Increasing awareness is the first step to increasing overall demand for tutoring, and increasing demand has a host of benefits, the most significant being that higher traffic provides clear justification for your center's existence and expansion.

So this article and video focuses on step one of your funnel: building awareness.

Awareness has three sub-components:

1. Outreach: Students must know you exist.
2. Alignment: Students must understand what you do and that they are potential users.
3. Desire: Students must feel your services can positively impact their lives.

While this article will cover each step, we’ll put a special focus on the first component: outreach. Increasing the volume of your outreach is doable even with a simple process for data recording and experimentation, which we’ll outline below.

Outreach

The simplest way to improve awareness is to scale up your outreach.

The “marketing rule of seven” says that it takes, on average, seven touchpoints to convince a person to give your services a chance. A single email newsletter blast will simply not be enough: you have to reach them from many angles - maybe seven or more!

So let’s ramp up the total touchpoints you have with students.

The name of the game is slowly expanding the different “channels” you use as well as the depth of your efforts within each channel. To do this, we’ll establish a regular cadence for measuring and experimenting.

Before I go further, a note: this requires patience. These processes must be built brick by brick, even over a number of years. Incremental gains each term are what we are looking for, that’s all. Start small.

Measuring Your Outreach

The first step to improving outreach is measuring it.

There are three general ways to do this:

1. Simplest: Track active outreach channels
   Examples: orientation, classroom visits, and department newsletters (that’s 3 channels in total)
2. More Complex: Track number of occurrences
   Examples: one orientation, 23 classroom visits, 4 department newsletters (28 total occurrences)
3. Most Complex: Track total touchpoints
   Within each channel, how many student contacts roughly? See the table below for an example.

You can just do number one and still be fine, but if you can add number two and three, you will build a deeper understanding of your outreach. Take a look at the table below for an example of how this might be done:

The steps to fill out this sheet are:

1. List out each channel
2. Estimate the occurrences for that channel (e.g. we did 15 class visits)
3. Estimate the touchpoints per occurrence (e.g. each class visit had on average 50 students who heard our pitch)
4. Multiply those numbers together to get total touchpoints per channel

We recommend projecting this number at the start of the term (estimating each number), and then going back and replacing those numbers with real data at the end of the term (or on an ongoing basis).

Important: this is a very imprecise estimate! That’s okay - it’s still a big improvement from simply measuring the number of channels or occurrences alone since it allows you to understand the specific levers you can pull to improve awareness in the most direct way.

Next Level: Tracking Effectiveness of Each Outreach Channel

Tracking your outreach is a great start - no need to go further in my opinion. But if you really want to improve, try to measure each channel’s effectiveness.

One touchpoint isn’t the same as another. A classroom visit is a higher quality touchpoint than a mass email received, for example, and will drive more traffic to your center (although it also may cost you more in time and energy).

Measuring effectiveness can be achieved in a few ways such as:

1. Using click rate tracking (try a free tool like this one) to study how many people are actually clicking through to your website. This would be a fit for links posted in an LMS or on a campus newsletter, for example.
2. Asking students how they heard about you in session request forms or in post-semester surveys. Perhaps one channel is surprisingly heavy even given a low volume of outreach.
3. Comparing a list of students you have reached out to with your session data for overlap. This is useful in a channel like email marketing, where you want to know if those that you emailed (e.g. students in certain course rosters) ended up coming in.

Top Outreach Channels for Learning Centers

Now that you are measuring outreach channels, you can work to improve them. This involves either adding more channels or doing more marketing within each channel.

Here are the seven most common marketing channels deployed by learning centers:

• Signage and Physical Visibility
• Orientation Drives
• Social Media and Email Newsletters
• Text and Email Outreach
• Faculty-Led Advertising
• Classroom Visits
• Curriculum Design

Process for Experimenting with New Outreach Channels

You now have a tracking system and a list of possible channels to experiment with. From here it’s pretty simple - try out a new channel, measure the data, and see if your tutoring numbers reflect the increased awareness that you have built through increasing outreach.

Notice I said “what feels the best” - as much as we want to measure everything, it’s hard to get a black and white answer. Trust your gut feeling on if a channel is working or not.

Here's a step-by-step process for your iterative approach to improving awareness:

1. At the start of a term, plan your outreach - where can you do more than last term? List the channels as new rows in your spreadsheet and project the number of occurrences and number of touchpoints, if you’re doing that last one.
2. Execute the outreach throughout the term and record your data every week - this weekly rhythm is important, and is where you can also record data like visits and students for the week. You’ll appreciate your detailed records when you need to look back. Record whatever feels helpful, with the ultimate goal of updating your marketing spreadsheet for the term. Here’s our template for recording touchpoints.
3. Clean up your data at the end of the term and ensure you wrote down what you wanted to.
4. See if any increases in outreach volume came with a proportional increase in unique students or total visits for the term.

This process will help you scale up outreach. Once you’re feeling good there, it makes sense to consider the quality of that outreach, which is where alignment and desire come in.

Alignment

The goal of component two, alignment, is to communicate the relevance of your service to the student hearing your outreach message. “Is this something I should pay attention to?”

The key to alignment is personalization. For example, if you send three department newsletters - math, engineering, and school of business - don’t send the same content in each newsletter. Early in each message, mention a few courses that are popular within that department, and perhaps mention a few tutors who are doing cool internships that the recipients may want to meet with.

Sometimes outreach channels inherently communicate alignment. Classroom visits are inherently personalized - this is specifically for their class!

Just consider ways you can make every touchpoint with students feel more personalized rather than generic. It goes a long way.

Beyond personalization driving alignment, working on the actual contents and style of the outreach can help maximize desire.

Desire

Desire is about building up emotional desire for the service. This component is more of an art than a science, but a few ideas I have on this front are:

• Stress the community piece - highlight your tutors’ bios and their career goals and interests which might align with students; show pictures of your busy center with lots of their peers; share numbers of how many unique students or sessions are held.
• Fear of missing out - share how other students are using your service and getting ahead and improving their grades because of it.
• Group sessions - much easier to come with a group of students or bring a friend, increasing comfort levels with your service.
• Share GPA difference - work with OIR to study the GPAs of those who use your services versus the broader campus. Often, your students’ GPAs will be higher. You can also ask ChatGPT for instructions on how to do this analysis yourself in Excel.

As discussed earlier, however, working on alignment and desire should be secondary to measuring and growing your total outreach, in my opinion, since the latter is directly measurable.

Conclusion and Next Steps

In conclusion, building awareness is the first step in our funnel. To improve awareness on campus, consider your outreach volume. When designing your outreach messaging, consider maximizing alignment and desire in your message.

Improving the volume of your outreach is a simple place to start. Working on alignment and desire are good, but this is kind of hard, and hard to know if you are making progress. Just do more outreach and you’ll make big strides.

The end result of this will be an increase in first-time student users of your center.

Next up: activation. It does no good to generate interested students if they have a difficult time getting a first session. This involves elements like:

• Your scheduling flow
• Mobile optimization (40% of sessions are booked from students’ phones!)
• Offering the right courses, hours, and modes

We’ll break down the key elements to review in the next article.