How can a language school start thinking as an IT-company

Check ideas and find what really works

During covid lockdown and switch to online formats language schools have found themselves in the situation when everyone competes with everyone. There is no more separation into online and offline language courses, location and comfortable classrooms no longer matter. Traditional language schools are forced to compete with major online services with their resources and programmers.

Time is the most valuable resource. Online time goes even faster. Competition goes within ideas and approaches which must be constantly updated and checked. How can you adapt and check new ideas without locking many resources in promotion? IT-companies implement MVP – minimum viable product. Language schools can start from even a more basic level – minimum engaging offer.

Minimum engaging offer can be one sentence or a short video. Examples from the world of IT:

1) Travis Kalanick concisely described the idea behind Uber: “you push a button and in 5 minutes a Mercedes S-class comes and picks you and takes you where you want to go”, video https://youtu.be/jT_1cxbM098

2) Dropbox published a promo video without the actual product and got 45 thousand sign-ups for their waiting list, video https://youtu.be/7QmCUDHpNzE

The most basic MVP is a minimum engaging offer with an action button. It’s a quick way to check interest in your idea or offer. If it doesn’t work, you should drop editing paragraphs and changing colors. Just switch to the next idea and new minimum engaging offer.

Examples of minimum engaging offers for language schools that can be often found:

- intensive language courses, learn English in 30/60/90 etc days
- we offer flexible learning timetable, you can select times of classes
- we conduct classes on our interactive online platform
- you work with certified teachers / native speakers
- we offer the lowest price in the market
- we are top school according to the rating
- we teach you to think in English / we motivate to study
- we offer English for IT, legal, career, interviews etc
- certified exam preparation center
- we offer our original methodology / communicative approach / innovative teaching methods
- we select teachers according to your goals / teach real-life English
- we offer DISCOUNTS up to 40% for our courses. Only 7 days left!
- we offer free webinars and speaking clubs

Think about other different minimum engaging offers that you can check in order to stand out of competition and attract new customers.

For Language Schools Language teaching