Marketing Strategy

Earn $30k to $70k as A Math Tutor Part Time

Alright, marketing 101 here. Let’s talk about marketing for math tutors. I've done most of it. I've done it all. Some marketing works and some doesn't. I’ll help you tell the difference.

To get started with your marketing plan, do some work thinking about your target customer. What does that person look like? When I started my first tutoring company, I made three profiles for exactly who I was going to target: what they do, where they live, where they shop, things like that. You want to narrow in on who your clientele is.

Maybe you're just a calculus expert, and you want to help college students. You're probably going to be doing a little bit more Craigslist marketing, and you’ll want to put up flyers all around campus saying, “$30 an hour calculus tutor.” Go to the STEM hall or anywhere there are science classes, and post those up with pull tabs at the bottom. You're going to get some college students who want to pay you for help.

When you create these profiles, write about your customers in more detail. Maybe they go to Starbucks or Subway. Those places often have bulletin boards where you can post things for free. Once you drill down into who your client is, and the type of routines they have, that's going to help your marketing strategy.

We want to act with some foresight, before we go out and start marketing too heavily. I think it was Abraham Lincoln who said that if you have six hours to cut down a tree you should spend the first four sharpening the ax. We want to spend time planning for our marketing too, we want to spend 80% of our time planning what we're going to do, and then we can do it quickly.

Anything that won’t take much time and will cost less than $20 is something that might be worth giving a shot. Whereas something that's going to be expensive and take a lot of your time is probably not worth it. I've made newspaper ads and magazine ads, and it’s not really worth it for tutors in my experience. Maybe in some businesses, you might be able to make money using those, or if you're good at writing advertising copy and have a big budget. But even small magazines charge $700 for a tiny square ad. And you're hoping you get a couple clients out of that. But people might not even contact you.

I've even sent out over 30,000 postcards all over Oregon. Actually I ended up getting some clients from that. But in the end it’s not really worth it. I also went door-to-door and dropped off postcards and brochures. And you might be able to get a few people that way. But I would stick with those flyers with the tabs at the bottom. Focus on places where you know your target customer from that profile hangs out. Putting those up is going to be more effective than most other advertising methods.

The world is moving toward digital digital marketing, social media, and having an online presence. Some people are really savvy social media marketers. If you're great at Instagram, you can be making clips about factoring or mathematics and posting those. The same idea applies online, of going to places where your target clientele is going to be hanging out. There are many moms on Instagram and Facebook these days. Those are fair places to market. Google AdWords can be really good too. If you're savvy at creating websites, you could create a website or even just a blog and start writing your thoughts about mathematics. Test things out and learn from that and be able to keep growing and move forward.