Learn How I grew my coaching classes business with zero investment in Marketing

I  used to run a coaching centre 3 Cube Computer Institute in Malad, Mumbai for B.Sc IT students on how to create software projects practically rather than copying & pasting the code from the internet. I ran these classes for 1 and half years and it was a good learning experience for me.
One of the challenges for any business is Marketing. I tried both offline and online marketing and soon I learned that online marketing has always given us the best return with zero investment. Let me share some Marketing ideas which I had used at that time to promote my Coaching Class.

1) Seminar:

Before starting our B.Sc IT Project course we conducted a FREE practical seminar on how students can create a software project and in that seminar, we had provided the student with all the information needed to complete their final year project.

Q&A
We had a question and answer session in which we answered all their queries. We never marketed ourselves, it was all about the student and their problems.
After the seminar, there was a big jump in our admission numbers. One big takeaway for me from this seminar was that if you provide value in a free seminar without marketing yourselves people will come back to you to learn more about you and your business. However, before even starting with the seminar, we made sure that students were aware of the Seminar. So we promoted ourselves on all social media platforms such as Orkut and Facebook. On our website, we had put up a B.Sc IT seminar page and a form to capture the details of the students interested in the Seminar.

Today there are many ways to promote a Seminar.
For example, on Facebook, you can organize an event and run Facebook ads to boost the event around a particular targeted audience. Similarly, Google ads can also be used to target a particular keyword a student is searching for and show him the Seminar event ads.

2) Blog:

Creating a blog costs zero but still, I can see many coaching class owners are not using the advantage of this medium. This is a powerful medium to connect with your students and share your knowledge around topics in which students need guidance.

While running my coaching class I had a blog for B.Sc IT final year students in which I had posted many articles to share our experience on how students could create their software project to score good marks. We added a commenting system in which many students used to ask about their problems and we used to revert back to them instantly. This blog alone gave us a good number of admissions.

Now there are many free platforms like WordPress, Medium which can be used to create a free blog for your coaching classes.

3) Website:

I had created a simple website with information about my coaching classes, the courses offered and why a student should join, about the teaching faculty and a ‘contact us’ page. I had optimized my website with basic SEO which helped me in getting it to the top of Google search results.

One of the best resources to understand how SEO works is to directly learn from Google Team. please check this link for more information  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184

We have written an article on how a website can be created free of cost. We are also planning to write a blog post on basic SEO guidelines for a coaching classes website.

4) Business listing site:

After putting my website up, it took 3-4 months for it to be displayed on Google search results. To make sure I didn’t lose the leads, I listed my Coaching classes on many Business listing websites such as Justdial, Sulekha, Indiamart, Yellowpages and Google My Business. This helped me in generating free traffic.

Your business will get a boost by getting listed in these business listing sites as Google and Bing hold many of these sites in high regards. Getting listed in these sites costs zero as almost all of them have a free listing.

5) Social Media:

In the year 2009, I used Orkut a lot to promote my coaching class and one thing I realized is spamming students with the same content is a bad marketing strategy. I took out some time to write content related to student problems.

For example, in Orkut groups, I used to share the blog content about the problems faced by students in their final year projects.

Today similarly Facebook can be used as a platform to share free knowledge on student-specific problems, as this can be helpful in generating good awareness in the student community about your coaching class.

Implementing the above marketing ideas has cost me zero and in the long-term, it helped me in generating good leads and branding of my coaching class.
I hope it was helpful. What’s your process for marketing? Do you have any tips and tricks that I didn’t mention in this post?