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Advertising Tuition Business

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I have a tuition business which I have been running part time with my partner for about 18 months. Now we have some money in the bank I am ready to make the leap and go full time :j, but I need to think of effective ways (which are free-reasonably cheap) to advertise to bring more work in.
To give you an idea of what we do, we offer tuition specialised in maths and the science, we will be offering intensive revision courses and proofreading. We offer the tuition to secondary schools students to degree level, so the advertising needs to reach parents/ students and I am failing to get any brilliant inspiration as to how I can reach this audience. I have mainly advertised on online directories so far and our websites comes very high on google searches which is how we get most of our work, but I am now ready to spend a bit of money on advertisements (but free is still good) to bring more work in and to expand. Any ideas on how I can reach my target audience? Any help and advise will be gratefully received :o.

Charlotte

Comments

  • poet123
    poet123 Posts: 24,099 Forumite
    If it were me I would think laterally. Obviously, no school would distribute leaflets about your services for various reasons. However, other businesses who have contact with parents and children may be more amenable. School uniform suppliers, youth groups, churches,Nurseries, after school clubs, sports venues, Taxi companies, all of them may be willing to take a stock of your advertising literature. So you need to make the leaflets eyecatching, and appealing, and ask for them to be sited in a prominent place. Perhaps spend a portion of your budget on a good slogan, and logo to make your leaflets memorable.

    Another avenue is PTA, friends of groups, they are good places to get word of mouth clients, maybe you could offer a raffle prize sporting your logo, sponsor raffle tickets for the xmas draw etc.

    Think about where well heeled, educated parents hang out, target that type of establishment, upmarket coffee shops, bookshops,Hairdressers, Nail bars, National childbirth trust meetings ( many will have older children), even clothes shops, village halls etc.

    Good luck!
  • Hi poet, those are some brilliant ideas thank you very much, I even have a school uniform/teen clothes store over the road from me so that would be perfect! I agree I need to get myself a good logo and then I guess the next step will be ordering some flyers. When placing flyers in stores, are you usually expected to pay and if so how much would you expect? If any one else has some ideas I'd love to hear them!

    Charlotte
  • Savvy_Sue
    Savvy_Sue Posts: 47,293 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    poet123 wrote: »
    Obviously, no school would distribute leaflets about your services for various reasons.
    Maybe yours wouldn't, but I remember several leaflets about tuition services coming home via satchel post over the years! And the covering letter was on the school's headed paper, although clearly written by the company. I suspect these were paid for, ie the company paid the school something for the privilege of sending leaflets home, and they were 'national' companies or franchises, which may be a different situation to the OP's.

    My point is it MAY be worth asking, particularly if the school appears to have poor SATS results.
    Signature removed for peace of mind
  • Hi Sue, my company also offers nationwide tuition, so this would be a possibilty. It won't hurt for me to contact some schools and ask to get a general feel for it. It would be the most direct advertising possible so ideal, but I imagine it would have to handled tactfully! Thanks for your tip!
    I am hoping to publish online revision material/practice papers with time, so a possibilty would be offering one set of these for free for the school to use/distribute, if we slap our logo on these we may get people requesting tuition as well as possibly ordering more study material, what do you think?
  • poet123
    poet123 Posts: 24,099 Forumite
    Savvy_Sue wrote: »
    Maybe yours wouldn't, but I remember several leaflets about tuition services coming home via satchel post over the years! And the covering letter was on the school's headed paper, although clearly written by the company. I suspect these were paid for, ie the company paid the school something for the privilege of sending leaflets home, and they were 'national' companies or franchises, which may be a different situation to the OP's.

    My point is it MAY be worth asking, particularly if the school appears to have poor SATS results.

    My school would feel they had a responsibility to vet the quality before seeming to endorse a service by disseminating information I suspect.
  • Savvy_Sue
    Savvy_Sue Posts: 47,293 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    poet123 wrote: »
    My school would feel they had a responsibility to vet the quality before seeming to endorse a service by disseminating information I suspect.
    I don't know if the schools we were using had a) vetted the quality or b) didn't really care because they knew very few parents were likely to use private tutors! But if a company wanted to give them money, who were they to argue? ;)
    Signature removed for peace of mind
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