In this episode, I explore how tutors can adapt their marketing strategies in a world where free information is abundant. I emphasise the importance of showcasing expertise, values, and real stories to stand out and attract the right clients.

Key Takeaways

• The shift in marketing due to free information availability

• The importance of expertise versus knowledge

• Using personal stories to demonstrate values and judgment

• The role of detailed student results in marketing

• The necessity of clear calls to action and sales messaging

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👋🏽 Hello! I'm Sumantha McMahon, and I've supported over 100 tutors and education business owners.

As a teacher 'dropout' turned professional tutor, combined with my 20+ years as a business owner, I'm in it with you! Yes, I'm qualified too :-)

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© 2024 Sumantha McMahon

Everything you know how to teach is now free. Every explanation, every technique, every bit of advice that you'd have given a parent five years ago is available instantly for nothing. So if your marketing is built on being helpful, then the ground has moved underneath you. Today I'm going to go through the four things that still work when everything else is free. And stay with me for the fourth one, because it's the one that most tutors skip, and it's the one that actually gets you the most sales. Now, if you're new here, welcome to the podcast. I'm Samantha, and I help tutors earn more without simply working more hours and build businesses that are really designed around the life they actually want. Marketing is where a lot of that work starts because how you're seen decides who comes to you and what they're willing to pay. It's also the way we are visible and we get in front of potential clients.

So let's get into it. Here's what I keep noticing: tutors are working harder at their marketing than they've ever worked, and getting less back than they used to get. More posts, more tips, more free guides, more explaining, and the response is thinner every time. In fact, I'm seeing this across industries. Although I work very exclusively in the tutoring world, I'm exposed to other industries, and everyone's talking about this. Now it's really tempting to read that as a U problem. Maybe it's the wrong platform, the wrong time of day, maybe you're not consistent enough, maybe you're not confident enough on camera. Now, I don't think that it's any of those things when we're talking about this in particular. What's happened is that the thing that your marketing was built on has actually stopped being scarce. For years, being really helpful was enough to stand out because really good information was harder to come by.

A parent didn't know what the 11 plus actually involved, for instance. A student know how to structure an essay you did and sharing that generously made you visible it made you trusted it built that credibility that time has gone and it's not going it's actually gone Any parent can now get a decent explanation of anything that you teach about in about four seconds, and they don't even have to sit through your carousel to get it, or your webinar, or your lead magnet. So when you give away more information, you're actually competing with something that's completely free, it's instant, and it's infinitely patient and available at 11 o'clock at night. So this sounds a bit bleak, and it really isn't, because there are things that you have that nothing else has, and they were all The thing that was actually doing the work of you getting booked. You just couldn't see them clearly while information was still doing some of that heavy lifting. Now, if this is already making sense, then follow or subscribe wherever you're listening or watching so that the next episode finds you. So let's go through the first one of these four things that I want to talk about today.

First one is that information is what you know, expertise is what you can see. They're not the same thing, and only one of them is still scarce. I'll show you what I mean. One of my clients sent me a piece of content to look over. It was advice for 11 plus parents, a list of what their child should and shouldn't be doing in the run-up to the exams. All of it was accurate, all of it was sensible. All of it was available in about 40 other places, though, written by people who don't really know the fraction of what she knows. So I asked her a different question. What have you noticed about that school over the years that you've been preparing children for? And out of that came so much value. They had changed the exam format before with very little notice, and they'd done this more than once historically. That meant that they could change it again at any point, and any child who had been drilled purely on the shape of a paper would be left standing there with nothing to really fall back on.

That's the piece of content. Not the list of tips, but the things that she can see because she's been in it for years and has watched the patterns, mastering the skill rather than memorising the format. And here's why, and here's the evidence I've watched I've watched happen. No parent can get that anywhere else. Now they might be able to if they ask the right question, but the problem is they don't even think to ask that question in the first place. They can get the tips though. They can't get though her read on a specific school and what it's likely to do next. So the question to ask before you post anything isn't, is this useful? Is could someone get this without me? If they could, then it isn't marketing you. It's marketing the subject. And I want to be clear because this can sound like I'm telling you to stop being generous. I'm not.

Give plenty away. What I'm asking you to change is what you're giving, not the information which any One can get, but the way you see it, what you have noticed, what you think is coming, what you'd do about it, that's still value and that's still generous, and it happens to be the only kind that nobody can get anywhere else, or at least not easily. Now, the second one is related to your values, where people can really see them. Here's something that I posted recently that actually I didn't expect much from. A tutor had come to me wanting to join my one-to-one programme. She booked a discovery call. But as we were talking about it, it became clear that money was actually really tight, and joining would have put real pressure on her. Serious pressure. We're talking not being able to pay your bills, pressure. So I said no. I said, not now. This is not the right thing for you, right now. She really wanted to join, she was willing to borrow money.

So when I said absolutely not, not right now, she asked me what she should do instead. And I told her really honestly, I said, get yourself into something more stable, maybe some stable employment, while you build the build business alongside it, so you're not making decisions from a place of pressure. What she then said next actually really stayed with me. She said she was relieved because every time she had thought about it, about getting a job, she'd read that as failing, as going backwards, as admitting the business hadn't worked. And somebody just telling her plainly that it was actually a really sensible move rather than a defeat took a weight off her. So I shared that bit of the conversation on LinkedIn, and the response wasn't what I expected. People didn't actually comment on the advice itself. They commented on the fact that I had turned down money because it wasn't right for her. And the reason that it landed isn't that people were impressed, it's that they learned something about me that they couldn't have learnt any other way. Way. I can tell you I'm honest. I could put it on my website.

I could write a post about integrity in the tutoring industry, but none of that carries any weight because everybody talks about it. What carries weight is a real story, a decision that actually cost me something, described so plainly that people can see what I actually do when there's money on the table. Now I want to be careful here because this isn't a technique. If you go looking for moments that make you look good and impressive, people will feel it and it will do the opposite of what you want. But it does tell you something about what people are actually reading when they read your marketing. They're not just working out whether you're good at your job, they're working out what you're like to deal with. I read this thing ages ago saying something like: if you're a hairdresser, stop telling people that you can cut hair. If you're a hairdresser, people know you can cut hair. They make that assumption.

What they're interested in is what kind of experience they're going to get when they meet you and then when they work with you. So in our situation, We want to know whether you'll be honest with them. Well, using this as the example, whether you would tell them something that they don't want to hear. Are you the kind of person who takes them or the money regardless? Now, none of that is in a value post. It only shows up in those moments where you did something and you're willing to say what that was and share it and share why. So think about your own version of this. The parent that you told their child didn't need tutoring, the student you referred elsewhere because someone else was actually a better fit. The thing that you refuse to do, even though it would be easier, or that Parents would want it. Those decisions are the clearest statement of your values that you'll ever make, and most tutors actually never really mention them. Now we've done two of those four things that still work now where everything else is free.

Your expertise, where you're still sharing value but from a different angle, and your values. There are two more, and the last one is the one that I said that most tutors skip, so do stay with me for that one. So the third one is related to your students in detail. Every tutor knows that they should be using results in their marketing, or at least they they try to. And most of them do it in a way that convinces very few people. You know the sort of thing, you know, where someone went from a grade four to the to a seven, they passed the 11 plus, they got into their first choice school. All of it's true and all of it is worth celebrating and completely interchangeable with every other tutor's result. Because the numbers on their own, they don't tell the story, they don't tell anyone of what happened or what you were like to work with.

The parent reading that has no idea whether their child is anything like your students. She's not comparing grades necessarily, she's trying to work out whether you would know what to do with a child who cries at their homework, or a child who is bright and refuses to write anything in an exam, or a child who's been told once too often that they're not a science person. Person, they want to know that you could get their child to that result. So the detail is in the whole thing, not just the outcome. It's the or the situation. So what was going on when they came to you in the first place? What did you try first that maybe didn't even work? What was the moment that something changed? And what did you do differently? What their what do their parents say afterwards? What do the students say? That's a story that nobody else can tell because nobody else was in that exact situation with that exact student and in that room. And it does something that a results list just can't, which is it lets the right parent recognize their own child in it and think, that's us. This was written for me. I'd go further.

The students who make the best stories are often not the ones with the biggest jumps. They're the ones where something was just really stuck and you found a way in. That's where your judgment is visible. That's where your skill is visible. And judgment is what people are buying. It's your skill, your talent, and your rapport that people are buying. One practical thing, get permission, keep it vague where it needs to be vague, change the details, for example, that identify anyone. None of that weakens the story. What makes it land is the specificity of the situation. So it's not the name of the child that's important here. And this brings me to the last one. Actually asking. This is the one that I mentioned to stay for because it's the one that most students nod their head along to, but then they don't do it.

The most common thing I hear by a long way is that people don't want to be salesy and they say it to me apologetically as though it's a personality trait that they're stuck with. And I understand it because most of us have been on the receiving end of someone really pushy and decided that we'd rather do almost anything than be that. Now here's what I'd say to that. If you're worried about coming across pushy and sleazy, you won't. That worry is the very thing that stops that from happening. The people who make everyone uncomfortable Are not lying awake wondering whether they're being a bit too pushy. They've never had that thought. So the worry is actually good news. It means that you're safe to sell properly and you've been holding yourself back from something that you were never at risk of doing in the first place. And you do have to sell, not hint at it, not mention it once at the bottom of a post after a 400-word kind of post, you know, about something else. We're not going to assume that people who have been following us for two years know what we offer because I promise you, people don't. They get confused or they're not sure, and we have to repeat ourselves.

And this is where I see it go wrong most often. Somebody has done the hard part. The tutor has built an audience, they have earned trust. Well, people really like them, and then the sales message is buried so far down and so hedged and so apologetic that nobody realizes they can actually work with them. All that trust and no door to walk through. There's something else underneath it, which is that selling feels like taking, and giving feels virtuous. But if you believe what you do changes things for people, and you've just spent this whole episode being told that your expertise is the rare part, then not telling people how to buy it isn't generous. It leaves them stuck with the free version of the answer. So the practical version is that you need to say what you do, you need to say who it's for. And you just say what it costs, or at least how to find out.

Say it more often than feels comfortable because you'll be bored of your own message long before your audience has even noticed it. And put it where people can see it, not at the end after the really interesting bit. That's your four things: your expertise, your values, your students, and actually asking for the business, asking for the sale. Every one of them is something that AI can't produce on its own. It needs your input and every one of them gets stronger the longer you do it. Now, one last thing before I go, because I've spent this whole episode talking about what AI can't do, and I don't want you to hear that as me telling you not to use it. Use it. If writing is the part you find hard or slow, or you stare at a blank page for 40 minutes and you give up, then getting help shaping the words is a really sensible use of your time. What I'm asking you to keep hold of is the thinking, the story about that school changing its exam format, the decision that you made.

That cost you money, the student who was stuck, and what you notice about them. All of that has to come from you because nothing else has access to it. Feed those in, and you'll get something that sounds like you and could only have come from you. Put nothing in, and you'll get back exactly what everyone else is getting back, which is that free version of the answer that we started this episode talking about. And if you're listening to this thinking that the marketing isn't really the problem, that the whole way the business is put together and alongside the marketing needs looking at, that's the work I do with my one-to-one tutors. It's a six-month programme to start with. It's completely bespoke and it really starts with a conversation rather than an application form. So the link to book a chat and to see more information about it is in the description. Thank you as always for staying with me, and you'll hear from me on Wednesday.