5 Big Mistakes Tuition Centre Operators Make
In Increasing Enrolment Rate

As Tuition Centre Operators, marketing has to be your next most important thing besides focusing on the best for your students. After all, what good is a Tuition Centre if there are no student in it? Unless the only person working at your tuition centre is you (very unlikely), you’re going to have to figure the ins and outs of marketing the business.

This may not come naturally to you, especially if you have moved up the ranks at your centre and never had any formal marketing training — but it’s still a crucially important skill to master.

Here are 5 common marketing mistakes that education professionals tend to make when it comes to enrolment. Are you guilty of any of them?

#1 Assuming Parents Will Come to You

Tuition Operators often make the mistake of assuming that having a great programme or location will automatically bring parents to them. However, the problem is, no one can enrol their children if they know nothing about your centre. Hence, it is necessary to budget for marketing expenses, such as advertising on offline media (a.k.a.printed media) and online media(e.g. Facebook). After all, the only way to get people to learn about you is to get the word out.

#2 Not Tracking Your Numbers

One of the biggest mistakes you can make when running your enrolment campaign is not tracking the numbers. There are 3 metrics you should be tracking

1. Number of enquiries
2. Number of school tours
3. Number of enrolments

In this context, you can make use of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software to do proper lead tracking by defining the different stages of your enrolment process. On top of that, most of the CRM software allows you to track by lead source.

#3 Not Communicating Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Do you know that one of the main goals of your marketing message is to communicate how you are DIFFERENT? How different are you from another Tuition centre 2 blocks down the road?At the end of the day, what parents really want to know is your Unique Selling Points that convince them this is the right child care center for their children.

However, the sad fact is that most education programs sound alike, look alike, and market themselves alike, due to what I call “being bound by industry norms”. When parents seek to make the best tuition choice for their children, but are given no clear differentiators, they are forced to commoditize all schools and base their decision on price and location. You can avoid this trap simply by taking the time to determine and communicate your unique selling points effectively.

Here are some examples of unique “niches” in Tuition

1. Passionate Teachers
2. Learning Environment
3. Comprehensive Curriculum
4. Eco-Friendly, Paperless
5. Result-Based (Track Record)

#4 Not Understanding Your Market

What target markets are your competitors aiming at? Are there other opportunities that you can pinpoint? What niche can you fill that is currently un-met?

Evaluate the information you find about your peers and competitors. This should tell you whether there are gaps in your target market. It should also indicate whether there is a saturation of tuition centres in certain areas, which might lead you to focus on less competitive areas.

Draw up a list of everything that you’ve found out about your competitors, however small.

Put the information into two categories:

• What you can learn from and do better
• What they’re doing worse than you

#5 Not Following Up Effectively with your prospects

It takes a few “touches” for your prospect to start to trust you.

You need to contact your prospects at least 6 times, according to a study by Leads360.
When you do that, you’ll have a 96% chance of getting through to your prospects.

Sharing stories about how you’ve helped your students gained self-confidence for example, is a great way to share your passion of your tuition centre services. You may not want to share specific child name, for reasons of confidentiality, but you should have a handful of great stories to tell.

The key is being persistent without pestering, and taking the appropriate time to follow up. Using a tool like CRM will allow you to properly monitor your prospects and set an appropriate amount of follow-up time. In some cases, the customer may not be ready to make a decision for a few months. If this is the case, you can simply make a note to follow-up after a period of time.