19th January 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Probably the most frequently asked question about Blue Tutors is how we find our tutors and our students. While it would be nice for any prospective entrepreneurs, looking to start their own agency, to hear a few key secrets about finding tutors and tutees, unfortunately there is no quick fix, no way to instantly fill a database with a plethora of qualified tutors, and those looking for their help.
The most popular way for us to find tutors and students is by word of mouth. Every June we still go to Oxford and Cambridge to make sure all graduates are aware of tutoring as an option after they leave, but we’re finding more and more that the demand to join our tutor roster is fairly consistent throughout the year, and it is often friends discussing Blue Tutors that lead new tutors to try us out.
Word of mouth is obviously the best way for a student to be introduced to us too. We’re happy when someone calls us after being impressed with our website, or an ad that they’ve seen, but there’s nothing more pleasing than when a parent says “my friend used you and did really well”. As we’re all aware, mums talk, and they can’t help but tell all their friends when they feel that they’ve found a great tutor. However, sometimes that’s not the case, and we have had students tell us that they don’t want to send their friends in our direction because they want the help to be exclusively for them.
Probably the biggest waste of money since we began has been on advertising in newspapers and telephone directories. For most people over the age of 20 this might seem strange, because a lot of us might jump straight to the local newspaper when sourcing a tutor, or to a particular colour of directory. We’ve found that these companies are trying harder than ever to sell their advertising space, because they’re aware that it’s no longer a customer’s first thought when looking for anything.
Why has newspaper and directory advertising declined? Obviously because of the internet. It’s so common in almost every house in the UK now, and because it is the actual students, rather than their parents, who often seek us out, an online search engine is by far the closest challenger to word of mouth when someone is sourcing a tutor.
We do a significant amount of advertising online, including optimising our site for search engines (which is non-direct advertising), and posting pay-per-click adverts. You should be warned though, it’s very easy to quickly spend a lot on pay-per-click adverts if you can’t identify your customers from their search terms. As with any advertising, it’s not necessarily the medium it’s in, but whether the right people will see it, and whether they will act upon seeing it. What these online ads allow us to do is advertise very specifically for individual tutors, because we can state the area for the ad to be shown, and the subjects offered by our tutors in that area.