The pandemic severely affected schoolwork among students. This resulted in leaving students on average five months behind in mathematics and four months behind in reading by the end of the school year.
If this unfinished learning problem is not dealt with soon, it may lead to a disaster that creates a ripple effect, not only in academics but in future lives.
The demand for tutors is high. Tutors are still relying on word of mouth as a marketing tool and aren’t taking advantage of digital marketing.
In the digital age, almost all high school and university students surf the web. Using a digital marketing strategy not only helps you to get noticed but also converts those clients into sales.
Here are some steps to consider when creating your marketing strategy as a tutor.
Step 1 : Target Audience
Target audiences comprise a share of consumers that a business aims to attract with its advertising efforts. The demographics of your target audience include their age, location, spending power and patterns, and interest and challenges.
The best way to obtain these demographics is through SWOT analysis. SWOT analyses identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Secondly, analyze your existing customers, demographics, and preferences in order to better understand prospective clients by creating a buyer persona. One thing to keep in mind when defining your target audience is to be specific and niche down as much as possible.
Your target market could be a final year high school student between the ages 16-18 that has a desire to attend Harvard to study law but is struggling with subject English and spends most of their time on social media.
When you understand who your target audience is you are able to create content that is both relevant and effective because you know who they are, what they do, and where to find them.
Step 2 : Set goals
Assess your current success to discover where you are as a business, what you are doing well, and what you need to improve. Create goals based on your analysis to ensure that you get better.
Goals need to be SMART goals
Specific – A clear, concise goal
Measurable – how much do you want
Attainable – is it within reach? Or do several other things need to happen before?
Realistic – Realistic – you can’t expect 100 000 visitors to increase in 1 month when the average is 1000 and your budget is 25% higher.
Relevant – assists the end goal
Timely – by when do you want to achieve this
Not only should your goals be SMART ,but also divided into short term, middle term, and long-term goals. Short term goals could be applied immediately between the space of days to a month , whilst middle term goals could be between three months to a year and long-term goals could be between one year and five years or even further long term.
Finally, create the marketing funnel. A collection of stages you ideally want customers to pass through as they purchase the product. Your main objective is to move potential customers through your funnel. There are fewer people falling down the funnel the further down you go. Align each of your goals and apply them to your funnel.
Step 3: Implementation
Ideas to Implement
Create a website
Having a website for your business can greatly enhance your organization’s credibility. It’s likely there are a number of providers offering similar services to yours. A good-looking website with clear and accurate information will make your company stand out.
Must have website sections
Homepage- Visitors land on your home page when they access your website. You have the opportunity to make a great first impression and capture their attention! This page needs to have enough information about your tutoring business and also explains how to navigate the website.
About sections- is where you share your brand story and why you started the business. What is your mission and what problems doing your business solve?
A catalogue of tutoring services- Here you can provide a list of all tutoring packages, such as one-on-one tutoring, that you offer. Include the price range per lesson and discount for packages.
Staff profile- For more credibility, they also posted their name, qualification , picture, and expertise level when describing your staff.
Booking page- Lastly, add a booking page with a call to action where students can book a free first lesson or consultation.
Search Engine Optimization
The first major step has been completed, and that is to create your website. In the next step, you will need to ensure that your ranking on Google is as high as possible, and it can only be achieved through SEO.
You can optimize your website by making sure it is user-friendly for all devices. Make sure that the keywords you choose are relevant to you, such as “Tutor, Math, and low prices”. A helpful platform to get keywords to use is Google Keyword Planner.
The number of links indicates to Google that your website is a quality resource that is worthy of citation. To do this link your social media pages to your website or other blogging sites. SEO done correctly will not only bring traffic to the site but also convert it into quality leads.
Social media strategy
The majority of students spend their time on social media, so it should be a no-brainer to be there. It is a great place to market your tutoring services by joining Facebook groups or creating a Facebook business page. Social media platforms are numerous. Identifying the right content to post is essential
YouTube is made up of videos, blogs are articles, whereas Facebook relies on short posts with images and videos.
Step 4: Track progress
Monitoring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts will allow you to track how the money you allocated has been spent so you can shift funds to more effective channels. With this data, you’ll be able to see where traffic and sales spikes are coming from and what’s working and what hasn’t. A good tool to use to find data for websites and KPIs is Google Analytics.
Conclusion
As much as traditional marketing is effective we need to recognize the time we’re living in, which is a digital age, and start acting accordingly. Many teenagers spend their lives online, so tutoring is a golden opportunity. As such, you would need a strategy like this one that would help you flourish.