The Mega Importance of Tutorials To Promote Your Online Classes
Written by Stephanie
December 20, 2022
Your courses are ready and you’re ready to rumble – yay! However, any online tutoring business needs more than just willingness and great content. Without students, your classes are going nowhere quickly. That is why promoting your classes is so important, especially online.
All very well, but how exactly can you promote your classes? Well, we’re here to tell you that tutorials can be a terrific avenue to showcase your classes to the (online) world. So, let’s take a deeper dive into the world of content marketing and how the use of tutorials can bring students to your classes.
Content Drives Business
Let us be clear: content is super important as it drives website traffic. A great way to promote your classes is by means of content marketing. As the name suggests, content marketing is the content you create to attract business. It can be in the form of videos, webinars, blog articles, FAQs, eBooks, and more.
Think of content marketing as central to your ‘Marketing Strategy 101’. It’s also particularly valuable for small online businesses. In terms of lead generation (i.e. fostering potential customers), one study showed that companies which had a blog on their website generated 67% more leads than those that didn’t have a blog. Content is indeed king!
The Great Benefits of Content
You may be a really small business, but you may also be a ‘guru’ or even the leader in your given niche, whether it’s tutoring German, doing baking classes or teaching video editing. Maybe you didn’t realize that, but you just might be! Content allows you to gain name recognition and, importantly, it helps build trust and respect in you by prospective clients online.
An often overlooked and lasting benefit of content marketing is that referred to as ‘evergreen content’. That means any content which is timeless and not bound by being contemporary or ‘trendy’. For example, it didn’t matter whether you made a video offering tips on speaking casual French in 2017, because it’s still valid in 2022, right! The same can be said for a blog article offering a step-by-step recipe for the best banana bread around.
That is why any form of content that is evergreen is so valuable for your marketing – it never gets outdated. ‘How-To’ content is especially popular since educating your audience not only gives you credibility but can result in new clients.
The Magic of Videos / Tutorials
Did you know that 53% of people online watch two or more educational or instructional videos a week? Just do a search on YouTube with the terms ‘how to’ or ‘how do I?’ and you will be stunned at how many videos there are out there. Of course, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook are also excellent platforms in which to publish your short-length, even improvised videos.
However, tutorials need not only be in the form of videos. You may even be intimidated about having to produce or appear on a video! That’s fine because other forms of tutorials include:
- Blog posts /Articles
- Audio / Podcast
- Infographics / Clip art
- ‘How-To’ Takeaway as a PDF
It’s always important to remember what the principal purposes of online tutorials are. They typically serve one of three purposes (or a combination thereof):
- To supplement instruction or training, e.g., a Spanish teacher doing a quick video on greetings and words for the holiday season.
- To provide information, e.g., a karate instructor or sensei getting a graphic designer to design an infographic about the eight basic karate moves.
- For marketing purposes, e.g., a newbie philately tutor doing a podcast on how to properly mount stamps in mint condition.
Market Yourself Like A Pro
You will always need to find an audience for your content. Blogging and social media are your two best bets. The former is best for text-based tutorials or audio, i.e. podcasts, as the content tends to be ‘static’ on a blog or website. However, that doesn’t stop you from having embedded video tutorials on your website.
On the other hand, social media lends itself best to video tutorials. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and a host of other social media platforms are where your videos will shine best, although they too can be great avenues for other types of media.
Marketing yourself like a pro also means making search engines work for you. You may not have heard of SERPS (aka search engine result pages) but you’ve probably heard of SEO, or search engine optimisation. SEO is the way in which you attract potential clients to your website or platform via organic searches. A lot of your SEO success will depend on the quality and amount of your content, including tutorials. And in the words of Forbes: “SEO without content marketing is like a body without a soul”.
Yip Can Be Your Collaborator!
Another excellent way to market what classes you have to offer is to be on a learning platform such as Yip. Being a ‘Yiper’ means being able to offer even more after your classes are done. How? You can upload any documents, including tutorials in the form of video, worksheets, eBooks, short clips or whatever other medium you choose to offer your supplementary content.
You can eventually consider building a content calendar, whereby you take both existing and potential students on a monthly ‘journey’ via your content. This can be in the form of social media posts, blog articles, email shots, podcasts, and any other combination of ways you generate content. You decide!
It’s said that content like tutorials is not intended to sell a class or promote your brand. Rather, it should be to educate, entertain or even empower prospective students. Your tutorials should spur their interest and engage with prospects, so that they can eventually become customers.
That is all true. But don’t kid yourself. Tutorials are still ultimately about promoting your classes and who you are as an online tutor and brand. And, yes, it’s about getting sales. Just think of tutorial-type content as a ‘softer’ way of reaching out to prospects online. Oh, and having fun!!
