To: Dr. Erika Patterson, ENGL 300 99A Instructor
From: Phoebe Wu, ENGL 300 99A Student
Date: October 14th, 2020
Subject: Increasing Student Registrations at Pott’s Education Studio through Social Media
Introduction
Pott’s Education Studio is an English tutoring centre located in Richmond, BC that aims to help students improve academically as well as instantiate good learning philosophies and develop emotional intelligence. In addition to teaching English to local and international students, Pott’s Education Studio also offers tutoring in Math, Science, French, and a number of different subjects.
Over the 12 years of operation, Pott’s hundreds of students have all been acquired solely through word of mouth and student recommendations without the use of any advertising. However, as more tutoring centres have opened up over the years, the number of student registrations have declined. Furthermore, as the demand for tutoring locally has declined, the demographic of the studio has also shifted from local students to international students.
Pott’s Education Studio currently has social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and WeChat, but none of them have been implemented to be used as business accounts to promote and attract more potential students. This may be a missed opportunity to increase the declining number of student registrations.
Statement of Problem
As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and many international students returning to China, Pott’s Education Studio has seen slight declines in term registrations over the years. While maintaining current clientele proves not to be a problem, increasing competition and changing demographics have also made it harder to acquire new student registrations.
Proposed Solution
An avenue to explore to gain more clients is through social media. Social media as a marketing strategy have been the key to many successful businesses. First and foremost, social media can be a costless way to promote the studio as well as to share recent class offerings. Traditional marketing strategies like posting advertisements online, in the newspaper, or bus stops on the other hand are costly to implement and may not generate the same result in this day and age. Furthermore, we may use the algorithms constructed by Facebook, Instagram, and WeChat to attract more clients from our demographic to the studio. On top of attracting more students, social media is a great way for the teachers at the studio to interact with current students. Building a strong social media presence allows current students to share the studio’s learning philosophy and contact information in a package that is easy for their peers to understand and digest, as opposed to a traditional pamphlet or business card. Through this method, we can inspire learning on the student’s end instead of having a reluctant student who is there because their parent’s decision.
Scope
To increase student registrations through social media, I plan to pursue five areas of inquiry:
- What kind of students do we most want to attract?
- What are some social media strategies employed by some successful businesses, particularly from the service industry?
- What content should be posted to the social media?
- Which social media platform would recruit the most potential clients?
- How do we construct a sustainable long-term plan to keep up a social media presence in the long run?
My intended audience is the owner and managers of Pott’s Education Studio. They can act on my recommendations because they are the ones that have access to the studio’s current social media pages and decide what image the studio wants to portray.
Methods
The study will be conducted through interviewing the owner and managers of Pott’s Education Studio about their goals and target audience. Through a questionnaire, I will also consult a Facebook group consisting of business owners who have grown their businesses through social media and have a following in the thousands.
My secondary source of material would be to look at publications about the effectiveness of social media as a marketing strategy compared to traditional advertising.
My Qualifications
I was a student at Pott’s Education Studio for five years and have been an employee there for five years. I am familiar as to what the studio has to offer in terms of the quality of classes offered there and what separates them from other tutoring centres in the area. In addition, my association with the owner and managers gives me the opportunity for an in-depth feasibility study. I am also familiar with using social media as a user and I also have experience with the business side of it.
Conclusion
As student registrations are slowly declining at Pott’s Education Studio, steps need to be taken to increase these numbers in order to maintain a functioning business. A viable strategy proven successful by many other businesses would be to increase the studio’s social media presence to not only attract the parents of potential students, but also the students themselves.
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