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What You Need to Know Before Starting Your Online Tutoring Business

Hispanic teen girl school college student distance learning waving hand studying with online teacher on laptop screen. Elearning zoom video call, videoconference class with tutor. Over shoulder view.

The demand for online tutoring has been growing at a whopping rate in recent years and is showing no signs of stopping or even slowing down. The online tutoring market has the potential to grow by USD 153.07 Billion during 2021-2025 and the market’s growth momentum will grow at a CAGR of 15.77%. Plausible reasons for the rapid surge in the adoption of online tutoring include improved focus, convenience, and cost-effectiveness.

Drivers & Trends Influencing the Online Tutoring Market Size

The success of the online tutoring industry did not come out of anywhere. There are several reasons for the skyrocketing rise in the popularity of online tutoring. Below mentioned prevalent grounds can help to understand its huge acceptance:

  • Flexibility and convenience of time, place, and pace.
  • Ability to reach out to remote areas of any region.
  • Instead of being passive, learners can themselves choose what they need to learn.
  • Time and cost-effectiveness.
  • Trends like gamification for better user experience are being invested into by the players of the industry.
  • Growth of blended learning and increasing VR and AR applications.

Key Things to Consider Making Online Tutoring a Successful Business Venture

Moving forward, a lot of budding entrepreneurs are inclined towards pursuing this business opportunity. However, they are not sure of how to avoid the pitfalls and challenges in the way. Here are a few things discussed that need to be considered before making up the mind.

  • Decide the Niche: Having a niche is extremely important when starting an online tutoring business to create a successful business model. It avoids competing for head-on with the already established tutoring businesses and helps in earning higher profit margins in the initial stages. Moreover, identifying the niches where the demand exceeds the supply also allows you to maximize your profit margins. However, regular monitoring of the initial results helps to recognize if one needs to shift the focus to a different niche.
  • Know the Target Audience: With the advent of online tutoring, the range of learners varies from primary schoolers to working professionals with varying educational backgrounds and based at different locations. It is essential to know the audience, their characteristics based on behavior, age, location one would like to aim for. Conducting a deep dive analysis of the behavioral traits will help in recognizing the audience and their requirements. An in-depth conversation with the target audience also gives an insight into what they expect from an online tutoring platform.
  • Study the Market Share: Knowing the market share one can simply estimate the number of potential customers of the tutoring business. It helps to learn what share of market one can aim for and what can be expected from the business. Evaluation of market share provides the best chance for the success of the online tutoring business.
  • Analyze Competitors and Their Offerings: Researching about the competitors in the niche market and finding gaps in their system or practices that can be given a more creative spin helps the tutoring business to define its USP. Ranging from businesses’ offerings to teaching style, and even prices can be the USPs of any business. Customers can easily outline the differentiating factors and select the platform suited to their needs.

Monetization Channels for Online Tutoring Businesses

Revenue generation strategy should be among the top priorities of every online tutoring business. Without a proper plot of getting ROI, a business cannot attract investors’ attention. Here are some of the most promising monetization strategies that are already tried and tested for various online tutoring businesses.

  • Commission from Tutors: This revenue stream brings a small share of each session’s cost, usually before the payment reaches the tutor. Business owners can retain a commission from tutors for every delivered session. The rates for every tutor may vary depending on the session price, teachers’ popularity, subject, etc.
  • Subscription: One of the most popular monetization strategies is to implement a subscription model. It includes a subscription fee from the learners in return for access to the complete tutoring platform and its tutors. The model is quite useful for learners who are willing to study different subjects and courses from different tutors.
  • Freemium: The platforms can offer training and live sessions for free, however, the learners need to pay for course completion certificates/diplomas. Additionally, platform owners can also choose to offer a final exam, feedback, mentoring, or anything that might be of value and interest to the learners.
  • Pay-Per-Session: With the pay-per-session, business owners can entice learners to pay for the premium sessions with the tutors in addition to the free content available on the platform.
  • Tiered Access: Business owners can set different levels of memberships (bronze, silver, gold) at different prices. Learners can preview the different levels but can only access them after purchasing the membership.
  • Website Ads/Banners: Selling the advertising space to a third-party ad network provider is another revenue generation However, business owners need to make sure the user experience is not hampered due to them as it will turn them away and render the monetization strategy.

Foolproof Marketing Plan of an Online Tutoring Platform

Once the online tutoring platform is set, the next question is to get traffic towards the website. As the competition is intense, it is essential to implement a well-formulated marketing strategy to set the business apart from the rest. Here are some ways which can help tutoring businesses put their best foot forward while marketing their tutoring platforms.

  • Blogging: This is a great way to generate organic traffic for online tutoring websites. Blogging establishes credibility and positions the business among the leaders of the industry. Publishing a blog post even once a week can also help to improve the website’s visibility to potential customers. Adding call-to-action inside blog posts is also a great way to start getting leads from prospective learners while offering them useful information they may be interested in.
  • Client Testimonials: Customer reviews are the brand ambassadors of any tutoring business making it the most effective online marketing strategy. A huge number of learners go through the reviews and feedback of the tutoring website before making the last call. Encouraging loyal customers to post positive feedback on the business and its services makes it easy for new learners to put their trust in the tutoring website.
  • Paid Advertisement: Advertisement is as essential as any other marketing practice, however, choosing the type of advertisement is quite a challenge. Tutoring websites with an extensive budget can reach out to Yahoo! for its advertising services and be assured of the ad reaching a vast group audience. Others can opt for Google AdWords for its pay-per-click advertising on search pages and pay as little or as much as they can afford.
  • Email Marketing: Email marketing is the cornerstone of online marketing. It is one of the most cost-effective tools to reach out to a global audience. Several feature-packed email marketing tools can help to create engaging and professional emails to grow your audience. Moreover, business owners can easily track and optimize email marketing campaigns to monitor the results.
  • Social Media Marketing: Social media platforms have reached out to almost every single user across the globe. Business owners can leverage the use of social media and run ads for the promotion of their tutoring platforms. All they would need is engaging content as it is the driving factor to attract the audience. If done correctly, social media marketing offers higher visibility, greater brand promotion, and huge traffic on the tutoring platform.

Choose a Readymade Software to Build an Online Tutoring Platform

Readymade white label software is built with the concept of helping businesses have their tutoring platforms with the least investment. Highly leveraged by the businesses, it helps them launch their tutoring platforms outside of their skillset, expertise, necessary technology, and infrastructure at the minimum cost and in a minimum timeframe. There are various benefits of considering this approach for tutoring platform development.

  • Cost & time-efficient
  • No involvement in the project management process
  • Tried and tested multiple times.
  • Reduces time to market and risk of lagging behind
  • Free from maintenance complications

Building a tutoring platform from scratch is quite a daunting process if one is not well-versed with programming and can easily defeat the purpose of launching and iterating the tutoring platform quickly.

A white label software solves this very problem of aspiring entrepreneurs and helps them start an online tutoring business as quickly as possible. The importance of white-label comes with choosing a good strategy to make things work and consider the best ready-made online tutoring software before the hammer goes down. It empowers the business owners to enter the market, test their business concept, verify market demands, and move towards an entirely mature tutoring platform.

Published: June 18, 2021
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vinod janapala

Vinod Janapala

Vinod Janapala is Senior Product Marketing Manager at piHappiness - Customer Feedback Software. piHappiness is a top customer feedback software designed to collect customer feedback on Web, iPad & Android tablets. Vinod is keen on such topics as marketing, SaaS challenges, and Personal Growth.

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