grow your business, Marketing Tip, Tutors, Tutoring Businesses

How to Advertise your Tutoring Services: The Complete Guide to Tutor Advertising in 2023

While low-cost marketing methods and organic leads are a significant way to nurture your tutoring business, they are not sufficient in today’s world. With so much competition in the tutoring market, it becomes increasingly difficult to generate more and more high-quality leads organically from search engines, social media, and other sources. 

Advertising your tutoring services through paid methods can be a good way to complement your organic marketing efforts. They bring in highly targeted and relevant leads from various channels like search engines, social media, and even offline channels. 

But paid advertising can seem tricky and confusing at first for many tutors. So if you’re a beginner, we’re here to help you make the right choices and help you understand how to advertise your tutoring services successfully this year. 

Here’s a cool tip!

If you haven’t already experimented with low-cost or free tutor marketing strategies for your business, it would be a wise decision to try them out before moving on to paid advertising.
 
Check out this blog that has helped a lot of tutors to get a headstart in their organic marketing efforts.


Define the objectives for your tutor advertising campaign

When you decide to invest in paid advertising for your tutoring business, the first step is to set your goals for the campaign. They will not only help you move in the right direction but also make the tracking of results easier and more effective. 

Advertising on various channels will help you get targeted and relevant customers quicker than the organic strategies. To get you started, here are a few objectives common to the tutoring industry:

  • Higher engagement on social media 
  • Increased website traffic 
  • Greater number of bookings from your website and social media  
  • More conversions from tutoring website 

71% of small businesses have a website. If you are part of the other 28% and are missing out on some major digital traffic on tutoring, don’t worry. We’ve got you covered!

Check out this blog on how you can get started on creating your tutoring website.

Your goals and expectations of the campaign will be very specific to your business. But ensure that you work on this step and finalize your targets before you start working on your tutor advertising campaign. 


Choose the right platforms to advertise as a tutor 

Advertising can be an effective way to get more tutoring clients. But for the best results, you need to do it the smart way! Once you decide on your advertising goals, the next step is to choose where to advertise your tutoring services. 

  • Find out what your competitors are doing. What kind of paid advertising strategies they’re using, what works best for them, especially in your target market, etc. Learn from their failures and make calculated decisions. 
  • Feel the pulse of your audience. Research and analyze what your target audience is searching for, what they want, where they’re searching for tutoring services, etc. It’ll give you a better understanding of what you should try and how. 
  • Figure out your advertising budget. Depending on your current revenues, allocate a part of your funds toward advertising. In general, it is a good idea to spend 4-10% of your net revenue on paid advertising. 
  • Finalize your advertising channels. Based on the above factors, choose the possible channels for your strategy, and make the final decision on which ones will work for you. 

Once you have done your market research, here are a few advertising platforms you can explore. We have also mentioned the use case for which these channels are most suited at the end of each section: 

1. Facebook and Instagram ads

These two platforms are the most used social media apps. Facebook has over 2.74 billion monthly active users, and Instagram has nearly a billion. And that’s why your ads on these channels are more likely to reach a greater section of the audience. Plus, these two platforms go hand-in-hand. So the tutor ads you create for Facebook can also run on Instagram if you want. 

The best part about advertising on Facebook and Instagram is that you can reach a highly targeted audience. You can filter audiences based on their interests, location, age, gender, and more! This means that only relevant people see your ads, which in turn leads to higher conversions. 

You can run the following types of tutor advertisements on Facebook and Instagram:   

1. Posts: These ads appear in the feeds of your target audience looking like the other organic posts, with a single picture. The only difference is that it will have ‘Sponsored’ written below the profile name.

Example: The Teaching Company used Facebook post ads to promote their classes using an offer for a free one-month trial. This helped them generate more than 15k subscriptions in March 2020 and increased the total average monthly subscriptions generated by over 10x. 


2. Stories: Ads in Instagram stories help you reach relevant people personally with one or more photos, videos, GIFs, etc. They appear while users are swiping through the stories on Instagram or even Facebook. 

You can also add calls to action on your story ads like ‘Learn More’, ‘Book Now’, ‘Sign Up’, etc.  Ads are differentiated from organic stories with a ‘Sponsored‘ right below the business name.


3. Video: Video ads can be a great way to build a connection with your audience and engage them. You can use a video that gives all the relevant information or is catchy. 

Example: My English School from Italy used video ads on Facebook and Instagram to generate new leads. This led to twice as many leads compared to their previous campaigns and had an 8.5% conversion rate. 


4. Carousel: It involves slides of multiple pictures or videos you want to upload along with some information about each. This allows you to give more information in one advertisement. 

Here is an example of carousel ads that you can run on Facebook and Instagram. Notice that you can add a CTA button like ‘Book Now’ to enhance conversions.

Don’t forget to optimize these tutoring ads for mobile devices, because that’s where the maximum people use these apps! 

Best suited for:

  • Facebook ads can be best for tutors who target parents of kids as they make a huge chunk of the users. What can be better than finding a Math tutor for their child while they were just scrolling through their feed?
  • Tutoring advertisements on Instagram can work best for tutors who teach teenagers or the young population since they’re the most active users of these channels. 
  • Tutoring businesses that provide services for multiple subjects or classes can use these ads, especially carousel ads to display information about each of them. 

2. Google PPC advertising

What’s the first place people go to when they’re looking for something on the Internet?

It’s Google – which makes Google search ads one of the best ways to drive relevant traffic to your website and landing pages. Moreover, you pay only when someone clicks on your ads!

These ads work for almost any budget, you have the power to set your own budget cap for the tutor advertisements so that you don’t end up spending more than you want to. 

Unlike Facebook and Instagram, where you define the audience who will see your ad, Google search ads can be set on a specific keyword. This means that when someone searches on Google for that keyword, they will see your ad as one of the search results.

The image below illustrates what Google search ads look like. The first two results from Cambridge Coaching and TutorMe are ads and contain all the relevant information needed in the limited space provided. 

Here’s a pro tip to work with Google search ads – target long-tail keywords. The shorter ones can have huge competition and may not bring in very targeted traffic. The longer, more specific keywords will increase your chances of conversions, especially in the beginning. For example, you could use a keyword like “English tutor in the Bay area”, or “Physics tutor for high school” instead of just “English tutor” or “Physics tutor”.

Best suited for:

  • Tutoring businesses of any size can try out Google ads to bring more qualified leads for their business. 
  • Tutors who have budget constraints can also try out this method of paid advertising without exceeding their financial limits. 

3. LinkedIn advertising

LinkedIn is a professional network for businesses and is quite popular. While having a strong presence on this platform is necessary, you can always enhance it with paid ads. 

You can choose your professional audience whom you want to target through LinkedIn. Select from the type of demographic data available – location, type of industry, profession, job titles, etc. There are multiple types of ads you can run on LinkedIn:

  • Text ads
  • Photo ads
  • Sponsored messaging 
  • Carousel ads
  • Video ads

Below is an example of a LinkedIn ad from Nulearn. They’ve promoted a weekend program and given only the necessary information in this advertisement. There is a clear CTA to ‘Apply Now’ and a ‘Learn More’ button where interested people can click for more detailed information.  

You can choose from two pricing models and pay only for the ads that work – pay per click (PPC) or cost per impression (CPM). You can also set your own budget without any contracts. 

The conversion tracking in LinkedIn also allows you to keep track of how your ads are performing and how many leads they’re bringing in. 

Best suited for:

  • Tutors who teach valuable job skills can find relevant people looking for jobs with those skills and reach out to them. Or even the tutors who teach students aiming to get into certain esteemed educational institutions. 
  • Tutors who take classes on industry-specific topics can target audiences from that specific industry, and optimize conversions. 
  • Budget is not such a constraint, but your target audience is. Professional target audiences can be reached effectively with LinkedIn ads. 

4. Printed adverts for local advertising 

The traditional advertising methods can work best when you want to target a specific geographical location and reach a wide segment of the population. There can be various methods of local print advertising: newspapers, magazines, local schools, markets, restaurants, shops, etc. – basically anywhere clients are likely to see your ad! 

Digital advertising is the rage today, but print ads can still work. Although you cannot track your results very efficiently in such cases. 

Here’s an example of a home tutor flyer. It is a colorful printed tutoring advertisement for children that is designed in a way that connects with children and their parents. It has all the necessary information needed as well. 

Best suited for:

  • Businesses that offer in-person tutoring, online tutoring, or home tutoring sessions for popular or the most in-demand subjects in a localized community. For example, Science tutoring for middle school students. 
  • Tutors who target a non-tech-savvy segment of the population. 

Don’t forget to drive more conversions

There are two ways that are the most effective in ensuring that your ads convert and you don’t miss out on any leads:

1. Create and promote your landing page

Landing pages can increase your ad conversion rate simply because they are bound to provide the information that leads are looking for. They are a must-have to maximize the efficacy of your paid advertising campaigns. So ensure that you don’t skip this step!

Keep it professional and include all the information that users are looking for: your educational qualifications, teaching experience, customer testimonials, pricing information, etc. Don’t forget to include CTA for booking a demo or trial class, or a signup CTA to start tutoring right away to drive more conversions.


2. Add booking CTAs

Providing direct CTAs for your leads to book a demo class, consultation or trial class with you is an excellent way to increase your conversions. Make sure that you add clear calls to action on each of your channels – tutoring website/ landing page, social media business profiles, or printed marketing materials. So that whenever visitors land on these places through your ads, their conversion into paying customers becomes extremely easy. 


CTA Tip!

Appointy’s tutoring scheduling software enables you to add “Book Now” widgets to your website, ads, landing pages, etc. with ease.
 
Drive more conversions from your Facebook and Instagram profiles by adding “Book Now” buttons, so that your occasional scrollers become your loyal customers
 
Make sure you try them out in your Appointy’s 14-day free trial!


Conclusion

Run experiments for paid advertising, in the beginning, to understand what works out best for your tutoring business without overspending your money. Try one channel at a time to advertise your tutoring services and put all of your focus on the same. 

Do share your experience and let us know if this post helped you in the comment section below. 

Wish you the best of luck!


About Appointy

We at Appointy, help business owners grow and run their businesses with our online scheduling software. This blog was a part of our ‘Manage your Business’ category, where we provide expert tips, and resources, or simply talk about the challenges that small and medium businesses face every day. 

If you have any thoughts on this blog or would like to chat about your business struggles and achievements, let us know in the comments below. 

We love a good talk!