media outreach Archives - The Influence Crowd

How to get media coverage for your online tutoring brand

It’s a long old time since we were stuck at home with nothing but a laptop and our families to keep us company, but the pandemic marked a big shift in how we learnt. Suddenly everything from French GCSE revision to guitar lessons went to an online only model.

The net result of this was a ton of investment poured into the online tutoring sector and overnight what felt like a million* new providers entered the market.

How to stand out in a competitive marketplace

Fast forward to the present and online tutoring remains one of the most competitive sectors in education. Especially in terms of Google ads and SEO rankings.

It is therefore hard for your brand to stand out in the crowd. Unless you use PR.

A smart PR campaign can help you stand out from the pack, show your personality as a brand and drive traffic to your site.

The only hurdle with this approach is that securing coverage in the media is not straightforward. You can’t just contact the One Show or The Times and say, ‘Hey we are doing interesting stuff, you should feature us.’

Instead, you need to find a way to turn your company’s story into one the media wants to cover and that takes practice.

To help, we’ve come up with a fictional brand and created some feasible news stories for it so you can see how the PR alchemy works.

Our online tutoring company

Meet ‘A Class of Your Own’ an ambitious online tutoring company that has been teaching adult learners and teenagers online for 2 years. They are popular with many hundreds of learners but have big ambitions to grow.

They feel growing their adult cohort of learners would be the best way for them to hit the big time and want their PR agency to help out.

Now the brief from the business to the PR agency goes something like this: “We want coverage for the news that we offer the best adult learning courses – anything from maths to singing – from the comfort of learners’ homes.’

The PR team’s job is to then turn this brief into something that the media and social channels want to feature.

If you were part of the fictitious PR team, here’s how you could go about it.

Prepare a media campaign

The first thing to do is a little research within the business and in the wider world to find out what news hooks could be used. These are the steps to follow:

Know who you are targeting

Before you get started you need to know everything about the audience you are targeting and what media they are consuming (social, broadcast, podcasts, digital etc). This will enable you to know what sort of stories they would be interested in and which media you should target.

I am going to assume for this example that we are targeting any adult with disposable income.

Research potential news angles

The next job is to find out what is going on both inside and outside of your business that might provide some key hooks for your story.

Here are a few key questions you’d want to ask the people in the know across the business.

a) What data do you have on your courses?

Which are the most popular?
Which are the most likely to be finished/abandoned?
What trends are there – is there a pattern to when people take up courses? Do music courses peak in summer or Christmas, for example?

b) What do you know about your tutors and learners?

Are there any interesting or unusual tutors on the platform? For example a former band member, space scientist or Countdown winner that could provide a quirky story angle?
Can you uncover any trends in age or location of learners that could be used for a PR angle?

You also want to find out what’s going on beyond the business that could spark a story angle.

c) What is happening in wider society that could relate in some way to the brand?

What cultural events are happening: big TV shows, movies, music star tours?
What calendar events could you link the story into: Christmas, Halloween, Back to School?
What societal changes are relevant, both positive and negative that you may be able to draw on for inspiration: an increased number of people living alone, more mental health issues, rising literacy rates, increased number of adults who speak English as a second language etc?

Once you have completed this task, you will start to see some obvious story ideas appearing. Some may be strong enough to go with as they are. Others may need additional data, an expert or some case study interviews to create a story package, but you are on your way to top notch media hits.

I can imagine a few stories emerging from this exercise depending on the information you might glean.

Story Idea 1

Headline:

The Singing Side Effect of The Voice Being Back on our Screens

The Story:

Data from A Class of Your Own online tutoring platform shows that demand for singing lessons jumps 200% each time The Voice airs on our screens. In fact, in the month following the show, popularity for singing lessons surpassed maths and English, traditionally the most popular online courses.

Why this story works

Because it contains a number of elements the media loves:

It’s fun – anyone can imagine sitting at home and suddenly getting the urge to be the next Celine Dion or Sabrina Carpenter as a result of watching someone else attempting their classics on screen.
It’s got data – there is some factual proof of a trend as you have a 200% uplift in courses being taken.
It’s timely – it will hit the press at the same time as The Voice is airing on screen and when the media is covering the series any way. Timeliness is a big factor in whether your story will be covered or not.
It has the potential to be visual and aural – if you can provide a few case studies of customers who have taken up singing as a result of The Voice, you have something to film, photograph and hear. This means the print media, radio and TV/online video channels are all covered, giving you more chances of coverage.

Extension ideas:

If you want to then make the most of the media coverage to drive leads (and why would you not?), this can be done too.

Show ‘how to’ from your tutors on YouTube/Insta/TikTok in the weeks The Voice is on air. These could be used to show how to master a particular technique that was on the episode that week or what went wrong if any contestant fails to hit a note.
Invite a popular YouTuber to learn how to sing with one of your tutors as if they were a contestant on the show and ask them to document their progress.

Story Idea 2

Note: This story will require an additional survey of parents to be used alongside the data from the tutor platform, but that can easily be sourced from a survey agency like YouGov for a fee.

Headline:

The Toughest Lesson to Teach Your Kids: Why so many parents are taking up online maths courses

The Story:

Data from A Class of Your Own online tutoring network shows that the homework subject parents struggle the most to help their kids with is maths – 7 in 10 parents stated it was the subject they felt most uncomfortable with. According to the tutoring experts, this is why A Class of Your Own has had a surge in the number of adults signing up to brush up on their maths skills, with rates increasing ten-fold in exam season.

Extension ideas:

Offer free taster and parent guides on key maths topics adults struggle with like geometry to drive traffic to your site and sign ups
One of the brand’s tutors could film themselves teaching algebra to a parent influencer on TikTok, who would in turn offer a discount code for tutoring to their followers

Story Idea 3

Headline:

The hardest three words you will ever say in English and it’s not ‘I love you’

The Story:
According to experts the hardest three words to say for new learners to English are not ‘I love you.’

Instead, ‘Squirrel’, ‘Rural’ and ‘Worcestershire’ rate as the top three in a survey of over 200 English as an additional language learners on A Class of Your Own online tutoring platform.

You can offer one of your tutors to talk to the media about why English pronunciations can be so challenging.

Extension ideas:

Offer free videos on how to pronounce difficult English words
This can be supported by a vibrant social ad campaign
Challenge online influencers who speak English as a first language to say a complicated sentence that includes the 3 most difficult words and ask them to include their outtakes, as well as the successful attempt. This will show that even for native English speakers these words can sometimes be difficult.

Hopefully you can see how these stories are much more engaging and likely to secure wider coverage for a brand than a simple ‘company x does great x courses’ which is unlikely to be picked up by any outlet.

If you want advice on how to turn your company news into headline news, please feel free to email us on hello@theinfluencecrowd.co.uk. We will happily help out.

*Image by Dreamstime.com

Why PR could be the key to boosting sales of your product

Schools and universities have to be very careful about who they work with. It’s why sometimes the sales process with an educational organisation can be very slow and cumbersome.

It’s probably why some of your marketing campaigns just don’t generate the number of leads you expect either.

This is why PR is so important in this sector.

What’s the difference between PR and Marketing?

Whereas marketing does a fabulous job promoting products and services, PR focuses on your brand. It helps articulate what your brand stands for and why schools and universities can trust it.

Someone brilliant once said that marketing is like asking someone out on a date. The PR and branding is the reason why they say yes.

Great PR speeds up your sales process.

So how could PR help my brand?

PR is about using great messaging, creativity and the endorsement of third parties to build trust in your brand. A great PR team knows what makes your audiences tick and therefore can help you articulate what you want to say in a way that makes teachers, school leaders and faculty stop what they are doing and notice/like you.

PR does that in a variety of ways – media coverage, speaker slots at key industry events, podcast interviews, hard hitting content, influencer link ups and made-you-look messaging that gets to the heart of what your target audiences need.

Case Study: How PR helped an education brand

We worked for a company which had created a new type of technology that could spot reading issues in young children, often before they became apparent to teachers. They engaged our PR services to build their reputation with schools and sell more products.

Prior to the business engaging us, the messaging they used often focused on the time-saving aspects of the assessments, the business’s academic pedigree (it was developed by university researchers) and AI elements within the technology. All very worthy messages. However, our work with schools had shown us that more human messaging, focussed on the child, was key to success.

Getting the messaging right

So we updated some of the messaging to focus on early intervention and preventing children from falling behind their peers.

Following this shift, the product was soon being featured in the education press throughout the year and speaker slots were secured at key conferences.

For the broadcast media, we focused on what the technology could do that had never been possible before – the fact that the tech could spot the signs of dyslexia in a child in minutes, just by following how their eyes moved when they read. This messaging resulted in coverage on both The One Show and regional BBC programming demonstrating how the technology would revolutionise schools.

The results

Traffic to the company’s web site and lead generation immediately spiked, with many new leads reporting that they were prompted to call because of the media coverage.

PR gave this business the right messaging to create greater interest from their audience and targeted the right channels to expose that new messaging more widely than before.

If you want more tips on how to improve your sales to schools, download our How to Sell to Schools Guide.

You can also take a look at the case studies section on our web site for more ideas on how PR can kick start your sales.

*Image by Kaboompics.com

Tag: media outreach

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