It can feel like you never have enough time in the day when you’re running a child care facility. In between meetings with parents, planning activities, and cleaning up from the day’s craziness, you need all the time-saving tips you can get to keep your business growing.
Child care marketing is an especially important avenue that it can be difficult to find time for. After all, there are always new families in your community who can benefit from your services. But if parents don’t know about you, they’ll never think to trust you with their little ones.
From planning your marketing efforts ahead of time, to getting active on social media, there are plenty of ways you can step up your marketing game even in a time crunch. With the right marketing tips on your side, you can streamline your outreach efforts, sign up more children, and excel in the child care industry.
Increase enrollments and keep families informed with expert advice and all the tools you need, in one place.
Plan your marketing calendar
The idea of planning advertisements, blog posts, and email newsletters can feel overwhelming, and it’s easy to put it all on the back burner. But the process doesn’t need to be as much of a challenge as you might think.
You can manage your daycare advertising strategy more efficiently by planning out a comprehensive strategy for the upcoming quarter or even the entire year. This process can take a couple of hours, but it will end up saving a lot more time in the long run. That way, you can spend your time executing your plan instead of trying to figure out what to do.
To plan your strategy effectively, you need to schedule a time to complete what is known as a marketing calendar. Think about the holidays and special events that are coming up. Let’s say it’s the final quarter of the year. You may want to schedule a holiday-themed email to parents to show your gratitude for their business.
Determine when you want to send out invitations and think about blog ideas that make sense for the season. Once you have brainstormed your marketing ideas, you can create a timeline and deadlines for each part of your marketing plan. You can delegate some tasks, or at least schedule your week so you have time to do the work yourself.
Schedule social media posts
Social media is an important avenue for reaching new families and staying in touch with parents who are already enrolled in your program. At minimum, your daycare should have its own Facebook Business page, and it may make sense to have an Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest page as well. But it can feel time-consuming to come up with and manage posts on a regular basis.
The best way to achieve consistent, engaging posts is by scheduling social media outreach in batches.
For example, if you turn on Social Share through Constant Contact, you can directly post your email newsletters on your social media pages. Post scheduling also makes it easy to keep up a consistent online presence, even if you don’t have time for marketing on a regular basis.
With post scheduling, you won’t have to take time away from other activities to post at the most appropriate time. Not sure of the best time to post a link to your update on Facebook? Social Share suggests the best times for your content to go live, based on Constant Contact data.
Automate a welcome email series
You probably have a lot of information you need to share with new parents once they sign up their children with your daycare. To streamline this process and keep new families engaged, create a series of welcome emails and set them to send automatically when someone joins your mailing list.
A welcome series can be a set of three emails that are sent out over a week. In the first email, you can welcome them with a personalized letter to thank them for trusting you with their child. In this email, you can also let them know to look out for subsequent emails.
In the next email, you can share all the answers to frequently asked questions, your policy manual, or other important information that they should know. In the next one, you can provide a calendar for the year, contact information if they have additional questions, and links to your social media pages.
At some point in this series, be sure to ask the parents of new enrollees how they heard about your business, and ask them directly what is most important to them regarding child care. Understanding your clients can help you better meet their needs and gain more customer leads.
You can also encourage them to forward the emails to their friends with young children as a way to gain new leads. Parents will feel involved, and you won’t have to do any additional work once you’ve set it up.
Answer parent questions online
What about those prospective parents who are considering your daycare but haven’t signed up for your email list yet? You can still market to them in a time-saving way by creating a parent-friendly website.
Since many new parents are busy and do their research in grocery store lines or elsewhere on the go, you want to make sure your website is designed to work just as well on a desktop as on a mobile device. Then, include information they care about, such as:
- Programs you offer for your targeted age range
- Your child care philosophy and values
- The curriculum and daily schedule
- Profiles of your teachers
- Information on your safety and security protocols
- Testimonials from satisfied parents
- Details on the food you serve
- Contact information if they have more questions
You can also add a page or pop-up form on your website where parents who are still deciding can sign up for your email list. With Constant Contact, you can easily create different email segments for interested parents and enrolled families. That way, you can make sure parents who still need some convincing get the information they need.
An automated welcome email series will show these parents that you’re ready to answer their questions and meet their needs.
Get notified about business reviews
Another time-consuming part of child care marketing is keeping your listings up-to-date and responding to all reviews as quickly as possible. Responding promptly and politely to reviews, whether they’re positive or negative, can help boost your credibility online and show parents that you care about their feedback.
Instead of constantly checking to see if there are new reviews, you can sign up through Google My Business to receive notices when a new review is posted.
Putting it all together
With the many marketing tools available to you online, you can save tons of time and market your daycare more effectively. By planning and scheduling your marketing efforts ahead of time, creating email and website content that answers parent questions, and automating outreach and review notifications, you can reduce time spent on marketing and get back to what you do best: supporting the kids and parents who rely on you.
For more ideas for a robust marketing strategy for your daycare, check out The Download. It’s a free guide that can help you pre-plan your child care marketing work and stay efficient as your business grows alongside the children you help.
