Giveaways.
If you are a tutor who is looking for an affordable and effective way to growing your tutoring business...Giveaways are going to be an awesome addition to your tool box of marketing strategies.
I have been using giveaways to grow my tutoring business for years now and if you follow the strategy I am about to lay out for you step by step I think you'll be able to replicate similar results!
Why are giveaways amazing for new marketers (Or veterans as well)?
When I was a new marketer trying every strategy under the sun I struggled to get the results I was looking for. I spent thousands of dollars trying different strategies that lead to mediocre to okay results.
I discovered a variation of this strategy years ago after speaking with one of my mentors. He was building an ecommerce brand and took it from $0 to over 7-figures within just a couple of months. In fact, he was labelled one of the fastest growing ecommerce brands of that year. Absolutely, insane!
This was when I thought to myself....What would happen if I merged this concept?
Physical products merged with your tutoring services...
But before I dive into the details of the strategy there are a few other reasons this works so well.
Giveaways are far more forgivable when it comes to performance than other types of advertisements.
Why?
Because they are easy to understand when your audience discovers your ad and who doesn't love free stuff, right?
This leads to more people wanting to click on your ad and give you their name, email and phone number (Phone number isn't required...I recommend just the email when first starting out).
The more people you can get to click on your ad will lead to a cheaper cost per lead!! That's why this method is so powerful.
What offers work well for giveaways?
The trick to making this work best for you will always boil down to the offer.
You want to be able to attract people who are going to not only be interested in your free offer but potentially your tutoring as well!
Always remember your end goal: To have them invest in your tutoring.
If you don't want to offer a physical product like I am going to suggest...
You can simply offer something like...
3-months of free tutoring.
6-months of free tutoring.
12-months of free tutoring.
Etc...
These offers work just fine! They work even better if you offer group tutoring.
It costs you absolutely nothing to offer this sort of giveaway...
You simply allow them to attend your group sessions that you are already doing regardless. How cool is that?
Now, in my experience adding in a physical product helps reduce your advertising costs.
The strategy.
The first thing I would do is head over to Amazon.com.
For sake of simplicity I am going to assume you're a math tutor (But you can follow the exact steps regardless of what you're tutoring).
In the search bar I would type in things like...
Math.
Math games.
5th grade math.
etc...
You want to search for things that your ideal customer would enjoy winning.
A parent who is entering a giveaway for some awesome math game to help their kids is obviously someone who cares about their child's education...Wouldn't you agree?
This is the person we want to enter! Because odds are...They may also be interested in tutoring for their child as well.
Here is an example of a really cool giveaway item:
This is something that is affordable for you but something I think would be great for attracting parents who have students that struggle with their foundation math skills such as multiplication or division (Very common weaker areas for children).
A few things to watch out for...
Look for items with tons of 5-star reviews...
So you know it's not only a quality product but it also shows that people are purchasing it! (Showing interest).
Your next step would be to begin building out your giveaway funnel. SmartTutor has an incredible funnel builder to help you get all of this setup and ready to go for you!
What's a funnel?
It's essentially a sales process that you can take someone through to try and get them to take specific actions.
It's different than a website because a website can have a lot of distractions. A sales funnel will have only one option...Take this or not. Buy this or not. Book this or not. I think you get the point.
Here is an example of a giveaway landing page that comes with the SmartTutor system:
After someone enters their information on the entry form they will then be presented with an offer to book a free consultation with you!
This step is really cool because you now have an opportunity to turn some of the people who entered your giveaway into booked calls!
You'll lead them to a page that has a calendar that allows them to easily book their consultation with you.
Pro Tip: Incentivize them to book that free consultation. Triple their odds of winning if they book a call with you.
Here is an example of what that page could look like:
How do we promote our giveaways?
Below I will list a few of my favorite ways to get people to actually see your giveaway offer...
- Facebook advertising
- Instagram advertising
- Influencer marketing
These are my top three favorite methods of actually getting people to see my giveaway offers!
There are tons of ways to actually market your offers but I highly recommend picking one source of traffic to begin with, master it, and then add in a second source of traffic.
A few tips about your advertisements...
- I would keep your sales message incredibly simple.
- Keep it short, sweet and to the point.
- Make the image look professional and clearly show the prize.
- Use a strong headline.
- Call out your ideal audience in your marketing message.
If you follow these tips you should be able to create an effective advertisement that will get people excited about your giveaway.
Email Marketing
I want to close out this post touching a little bit on email marketing.
The point in growing such a large email list is to be able to nurture your leads into paying customers, right?
I've seen it far too often that someone will grow their email list and then they won't send them any emails! That's insane to me. Make sure you are consistently emailing your list.
When running a promotion like this you will want to combine an automated welcome sequence with manual weekly newsletters...
Let me explain...
When someone enters your giveaway, odds are they don't know who you are, what you do or how you can help them.
So you are going to want to put them on an automated email sequence warming them up to who you are!
Here is an example of what an automated email sequence might look...
- Email #1: Thank them for entering.
- Email #2: Introduce yourself, what you do and how you've been helping students.
- Email #3: Talk about the hero's journey. How you overcame similar obstacles and how it changed your life. If you don't have a story like that...Tell a story about one of your students.
- Email #4: Show case some incredible testimonials of some of your students.
- Email #5: Ask them again to book a free consultation to see if you can help their child.
Then make sure every single lead is added to your weekly/monthly newsletter so even if they aren't ready to become a client of yours now...You'll always stay top of mind.
So when their child is struggling in the future...They will give you a call!
I hope you got a lot of value out of this post and I am excited to see you grow your tutoring business using giveaways.
If you'd like help implementing this strategy and get access to our done-for-you funnels, templates, emails and more you can grab a 14-day free trial to SmartTutor and begin implementing this strategy in your business today!
