How to Advertise Your Tutoring Agency Online?

Whether you are a small business trying to secure your first customer or a well established business looking to continue expanding, knowing how to market yourself online is important to securing business growth.

Social media gives you the ability to gain new customers without spending any money. Tutor listing services like TutorCruncher’s Find a Tutor can help you secure clients ready to buy. Review sites and forums can give you great buzz through e-word-of-mouth.

To help you advertise your agency better online here are 5 tips for you:

1. Keep your social media up to date.
2. Provide social proof with review sites.
3. Perfect your website.
4. Start using clever promotions.
5. List your business on directories.

Read on to learn more about each of them!

Be active on social media

Social media platforms are a great way to advertise your business. By being active on social media and interacting with other agencies you can spread the word about your company for free.

Before you begin posting, make sure you identify what value you are giving to clients with your posts. For most people social media is a way to switch off, so they will find continuous promotional content off-putting. You could consider trying to focus on some of the following topics:

• Entertainment: If it makes sense with your branding, create light hearted content. Funny and relatable posts are also more likely to be shared on social media, meaning you could get more traction for free.
• Education: Are you able to provide expertise in a certain topic which will help people? If so, lean into this! People enjoy learning new things, and if you can provide knowledge to them in short digestible posts or videos you are likely to gain new followers.
• Tips and Tricks: Alongside new knowledge, people love gaining new insight into how to do things more efficiently. Creating tips and tricks posts is one of the best ways to create fun, digestible content, which users will engage with and share.

Alongside posting, you should also consider spending some time doing social listening. Social listening is the act of following mentions of your business and replying to users talking about your business. Engaging with people talking about your brand or topics you care about can increase your social traction. It can also help you understand people's sentiment towards your business.

Take advantage of review sites

Review sites provide potential clients with extra security about the quality of your service. Online reviews will also help give your business social proof, which is the phenomenon of people following others behaviour.

To build up a good reputation on review sites, you need to get clients to review you. Usually satisfied clients will be happy to take a few minutes out of their day to write a nice review. Be sure to remind people to review your business when it feels appropriate.

If you are having trouble collecting reviews, you could also consider incentivising people to leave a review. This could be done through promotions or a gift in return for a review.

Trusted review sites used by companies include:

• Google Reviews
• TrustPilot
• Facebook Reviews

Some sites such as TrustPilot allows you to add your rating to your website. By adding a badge showing a good rating to your website, you can assure customers that you provide great service.

Create a powerful website

Did you know: 57% of internet users said they would not recommend a website with bad design to someone.

What's more: 75% of users will make a judgment about a company's credibility based on their website's appearance.

First impressions count, especially online. When potential customers have dozens of options to choose from, you want to make sure your tutoring agency website does not put users off. There are lots of simple and effective tools you can use to boost your website appearance such as:

• Easy website builders like Squarespace, Wix and Wordpress which let you build a website using easy drag and drop tools.
• TutorCruncher’s Socket provides you with professional front-end integrations for listing tutors and lessons on your website. As well as this, the plug-in enquiry form feeds information directly from your website to your TutorCruncher system and emails.
• Website monitoring tools such as HotJar help you understand what your users are doing on your website and what you could improve.
• Free tools like Google Analytics can give you insight into where your users are coming from, how you are converting them and what areas of your website you might need to improve.

Making sure your website is functional and professional can be the make or break of a sale. So using some free and cheap tools to optimize your online presence can massively boost your sales.

Tap into the power of promotions

A great way to get new customers on board as well as to re-engage old customers is to run a limited time promotion. You can create targeted promotions and get the word out about them using TutorCruncher’s broadcast feature.

Some promotions you might want to consider include:

• New Customer Discounts: Offering a lower price or a discount such as ‘First Sessions Free' to new users will likely help clients convert. If you want to make these offers more effective, you could consider doing these promotions for a limited time during periods when you usually expect more uptake such as around exam time or during back to school season.
• Loyalty Rewards: Reports show that ¾ of clients want to get personalised promotions based on their past purchase history. A simple way to do this is to find your most loyal and active clients and reward them for sticking with you. This type of promotion will help increase brand loyalty, meaning customers will keep coming back.
• Offer discounts of subscriptions: Subscriptions guarantee users paying you a set some regularly. They are also a great way to increase customer retention, since users become more attached to your business from regularly receiving services from you. Try TutorCruncher’s subscription feature today!

Aside from the promotions mentioned above you can also think about some unique promotions that fit your business model. While promotions are not a new strategy, time and time again they prove to be an effective one. So testing the waters will most likely be a worthwhile investment.

List your agency on a company directory

Agency directories are a great way to get free promotion. When a potential customer gets onto an agency listing site they are already there with the intent to make a purchase. This will therefore make it easier for clients to convert clients.

There are lots of free company directories you can be apart of including:

• TutorCruncher’s Find A Tutor
• Google My Business
• Bing Places

While company directories can sometimes be seen as being less useful today, due to the ease of internet searches, linking your business to these pages can help boost your SEO and help you show up higher on Google.

What's next?

Following these simple steps can help you gain cheap or even completely free traction online. While it might take a bit of time for these steps to pay off, keeping at them will guarantee success!

Want to learn more about how to run your business more effectively? Read our blog about the BCG matrix, and learn how to section products with ease.

Looking for tools to help you promote your business? Try TutorCruncher’s broadcast feature to promote your agency more effectively!