With Singapore’s dense tuition industry, students and their parents are spoiled for choice.
You may be a great tutor with lots of potential but you need the right marketing strategies to prove your worth and get the recognition that you deserve.
If you’re a tutor wondering how you can improve your reach, stand out, and get more students on board, you’ve clicked on the right article.
In this article, I will be sharing with you 5 Marketing Tactics that you must apply if you want to expand and sustain your tutoring business.
Provide useful resources
In the past, the way tutors marketed themselves was limited to physical efforts such as flyers, which students and parents would easily throw away.
But now, there are many other ways that students and parents can find you. For that, you need to understand their needs and provide them with what they’re looking for — learning materials for the student to improve.
Parents and students are always looking for cheaper alternatives to their academic resources because resources such as assessment books are costly.
If they stumble upon your page for resources and find that you give good tips, notes or questions, they might want to engage you for your help.
You can provide resources by simply posting on social media platforms or even creating a blog to write articles, just like our blog that you’re currently reading.
Social media can once again be very useful in your differentiated outreach as you can post study and motivational tips on the students’ social media platforms, and use Facebook to give parents tips on how they can help their children.
Referrals
Word of mouth is still students’ and parents’ most trustable form of marketing. Just as you are looking for students, students and their parents are also searching for a good tutor to help improve their grades.
That is why you must make sure that you always teach every student with your utmost effort, regardless of the fees, the student’s level, standard or background.
If you do perform well and your student achieves significant improvement in their grades, their peers will definitely be curious and ask what their secret is.
But natural referrals come by luck and there are still other ways where you can get referrals for your business.
You can come up with a referral reward system whereby if your student refers their friend or sibling to your tuition, both of them will get rewards such as discounts for their lessons.
This is a very effective marketing tactic used across many industries as there is an incentive for them to help you grow your business.
Make use of social media
Everyone — including students and their parents — is on social media, and you’ll need to know how you can make full use of this technology to reach them effectively.
First of all, you need to know where your target audiences are.
Students nowadays are usually on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, while their parents are usually on Facebook. You need to cater the marketing materials according to what each target group will be attracted to.
Present something valuable for the students such as offering a specific trial class that will guarantee achievement for them (e.g. Master algebra just from one trial lesson!)
You can also give them a glimpse of how you teach by posting snippets of your lessons and explanations, in order to gain their trust in your teaching.
You should aim to create viral content on social media so that it will get your audiences talking about it and sharing it. The trick to do so is to follow trends closely and spend time brainstorming content that engages and excites your audience.
Social media marketing is one of the most effective methods for you to gain awareness because its exposure is limitless.
In addition, you can create an affiliate program and amplify your reach as your audience helps you spread the word, further enhancing your visibility.
Make sure that your platforms are professional and user-friendly
I’ve come across so many tutors’ websites with non-clickable buttons or extremely cluttered layouts and I can’t stress the importance of having professional-looking websites.
Your website is the place where students and parents form their most official impression of you.
A good website is key to gaining credibility and trust from students and parents. It gives the impression that you are serious about your job, have the experience, and know what you’re talking about.
Besides the technicalities, make sure that your website is also error-free in terms of spelling, punctuations, grammar, etc. Parents and students wouldn’t look for a careless tutor!
Your website should also reflect your personality and branding that you want to achieve, through the colour schemes, designs, fonts, etc.
To gain attention to your website, there are many Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) courses that you can easily access online. Mastering SEO can allow your website to rank higher in search engines, which means that more of your potential clients will come across your website when they’re looking for tuition services.
If you don’t intend to use websites, you can just ensure that your social media materials are also pleasant, error-free, and clear.
Have a unique selling point
There are many other tutors who are also reading this article or have already adopted these good marketing tactics. It is definitely still difficult for you to stand out among the rest.
What you need is a unique selling point that sets you apart from every other tutor out there, such that students and their parents will be inclined to choose you as their tutor.
Take some time to think about your true specialty and what you have to offer.
What’s the special method that you use to teach? How many students have you helped and how much did you help them? What’s your guarantee?
You need to develop and sustain a strong brand identity that you will be well known by your clients for.
Conclusion
These 5 marketing tactics are what every tutor needs to keep their tutoring business continuously growing.
It might seem like a sustained tedious effort, but it will definitely be worth it as effective marketing can open many doors for you to reach your target audience far and wide.
But if you want to make the process of attaining more students even easier, you’ve just discovered the most efficient, effective, and easiest way to do so.
Simply register yourself with us and we will match you to students who are looking for a tutor. SmileTutor helps to match over 30,000 students to tutors every year!
Want more tutors’ career advice? Read our other articles here.
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