So you’ve finally secured the licensing needed for your daycare center, you’ve had the place inspected, the rooms are all clean and pretty—you’re ready! Now, your next problem is getting families to find you. If you’ve been putting your daycare advertising on the back burner, it’s high time you start thinking of putting some of your marketing skills to work to get clients rolling in.
Whether you’re a veteran in the daycare industry, or just starting out, this article will prove useful in helping you level up your daycare advertising and marketing skills and improve enrolment.
So How Do You Get Started With Daycare Advertising?
Knowing and making use of the right kinds of daycare advertising strategies is not easy. If you want to attract more parents into your daycare and increase enrollment, you need to do something that will set you apart from the competition in your area. Because parents nowadays love to do research before they choose the best learning center for their children, it is important that you establish your brand and presence both online and offline.
Using the internet as the playground for your daycare advertising strategies provides you with an opportunity to “toot your own horn”. You want parents and potential clients in your area to know that you are a professional childcare provider and you provide the exact services they need.
Getting The Word Out
There are two tried and tested (and free!) ways to go about with daycare advertising. These two strategies will be responsible for getting most of the business you receive once your daycare center becomes fully established.
- Child Care Resources and Referral –this involves matching parents looking for daycare providers with those available in their area. This kind of daycare advertising works great all year round. You don’t even need to do anything other than having your license added to the list.
- Word-of-Mouth Advertising –Tell anyone and everyone you know about your daycare business. Daycare advertising is easily done when you inform your friends, neighbors, co-workers, family, and colleagues about it. Don’t think you only have to tell people who have children. Tell everyone—chances are they’ll know someone who needs childcare. Your friends and family, people who know you best, will be able to refer people looking for childcare directly to you. Nothing says effective childcare marketing that having satisfied parents tell others how happy they are about your service. Manage your daycare like a professional, keep children and parents happy, and you eventually won’t have the need to advertise anymore.
When you’re first starting out in this daycare business and you need to get all the clients you can, you will have to make your daycare marketing campaign a little more creative than usual.
Daycare Advertising 101: How to Do It
-
Advertise Online
Daycare advertising has long been dominated by physical marketing strategies such as paper flyers, newspaper ads, and ads on bulletin boards at local schools. While many people still use such methods these days, in certain places most parents look for daycare options for their children online. For this reason, you might find it convenient to advertise your services online.
-
Use Social Media
Another effective daycare advertising strategy is actively promoting your center on social networks that parents are on—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
When we do our research on certain stores or institutions we often check out if they have a social media page and read reviews. Parents do the same thing when looking for the right daycare center for their children. Completely immerse yourself in social media marketing by regularly posting updates online (and eventually evoke responses from interested parents), respond to comments, respond to reviews and respond to private messages.
Show your potential customers why they should choose your daycare center. Show them what makes your center the best for their children. You can do this by promoting the values you believe in, your amenities, your programs on social media. This is also a great chance for you to show off the teachers in your school.
-
Host An Event!
Another effective daycare marketing strategy is to host an event. Invite your local community to join in an activity hosted by your daycare center. It can be an event for a special holiday like Valentines, Christmas or Halloween. It can be a BBQ day event, a carnival, art day, or even an open house event. By offering the community a fun way to get acquainted with you, your staff, and your center, while they spend time with their family, is a great way to build your presence in the community.
Make sure you prepare a lot of business cards, brochures, swag items and flyers with your center’s information on that day. You’ll find them useful in case potential clients want to inquire about the services your center offers. Make sure you have registration forms available in case some parents decide right there and then to enroll their kids,
-
Use the Power of Networking
One of the oldest and effective ways of establishing your daycare center in the community is by forming business partnerships. Try to look up mother and child or mom groups within your community and connect with them.
Get in touch with the organizers and volunteer to give a presentation on choosing the right daycare center for their child. You can even hold a workshop on helping young children make the transition into preschool.
You establish yourself and your business as an influential presence in the community. The reputation and credibility you build-out of these partnerships will be among the biggest factors prospective clients consider when making a decision.
Make sure you have your calling cards and flyers on hand when you network. Offering discounts to group members is also another way to boost a mutually advantageous partnership.
-
Use A Childcare App
As parents become more and more tech-savvy, it would be unavoidable for you to incorporate technology at your center to attract them. There are apps that can help parents stay updated on what happens with their children at the daycare while they work.
Modern parents appreciate having all the information they need at the tip of their fingertips, or at least on their mobile devices. Imagine you’re at the store buying groceries, and the application notifies you if it’s time for your child to go home, or what your child did in the daycare center. So convenient, right?
The transparency and peace of mind that a childcare app provides is a great way to build trust among new clients and existing families. It could also be the deciding factor why they choose to enroll their children at your daycare center over the competitor.
Daycare advertising is a lot of work, but it’s a great way for you to get more parents to enroll in your daycare center. There are a variety of advertising and marketing strategies you can use, but how successful it goes depends on your dedication to it.
Parents nowadays are on the lookout for quick and quality solutions to their problems. The same is true for daycare. Think about what parents want the most when it comes to a daycare facility for their children and start advertising exactly that.
If you’re just starting into the daycare business and you don’t have the money to pay for advertising your center, you can use word-of-mouth advertising instead. If you can afford to shell out a bit of money on advertising, why not get flyers, brochures or even business cards that you can hand out. You don’t need to write a lot of unnecessary info about your daycare. Just state only the most important and details and don’t forget to include the logo. Adding a logo will make people remember your daycare center more. After all, 90% of attention is visual nowadays. Therefore, make your logo as attractive and as colorful as possible.
Build connections with other people in your community and participate in events, to establish your presence and advertise for free as well. You never know who knows someone who needs the help of a daycare center soon. When you let people get to know you, they’ll feel more at ease knowing that their children are safe in your care.
Conclusion
When you’re trying to promote your daycare business, it is best to understand that there is no single daycare advertising strategy that is going to work. You simply just can’t use only one strategy—you have to use several or more! Experiment with which marketing strategies work best for your business and use them! The key is to get your name out there as much as possible. Once you have truly established your name and your business, your work will be done for you. You will have as many clients as you want, and you will get as many inquiries as you can even when you’re not advertising or looking for new clients anymore.
