how you can solve their issues. The text of your emails should vary according to different customer persona profiles. End every message with a CTA that will take email recipients to a relevant page of your website.
Demo lectures
Record an online demo to advertise for tuition, convince future students that you're a professional and prove your tutoring skills. Keep it short enough but valuable — if it takes visitors an hour to watch your video, most of them will likely drop it.
Business cards
Business cards may seem old-fashioned, but when designed in a creative way, they can be very effective. Refrain from providing all the details on the same side of a card. Otherwise, it will look overloaded.
Blend organic and paid advertising
Consider launching paid advertising campaigns on programmatic platforms to enhance reach. When designing your ad creatives, keep in mind the requirements of the selected platforms.
As for the ad for tutoring copy, focus on the most essential things. Specify your main subject and the years of experience, and outline your UVP. The text must be short but memorable and compelling.
Note that some platforms allow A/B testing, so you can prepare a tutoring advertisement and find out which of them brings better results. Feel free to use instruments for the organic growth of your tutoring service as well.
How and where to advertise tutoring services online?
There are numerous ways to promote your offer, and we have already listed some tips here, including social media marketing, paid and local advertising, blogging, etc. Feel free to use them. Now, let's focus on additional things you can do.
Build landing pages
Create landing pages to advertise your business and convince visitors to take the desired action and convert.
While the website provides all the information you need and want to share with the audience, a landing page works for your salesperson. For instance, a user clicks an ad promoting your free session and then lands on the page where the only possible action is to book this session. This limited freedom of action will keep them focused, making them more likely to convert.
Attend relevant events
To attract clients and grow your professional network, take part in education events (college fairs, open days at universities, etc.). Join online or in-person, interact with other attendees, and distribute business cards and other marketing material when possible.
Offer free sessions
For tutors, building trust is a crucial thing to do. Therefore, consider allowing potential learners to have the first session with you for free.
For students, this will be a chance to ascertain the relevance of your techniques and skills without investing anything. If you meet their requirements, they will likely sign up for paid lessons and recommend you to their friends.
Promote on educational websites
Google and social media are excellent channels, but you should not limit yourself to them. Your potential learners and their parents may visit various educational websites; you should be there for them.
Search for websites relevant to your area and suggest them to cooperate. They can promote your business, and you, in exchange, will advertise them to your audience.
Benefit from your network
If you have any connections among tutors and teachers, use them to promote your tutoring service. These include connections in local schools, on LinkedIn, etc. Select professionals who are not your direct competitors.
For example, if your primary area is preparing students for the IELTS exam, you can call in a favor from a general English teacher.
Advertise your tutoring business with programmatic
Promoting tutoring business online can be a rather time-consuming task, as you have to prepare creative materials, select the right channels, set up targeting, etc.
With programmatic advertising platforms, this process gets significantly simpler. Powered by AI and ML, they allow advertisers to run highly targeted and measurable campaigns.
In essence, within DSP (Demand Side Platform), you set up your campaign, and the system automatically "cooperates" with the supply side platform to purchase the ad space on the suitable inventory. For the optimal price, your tutoring ads are shown to users who comply with your audience's characteristics, so your conversion rate will grow.
Learn more about the DSP principles of work here.
Another benefit in terms of saving time is that some platforms (like SmartyAds) have an auto-resize feature. Instead of customizing your visuals for every specific channel, you can turn it on, and your creatives will be automatically resized to fit their placements.
Future predictions in advertising tutoring services
Technologies are changing every business across industries. There is not even one domain that will stay intact by the rapid advancements of artificial intelligence. AI will inevitably shape tutoring services as well.
Cutting-edge technologies like AI-driven content rendition analysis will soon become a must even for tutors to gain a competitive advantage. This sort of tool allows businesses or professionals to accurately evaluate the effectiveness of their advertising efforts. AI can analyze tone, style, and relevance of your messaging to suggest improvements. All this can help make your ads more engaging and relevant to target audiences while ensuring higher conversion rates.
Another emerging trend that will influence the niche of tutoring is voice search optimization. As more people use digital assistants to search via voice commands, optimizing your tutoring ads can boost discoverability.
Adaptive content also gains traction. It’s some sort of dynamic content that gets automatically adjusted based on certain criteria: user behavior or interests. This ensures the most personalized experience that will enhance engagement and retention.
In combination with AI-powered output analysis, these innovations give you precious insights into what works and what doesn’t in your tutoring advertising strategy. Embrace these trends to stay relevant in the competitive tutoring market.
To sum up
Offline and online tutoring will always be in demand, which means that the market will keep growing.
To overcome your competitors, you need to apply marketing efforts across various channels, including your website, social media, etc. You must come up with your value proposition and promote it to the right customers at the right time.
With programmatic platforms, you can advertise your tutoring business to prospective clients who are most likely to be interested in them without wasting time on finding suitable ad inventory.
Everything is done automatically so that you can focus on more important things. For instance, creating blog posts and preparing tutoring sessions for your students.
Advertise your tutoring services with a DSP platform. Register now!
