How To Advertise For Tutoring: The Ultimate Guide

Whether you’ve just started a private tutoring business or want to grow your existing company, knowing how to advertise your services is critical to your success. 

However, knowing where to begin—especially if you haven’t advertised a tutoring business before—can be a little daunting. 

Luckily, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about how to advertise tutoring services, including:

🧐 Why you first need to outline your advertising campaign goals.

🧐 How to define your unique value proposition as a private tutor.

🧐 How to decide which advertising platforms to use to reach your target audience. 

Before You Begin, Define What Success Looks Like 

To ensure your advertising campaign is successful, you first need to have an understanding of what you want to achieve with your marketing efforts. 

Having a clear goal in mind will not only help you define your priorities, but it will also help you to stay on track with your advertising campaign.

Here are a few examples of goals you might want to achieve with your advertising campaign:

📈 Increasing traffic to your tutoring website to grow your customer base.

📈 Getting higher conversions from your tutoring website.

📈 Securing more tutoring lessons. 

Whatever goal you set for your campaign, make sure that it’s realistic and that it will help you grow your tutoring business. 

Next, Establish Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP)

How you position yourself is one of the crucial elements of advertising. In order to position yourself effectively within any market, you need to determine what sets you apart from the competition. 

To do this, ask yourself the following questions: 

💭 What makes you stand out from other successful tutors? 

💭 Do you have any unique teaching techniques or notable academic achievements? 

To help you define your unique value proposition so that you can set yourself apart from similar businesses, it may be helpful to outline some basics. 

This may include: 

💡 What subjects you will be tutoring. 

💡 What your area of expertise is.

💡 What qualifications and tutoring skills you have.

💡 Whether you'll be tutoring online or in person.

💡 How much you will be charging for lessons.

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Seven Effective Ways to Advertise Your Tutoring Services

Once you have set a clear goal for your campaign and identified what makes you unique as a tutor, you can get started with advertising. 

The following section outlines some of the ways in which you can advertise your tutoring business. 

You can choose the methods that are most suitable to you and the specific goal that you have set for your tutoring advertising campaign. 

1. Target strategic locations with printed advertising

It may seem a little old school, but putting up printed advertisements (like brochures, flyers, or posters) is still an effective form of advertising. 

This is because it’s a relatively inexpensive and accessible way to spread the word about your tutoring business and services. 

If you place your advertisements at the correct locations, you stand a good chance of getting noticed by potential students or their parents.

Before you distribute marketing materials, always make sure that you have permission to do so. 

If you don’t, your ads may be removed and you could even damage the reputation of your tutoring business. 

Here are a few examples of where you could put up your printed advertising:

➡️Local schools.

➡️Libraries.

➡️Local community boards.

➡️Coffee shops.

➡️Shops/malls.

➡️Churches.

2. Use your network to gain referrals

The value of referrals and word-of-mouth advertising cannot be underestimated within the tutoring industry. 

Parents are looking for someone that they can trust with their child’s education, and if you’re planning on tutoring adults, they’re likely searching for subject matter experts that they would feel comfortable with. 

In both instances, a referral can go a long way and your reputation as a tutor means everything. 

There are a few different ways you can leverage your network to create more referrals. This includes:

✍️ Sending emails to schools offering your tutoring services to students who need help improving their grades. 

✍️ Reaching out to schools and asking if you can advertise your services in their newsletter.

✍️ Asking the students that you tutor or their parents to let others know about your services.

✍️ Joining online community forums where you can promote your tutoring business.

A crucial aspect of leveraging your network is ensuring that you create a good impression during tutoring sessions and other interactions with your students and their parents.. 

People are going to be talking about their encounters with you, so make sure that you create positive experiences for the students you tutor. 

However, it’s also important to remember that generating positive word-of-mouth advertising goes beyond just offering a good tutoring experience. 

It also includes things like staying on top of your admin and invoicing, maintaining clear and consistent communication, and always being professional and friendly. 

Don’t underestimate the power of social media 

According to the latest data, people spend an average of 147 minutes, or two hours and 27 minutes a day on social media.

Since people are spending so much of their time on social media, it’s a great place to get noticed by prospective clients and create a strong online presence for yourself.

Having a social media presence is also a way of establishing credibility. If people can’t find you or your tutoring business online, they may wonder whether it exists. 

You can also leverage social media by asking your students or their parents to leave reviews on your social media pages. 

Some of the social media platforms that you can use to advertise your business include:

🤳 Facebook.

🤳 Instagram.

🤳 TikTok. 

Let’s take a closer look at why each of these platforms can be effective for advertising a tutoring business. 

Facebook

Facebook groups are very popular corners of the internet where you can target groups of people who already share a common interest. 

For your tutoring business, you may want to advertise on parent groups, groups about studying hacks, and groups that are relevant to the subject that you will be tutoring. 

Location-specific Facebook groups are particularly useful for local advertising as they can enable you to target local community groups in your area. 

You could also create a Facebook page specifically for your tutoring business where parents and potential students can find more information about you as a tutor, leave reviews, and interact with you via the platform. 

Instagram

Instagram has shifted far beyond just an image-sharing platform. 

However, do not neglect the aesthetics of your page. Having a well-curated account makes you look professional and will increase the likelihood of people interacting with your content. 

Instagram could be a valuable tool for your tutoring business because you could add content like short tutorials to your ‘Reels’ or ‘Stories.’ 

Prospective clients who are exposed to your tutorials can then easily share them with their friends and family. 

This is great because the more people who see your content, the more likely you are to secure more customers. 

The numbers speak for themselves:

🏆 17.6% of people in the world use Instagram.

🏆 Over 200 million businesses use Instagram for online advertising.

🏆 60% of people say they discover new products on Instagram.

🏆 31.2% of Instagram users are between the ages of 25 and 34.

🏆 200 million Instagram users view one business profile or more daily.

🏆 One-third of the most viewed stories are from businesses.

TikTok 

With over 1 billion users, creating a TikTok account for your tutoring business is a great way to get noticed. 

This platform is ideal for creating engaging video content such as short tutorials. If you’re a math tutor, for example, you could share hacks for solving complicated equations.

You can also add a link to your website or contact form so that potential clients who see your videos can get in touch with you. 

4. Join tutoring directories 

Tutoring directories host the contact details of tutors who are either in a specific geographical area or experts in teaching a particular subject. 

You typically apply and pay a fee to have your business listed in a tutoring directory. 

The people who use tutoring directories are individuals who are actively looking for tutors like yourself. So, it’s a great place to advertise your services and find potential clients. 

5. Create an engaging website

Having a website is a great way to establish a sense of credibility for your tutoring business. 

It may seem challenging at first but there are many free online tools that can help you create a professional website for your business without having any coding or web-building expertise. 

Most of these free tools also offer customizable templates to help you build a user-friendly website. 

Two great tools that can be used to build your website are Wix and Squarespace. 

As your tutoring business grows, you may want to upgrade your website and add some paid features. Both of these tools allow you to do just that. 

You can use your website like your online CV where you host information like your qualifications and experience.

It’s also a great place to highlight your unique value proposition and outline what sets you apart from other tutors. 

You can also use your website to showcase testimonials from your past students and/or their parents. 

Testimonials are examples of social proof and they are a fantastic way to promote a tutoring business as people are looking for an expert that they can trust—either with their own education or with their child’s. 

6. Use SEO to get your website noticed

The purpose of search engine optimization (SEO) is to increase traffic to your website. 

This is vital as visitors to your site can become customers, so the more views your website gets, the better your chances are of growing your tutoring business.  

Using SEO helps to direct organic traffic to your website. This means that you are not paying for website views as you do with paid advertising, which we’ll cover in the next section. 

The main idea behind SEO is to consider how search engines work and generate search results. 

These insights are then used to determine how you can optimize your website so that you rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Why would you want to rank higher? Simple. It’s so that your tutoring business is one of the first names that pop up when people use a search engine to look for your services.

After all, when was the last time you looked at the second or even the third page of results for anything you’ve searched for online?  

Make your website user-friendly

This may seem like an obvious point, but you’d be surprised how many businesses neglect this cardinal rule when building their websites. 

There are a few simple ways to help ensure that your tutoring business website is user-friendly. Let's take a look at some of the most popular ones below:

Streamline content 

If it’s your first time building a website, you may be tempted to supply as much information as possible.

However, having tons of copy on your site is not necessarily a good idea. 

Give visitors an overview of who you are, the tutoring services you offer, and your expertise. hen use different pages on your site to elaborate on various elements. 

Having informative content on your website, or even a blog, is a great way to increase traffic as this content can also be used in SEO.

Just make sure that your long form content, like your blog, is hosted as a specific page on your website. 

You don’t want it to get in the way of someone just looking for an overview of your tutoring services and experience. 

Use subheadings to help visitors navigate your site

Subheadings are a great way to break up your content. It helps to guide visitors through your site and highlights information that they may be looking for at a glance. 

Ensure you use clear CTAs

A CTA is a call to action that prompts your reader to take a specific action. They are usually also highlighted visually, either by being written in bold text or placed in a colorful box.

Some popular CTAs include:

✅ Learn more.

✅ Get started.

✅ Get a quote.

✅ Subscribe (relevant if you decide to have a blog). 

Make your contact details clearly visible

Your contact details are one of the most important things to place on your website. It’s best practice to have a ‘contact’ page that supplies all of this information. 

However, you could even include your contact details as a footer on every page of your website as well. 

Include a contact form

You can add a contact form to your website where people can simply fill in their details and ask any questions that they may have. 

The most important thing about having a contact form on your website is ensuring that you follow up with people who complete it.

Neglecting to follow up on your contact forms can definitely have an adverse effect on your tutoring business. 

This is because prospective clients are taking the time to reach out to you and leave their details—not getting back to them could be interpreted as though you don’t want their business. 

7. Don’t forget about search engine marketing (SEM)

If you’re finding that your SEO efforts are not driving enough traffic to your site, you may want to add SEM to the mix. 

SEM allows you to display paid adverts as search results on different search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. They will appear along with organic search results. 

Using both SEO and SEM is a great way of driving as much traffic to your website as possible. 

The tutoring industry is quite competitive, so there are many businesses just like yours vying for website visitors. 

All of these businesses want to occupy the top few spots on the SERP so that they can be noticed by potential clients.  

If you use a combination of SEO and SEM, you’ll stand a much better chance of improving your website’s ranking and getting more potential customers to visit your landing page. 

Now It’s Your Turn to Start Advertising Your Tutoring Business

Advertising a tutoring business may seem like an overwhelming task. However, by taking a step-by-step approach and following this guide, you’ll be off to a great start. 

 

Here are a few key takeaways to remember so that you can successfully advertise your tutoring business:

🍎 Set clear goals.

🍎 Determine what sets you apart from the competition and communicate it across all marketing channels.

🍎 Create a cohesive online presence. This includes having a website and social media accounts that promote your tutoring business. 

🍎 Don’t dismiss more ‘old school’ forms of advertising for tutoring such as posters or flyers.

🍎 Never underestimate the power of a good referral—your reputation is everything!

Once you’ve successfully advertised your tutoring business and grown your customer base, you’ll need to ensure that you give your students and their parents the best possible service. 

Teach ‘n Go helps you do just that. Our school management system is great for tutors as it streamlines administration so that you can focus on doing what you do best—teaching. 

Our platform allows you to: 

🏅 Schedule and track lessons.

🏅 Easily manage attendance history.

🏅 Display individual course pricing.

🏅 Send bills directly to your clients.

🏅 Keep track of payments.

We have even created a dedicated portal that allows you to send automated email and SMS notifications to your students and their parents. This will help you strengthen those all-important customer relationships. 

So, what are you waiting for? Create a free account today and enjoy a 7-day free trial of our teacher scheduling software. No credit card required. 

You can also book a demo. You’ll have access to all of Teach ‘n Go’s premium features and be able to cancel at any time.