How to Market Yourself as a Tutor: Find Students You Like

What’s the most common struggle as a tutor for you? You might say “oh it’s definitely getting students, I’m good at what I do which is teaching and tutoring, but marketing? Definitely not my strong suit.” Most of the tutors I’ve talked to think this is their weakest spot when it comes to being independent, not relying on a third party platform like Preply, italki and Wyzant.

You’re right, but only fifty percent, because there’s another half of the picture you probably haven’t noticed at all, and it’s the reason getting students seems so hard to you. There are two aspects to this problem. The first one is that marketing is not just about getting students. The second one is finding the channel that fits both you and the place your target audience actually hangs out.

What is marketing, actually?

I understand that most tutors, when they go out on their own, see advertising and marketing as a necessary “must do” chore to get students so they can do what they’re meant to do, which is tutoring. But no tutor who just enjoys tutoring will ever find this article. Why? Because the tutors who purely enjoy tutoring will, relatively speaking, often have a stable job. Only the ones who crave making more money and being free, who think themselves highly competent at their skills and are looking for the next stage of their tutoring career, will reach this article.

There’s a reason most tutors aren’t into marketing or advertising in the first place. Part of it is the stereotype, part of it is the academic intellectual arrogance of purity for knowledge, and part of it is that they get overwhelmed, or they just don’t know where to start.

Sure, by its nature marketing is a means to an end. You go out and find whatever way you can to expose yourself in the world, hoping that the people who need the value you provide will see you and potentially pay you in exchange for it. So marketing isn’t about providing value itself, it is about communicating the value you already have.

It sounds easy, but any activity that’s worth having a name just for it usually means there’s more worth learning and knowing than just “oh yeah, marketing is about pay to win”, or that it’s luck.

Who are you actually selling to?

So like I said, in a nutshell marketing is about communicating your value to potential clients. But first you need to define your potential clients. Who are you trying to sell to? In marketing this is called your target customers, and note it, this is especially hard for tutors. Out of most of the tutors I’ve worked with, including when I was starting, 99 percent of them made this mistake. They couldn’t clearly define their target customers.

You might be thinking, of course I know my target customers, it’s so obvious, they’re students, parents, people who want to learn this one specific subject or skillset. Most tutors will answer like this, and you’re right, of course a definition is better than none, but it’s a vague one nonetheless, because this is like saying oh, I open a restaurant and my target customers are people who want to eat.

If that’s all you know about your target customers, on a very surface common sense level, then dare I say your job right now is not thinking about how to tutor and teach better so that you can attract more students to you simply by the quality of your tutoring. You need to learn about marketing and business as a whole. For more detail on better understanding buyer psychology and pure marketing and sales skill, I listed an article on this topic, you can go check it out if you’re interested in learning more about it: content creation, marketing and value

You might ask, why do we have to know all of that, isn’t it easier to just do paid ads, or go to one of the Facebook groups and post myself, hey I’m available for this tutoring if any of you are looking for help with this subject, blah blah blah? Sure, it can work, and word of mouth too, I bet that’s probably the only primary way you get your current students.

But that isn’t very effective, right? For posting on social media it depends on the algorithm and luck, because you’re just posting self promotion, and social media normally rewards you with traffic when you create content that can hold people’s attention. For paid ads that’s even more obvious. Whether it’s Meta, Google or Instagram, when you create a campaign it won’t magically bring the students you want even if you use money. Why? Because ads only amplify what you already know about your niche. What do your target audiences want? If you don’t even know who your target audiences are in a very specific way, how does Google or Meta know who they promote your ads to? The point being, you can not brute force your way out of this.

Two demographics can hide inside one subject

So let’s go one layer deeper. Let’s just say you’re tutoring math, good, you’re tutoring specifically calculus, and you’re getting all kinds of demand for helping others with calculus. But after a while, if you pay attention to the people who come to ask for your help and pay you, you will see roughly two sets of demographic. There’s the group of students from middle and high school who need to learn calculus to pass the exam, high demand. And there’s adults who want to get into the AI industry who also need to learn calculus.

Note it, I’m just giving you a hypothetical scenario. In real life this is not obvious to spot, different demographics tend to blend in, and in the real world you usually need more patience and experience and enough time spent in your niche and your market to have this knowledge.

So back to our hypothetical scenario. You now have mainly two groups of people coming to you, students who are learning calculus for an exam, and adults who are learning calculus for practical use in the AI industry. You now have a better and clearer picture of who your target demographics are, so what do you do now?

Well, even if you do absolutely nothing, you’re still in a better place compared to if you didn’t pay attention and observe, because now you realize you actually have choices to make, A, B or C. And as you can see, from these two simple roles I showed you, it’s not that hard. I’m not asking you to master this, I only hope you understand it better and apply it to your tutoring business, or it could be any business, or just simply to being a better well rounded person who can have a relatively easy time when it comes to making money.

Okay, let’s get back to it. So you have two demographics who have demand from you, what do you do? Ideally you master your service as tutoring and have a big company, become a mega corporation in the tutoring industry so you can capture them both, but often we don’t live in that ideal world, at least not yet. So in order for you to market better, of course you can serve both of them, there’s nothing wrong with that, but the better approach as a small business or an independent freelancer is to lock one of these two audiences and go deep. But which one do you choose?

Don’t choose the audience that pays more

Most tutors will just go with whichever group pays more and be like, yeah I’ll choose this one since they tend to pay more. Let’s just say that between these two hypothetical groups, students from school and adults who learn it because they want to apply it in their AI profession, the students tend to pay a higher price than the adults.

This is where you need to pay attention again. Not to the different target audiences and the price difference you just identified, but to yourself. Ask yourself, not for the profit, but for the well being of yourself specifically when you do the work itself with these different target audiences. Who are the ones that get along with you the most? Who appreciates your value more? Who agrees with your value more? Don’t start by thinking about who the target students are, start by thinking about what kind of person you are. What is your value when you do something, and I mean anything? What do you care about the most?

I swear to god, sometimes when a person is getting into business they tend to learn and think about the logical side of business, focus on the market and the customers, but often neglect their internal personality. And the reason why I said it is because with any sort of profession, it doesn’t matter if it’s a business or a job profession, if you don’t know yourself first, you will be like driving blind, almost hoping something will work. Because business, or any sort of skill based activity, it’s revolved around you first. The way you tutor is your way, it’s stemmed from you as a person, as who you are, your nature.

Your value is your subject plus who you are

Enough abstract talking, let’s get back to the two scenarios and let’s see it in action. Earlier I gave the two different audiences their avatars, now let’s focus on you.

Let’s just say the reason why you’re so good at calculus is because you love computational physics and programming, that’s where your interest lies. So in this case let’s say you clearly tend to have more passion and excitement for teaching and talking about calculus and technology with your adult students, the ones you share more overlapping value with, compared to the students who pay you more money sure, but who learn it just because they have to.

Students that are from high school or middle school don’t share that much overlapping value and interest alignment compared to the adults. And even though the adults you currently tutor, the ones who want to learn it because of AI, don’t share all of your value either, you and them are under one big domain, which is tech. Not the closest thing to your interest, but close enough compared to students who only share one thing with you, which is just math.

Okay, remember I said that in this scenario the students from school pay you more, and that we want to get consistent ideal students via marketing, and that marketing is all about communicating your value to a certain group of people. The highest value you can bring in this case is not just math and calculus, it’s your interest in IT and tech plus the calculus knowledge. It’s a combination of two things. So even though the adults pay you less for now, in the long term as time goes on, you will definitely have more success in this field than in the other one.

Because remember, when you communicate your value, you’re not just saying hey, I can help you with calculus, feel free to DM, all ranges of calculus and algebra too if you want, I have a lot of experience in math from basic to advanced. I’m pretty sure you’ve seen these kinds of self promotion and advertising posts all the time, and this is exactly why you’re struggling to get students coming to you, to make a suitable and profitable tutoring career, or any business in that regard.

I believe most tutors already have their unique strength, they just don’t know how to communicate that beyond spending time with their students. Tutors usually have no problem closing a deal with a student after they’ve talked, whether it’s in person or on an online video or voice call, but it’s the process of how to get the students who want them to know they exist. So understanding what makes you a bit special can give you a better idea on how to position yourself, and how to display yourself and your tutoring to your target customers.

Where do your students actually spend their time?

So now we have learned that it’s about matching your value proposition to the highest matchable set of people. Okay, so now, exactly how are we gonna do the marketing itself to get students? I’m pretty sure by this point you already have a somewhat general direction of how to do it, but let’s break this down.

There are many marketing channels like YouTube, Facebook, forums like Reddit, Instagram and so on. How to choose is to consider two factors, and the first one is where your target audience spends their time. If you really thought about it from the earlier part of this article, you might already have a rough estimation.

Let’s just still use this students and adults example. If you target the students, where do you find them? Probably never, because they’re busy playing video games and doom scrolling on TikTok. You find their parents, and Facebook will be the place, or SEO and paid ads. Vice versa, adults who want to get into the tech industry tend to be young and male dominated, so Reddit and YouTube will be the place to go.

Choose one channel, and choose it for your strength

If you’re not in the stage of scaling your business, and you’re just trying to learn and get good at marketing and wanna see results fast, then just choose one primary place. Don’t even choose two. Remember there’s a quote, “jack of all trades, master of none”.

But then let’s just say, which one should you choose? This is after you have located the couple of platforms your target customers spend time on. Out of these couple of platforms, choose the one that suits your natural strength the most. Don’t choose what’s popular and trendy, like oh, a lot of people are saying I should do TikTok, etc. The fundamental skills you will learn are the only things that matter in the end, and different channels require different strengths, so that really comes down to you.

For example, if you’re introverted and prefer to read and write instead of video editing and being on camera, I’m not saying you should never market on video platforms, since they’re pretty much the dominant places on the modern internet. But if you force yourself to do that, not only is it very hard for you to keep doing it consistently, it might also make the work low quality. The rule of thumb is that at the beginning you should always play to your strength, your natural talent, instead of pure logical thinking.

For another example, another tutor who faces the same problem, and she wants to choose a marketing channel. She has two options, YouTube, and Google paid ads for her website landing page. She’s a very energetic person, very compassionate and kind, but not very analytical, nor does she enjoy being analytical, and due to that nature she doesn’t like doing the SEO and the website written and technical side of her marketing. But she does enjoy and like to engage with visual content, so she should, at least in the early stage, only focus on making YouTube videos for marketing, to the best she can make.

After all those examples I have given and shown, you will see a pattern. Marketing, or just like business itself, it’s really just a negotiation between reality which is the market and your inner world. You need to constantly find the intersection between what you’re good at and what reality needs.

Marketing is attracting, not selling

Selling is the process of convincing others to take actions, which is very immediate and instant. Either this person buys from you now or a couple of days later and you get money, or they don’t. Most of the tutors I know and have helped normally don’t have a problem of selling once the students found them, because most of you don’t have the problem of teaching itself.

If you do, then you will know. Like, you might not have a problem of getting people, but they won’t pay and choose you, and then you need to also work on your trial lesson. For more detail you can check out this article: how to teach a trial lesson

Marketing is more of a long term game. Since most tutors do not have the problem of converting new students, their problem is a lack of exposure and traffic. So whatever the platform and channel you choose for your marketing, do not cold call or do any sort of active overselling. I’m a firm believer that you only attract the people you want to work with, not chasing. Education, even though it’s also competitive, still somewhat relies on your expertise. So what you need to do is to pick a channel and stick with it.

If you have any questions or want a deeper dive, I’ve helped hundreds of tutors start and grow their own tutoring business, and you can book a free strategy call to get a one on one with me.

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