As the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools and colleges to shut down, many educators consider shifting to online. As this situation creates immense opportunities for online tutoring, getting clients for your tutoring business is not very easy.
But once you have got the trick of getting new students for your online classes right, it must be smooth sailing for your business. The question is how? What should you do to make the online learning experience more effective for your learners so that they keep coming back to your site bringing more references?
Getting clients for your tutoring business?
As an educator running an online teaching platform, getting the initial set of students can be a difficult job and requires you to adopt different marketing strategies.
However, you are not a marketer, right? That is exactly why we have written this blog to make the task of finding students for online tutoring easy for you.
Here are some of the effective steps that you can try out in the beginning stages of launching your business.
Begin small
The strategies you used for getting an initial learner set for your tutoring platform are a bit different from the techniques you commonly leverage to grow your already existing tutoring business.
The significant thing to grasp here is it is better to start small. What all you would implement initially are experiences that will help to create a foundation of what works great for you and what doesn’t.
When starting out, focus on trying out different channels to promote your teaching business and dig in-depth into the performance of your efforts to get insights on what your target learner base exactly wants.
Most educators who have a decent budget for promotions will start using paid methods of advertising. But, it is recommended to wait for a while rather than simply turning to paid methods without any planning.
There is no point in spending so much money without understanding your target market and the interests of your learner. You must focus on understanding what works for you and that doesn’t before spending a lot of money on the techniques that don’t have any guarantee to bring in success.
Leverage social media
Social media serves as an excellent medium to find your student base and keep them engaged. This includes both students and their parents. There are lots of social media channels with various types of learner base and content type.
You can start using some of the social platforms that suit your niche and understand the impact and then expand to other social media channels.
Create a beautiful and strong business with your USPs highlighted to attract your client base. Make sure your social media accounts are updated with the recent and right information that your students would be looking for.
The most important thing to add is your service offerings, unique selling points (USP), website link, and contact information.
Do not forget to add the email button, call button, and the “Book your class” button in your profile. The book your class button is a great call to action integration that allows your potential clients to book a consultation, a free trial, book a class of yours through your social profile.
Spread the word to your community
The very first set of clients you would get is mostly from references. Start connecting with potential clients and let them know you are now in business. Ask your friends and family to pass your reference to the people they know.
The results might vary for educators who are making a shift from normal class-based teaching to online teaching and those who are beginning from scratch.
If you are starting the business from scratch without any foundation, you can as2k to the people you know, family, and peers in your network to spread the word to their network. This works great as most parents ask for references from their network to find good educators.
This method works better than other strategies as it helps to build inherent trust among your potential clients. It does not help you to establish an initial student base it will also help you to grow your client base.
On the other hand, if you already have an established presence in in-person tutoring, you might already have a client base who clearly knows your style of teaching and skills.
Reconnect with your formal students and parents and let them about your online tutoring business and invite them to your classes by offering exclusive offers and discounts.
You can also implement techniques like offering trial classes to make sure the students are familiar and comfortable with your online tutoring methodologies.
Share student testimonials
If you already have an established client base either offline or online, you can use it as a valuable resource to drive more students to your online classes. Ask them to share their testimonials so that your potential clients can understand what they can expect from your classes.
If you have any unique tutoring success stories, for example training a student with special abilities, ask them whether they can use the story for promoting your classes. This will help to boost the authenticity of your promotion.
Adopt local marketing techniques
If you wish to continue taking traditionally styled tutoring along with the online tutoring, connecting with the local student base is a good idea to take your business forward.
If you are looking for how to get student clients, consider connecting with educational brands in your locality. Reach out to local clients through classified advertisements. Circulate brochures and notices for your online tutoring business.
Consider partnering with schools in your locality for their referral programs as it will help you reach your target learner base.
Don’t forget to add your email, website, booking links, etc. in the ads or flyers to increase your conversion rates. Offer exciting discounts to your first students. Convincing your first users to register for your online classes is a bit difficult.
The best way to get them to sign up for your classes is to offer discounts and promotions they cannot refuse. Before deciding on the price and discounts, conduct market research to see how much other online tutors are charging.
You can try undercutting their prices. Also, you can set your prices high but offer steep discounts for the first batch of your clients.
For some tutors, charging hundreds or even thousands can pay off. But it works mostly in cases when they have an established presence in the industry. But when you are starting out, it is better to price nominal.
To implement that, price your courses high, and offer exclusive discounts as a first-time offer so that your users would identify it as a great deal to sign up for.
Conclusion
Getting initial clients for your clients for tutoring business might take a lot of effort and time than you have though if you are starting out from scratch. To ensure that you can pull it off, offer a personalized learning experience to your students starting with an appointment to delivering the actual classes.
Use a professional online tutoring software to manage your online tutoring sessions efficiently. Look for an all-in-one software that features all the essential functionalities like a tutor dashboard, whiteboard tools, live tutoring, payment gateway integration, social media integrations, etc.
Adapt online tutoring to get adjusted to the COVID-19 pandemic and managing your business efficiently even post COVID-19.
