If you are a daycare owner, finding ways to promote your business is always on your mind.
You have to think about what will make people want to enroll their children in your center.
In this article, we’ll discuss some ideas for how you can develop and optimize your daycare so that it stands apart from all the others!
So if you want to stop wondering “how do I make my daycare stand out”, and actually make it happen, keep reading.
What Makes a Good Daycare Good?
Not every daycare is the same, and they all offer a different experience. It’s not just about having fun activities or providing great learning opportunities. It is also about how your daycare interacts with your customers (whether they be parents or children).
The best daycares have a combination of things that make them stand out. For example, a daycare with closed doors and windows offers a different experience. Vividly different from one where the children can go outside anytime they want.
A daycare center is not always going to be perfect for everyone. But by focusing on the three aspects below, it’s easier to create an environment that will appeal more than others:
- how you interact with your customers.
- what type of environment you offer (indoors or outdoors).
- variety in activities.
Focusing on these three aspects, will generate positive word of mouth for your daycare, and the most powerful tool at the disposal of any daycare is word-of-mouth marketing.
Even though a daycare cannot directly affect the outcome of each parental referral, they can certainly steer it in a positive direction. This returns to how you present your service, what environment you provide and how you interact with the children/parents.
Let’s move on to some daycare promotion ideas. These will ensure that you are ready to optimize your daycare for growth and success.
How Do I Make My Daycare Stand Out: Daycare Interactions
One of the most potent opportunities for making your daycare stand out is to improve your interactions with all involved. As a social-first business, interactions lead to how people think of your service.
This means improving in all areas: responsiveness, friendliness, accessibility and more. It is important to commit time and effort to reinforce these interactions as a vital part of your daycare’s value proposition by telling the story behind them on social media.
In addition, one way you can take advantage of opportunities for word-of-mouth marketing is through offering an improved level of customer service in person or over phone/email; this will often lead to referrals from satisfied customers who are happy with how they were treated (even if their child was not enrolled).
It also helps when hiring a new childcare team who exemplify the qualities outlined above – someone with good people skills will do well here! This may allow for a more effective training experience as well.
Daycare Environment
Just as important, if not more important for the development of the child is the environment in which he spends his time. By providing an environment where children feel comfortable, cared for and challenged, you ensure they stay in your daycare.
The environment should not be constant either. By changing the environment with indoor/outdoor integrations and themed changes, you will ensure children receive the change and variety needed to flourish.
The daycare should also not only provide a safe and stimulating environment for play, but one that will help them deal with frustration or anger, as well as low self-esteem issues. With this in mind, it is important to make sure there are places where they can go when they need space from others; if they feel like an outsider because they don’t know how to socialize with children their age or just want time alone by themselves.
By providing these three things – integral safety, stimulation, and individualized care – you will give children the best possible start on their way to adulthood.
How Do I Attract Parents to My Daycare: Daycare Service
If you’re just an intermediary who holds the child for a while and then releases them back to the parents, you’ll have limited success attracting parents to your daycare.
The best way to stand out as a daycare is to build a relationship with the parents and children. You must become an integral part of their life so they know they can count on you when necessary.
To tailor your service, identify why you provide daycare services in the first place. What services can you provide that others cannot? For instance, if you’re bilingual and offer a second-language immersion program to children of all ages, that stands out.
Other ways to stand out in terms of service are to offer a more structured environment or to have smaller ratios of children per caregiver.
You can also work on attracting the best type of child for your daycare, as well as building a relationship with them and their parents before they start attending your facility.
The Technical Approach to Making Your Daycare Better
The previous pillars had to do with seamless and essential aspects of making your daycare stand out. The following will cover the more technical approach to optimizing your daycare experience as a whole. This will help promote your business online, build your brand image, and most importantly, answer the question, “How do I attract parents to my daycare?”
Develop A Brand Story
Before you get into marketing your daycare, you have to have a good reason to do so. The backing for your daycare marketing is the brand story that you must develop.
As a daycare, your brand story should be about the company’s family-friendly atmosphere, which is why it would be advantageous to promote your daycare as a place where children can grow and learn in an environment that they are comfortable with.
Another important aspect of developing this story is what sets you apart from other daycares?
This part of the brand story should focus on any factors that make your facility different than others. Think about how many daycare teachers or classrooms there are at your location.
What kind of curriculum does your center have? All these things will help set you apart from other places, so include them when writing out this section of the branding process.
There are a lot of things to consider when establishing your daycare and these will help you come up with an effective story. Remember that this should be short, sweet, and easy to understand for people who might not know much about the caregiving industry.
Build An Optimized Website
Next, as a face-to-face business, you still need to have an online presence. Creating social media pages will help, but you need to do more. As a daycare center, you must have a well-optimized website that can be used by anyone.
Your daycare website should have all the information a parent would want to know before choosing your center. They should be able to find out what you offer and see pictures of their potential new daycare space.
You might also have a blog on the website, which is not only an effective way for parents who are currently enrolled in your program or considering it more to learn about how you manage things like discipline and education but can help with SEO as well.
Benchmarking other websites will give you inspiration as to design and content. Check out several websites to find ones you feel make a strong case for parents to sign up.
Social Media Presence
In addition to having an optimized website, your daycare center should be active on social media. This is important for parental engagement and helps provide a face to the story.
Without social media, the referrals will have to purely rely on word-of-mouth. Whereas, with social media, they can check you out and verify the story to their own satisfaction.
Social media for daycares should be created and managed with care. To establish a presence, posts should be frequent but not too frequent that they become spammy or overwhelming.
It’s also imperative for the daycare center’s social media pages to be consistent in tone.
The best way to maintain consistency is by using an account manager who can post on behalf of the organization while staying true to its narrative voice.
If you run a daycare with a tight budget, you can manage the social media pages on your own. If you go this route, you should learn as much as possible about a social media platform before you dive in. And it’s important to remember, that when it comes to social media marketing, it’s about quality more than quantity. Start with one or two platforms and expand your efforts later. Don’t spread yourself too thin by creating a profile on every platform.
Become A Thought-Leader
Aside from providing daycare, you can help educate and guide parents in everyday life. By joining Facebook groups, writing blog posts and engaging in discussions, you will start to build a reputation. In the daycare industry, reputation is the most critical aspect of survival.
To become a thought-leader in the daycare sector, you must first educate yourself. Seek out other daycare centers, talk to them about their successes and failures, and learn what they have done well in terms of marketing.
The more interviews you do with experts in the industry, the better prepared you will be for your own interviews as people start recognizing you as an expert too.
Some of the ways you can secure your position as a thought-leader are:
- Blogging is one of the best ways to reach a large audience and establish your expertise.
- Designing infographics for social media or other marketing materials.
- Videos are an excellent way to share your knowledge and promote your brand.
- Speaking at industry conferences, seminars, or other events.
These are just some examples of what you can implement in your thought-leading strategy. The only limitation is your creativity.
Search Engine Optimization
In terms of standing out in the digital world, your best bet as a daycare center is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO will help you garner attention by showing up on the first pages of search results, but also by improving your overall trust factor and domain rating on the web.
Some of the best ways for a daycare center to use SEO is to do the following:
- Optimize your website for search engines.
- Make it easier to find you with keywords and key phrases.
- Use keywords in domain names, meta descriptions, title tags and headers.
- Build links from other related sites on high-ranking pages that point back to yours.
This will help increase the traffic and visibility of your site as well as improving its trustworthiness.
The best way to get started is by doing an audit of all current SEO practices so that they can be improved upon or corrected if necessary before moving forward with additional initiatives.
A professional daycare center consultant will be able to do this for you quickly and efficiently at a price that won’t break the bank! However, SEO can easily be done by anybody, given that they do their research and are not afraid to experiment.
Incentives, Offers, Discounts
Daycare centers are expected to be predictable, but you can break the mold. Be unpredictable. Offer discounts, incentives, and even freebies to your loyal customers. Offer incentives for referrals from a rewards program where the customer gets points each time they refer someone else who becomes a customer too.
Create offers that are only available on certain days or times of the year. This will give people something extra special to look forward to when they choose your daycare center over another one!
Encourage parents by giving them specific reasons why their child should attend your daycare instead of all the other ones in town.
Incentives have to be natural. After all, you’re not selling a subscription to a magazine. You’re selling a caring, supportive, and all-inclusive environment for somebody’s child.
Host Events
You could host themed events, birthday parties, holiday gatherings, and much more. The sky is the limit.
By hosting events, your daycare center becomes a community center for all ages. Events are a great way to bring in new families and catch the eye of potential parents that would otherwise not have been interested.
You don’t have to host events exclusively for the children. Think about the parents too. If the kids know each other, it’s only natural that the parents know each other as well. Hosting events makes you an authority, showing that you know what you’re doing and you’re doing it well.
By hosting events for the community outside of those who use your services, you show that you are there for everybody. When the children outgrow your daycare center, you can still be an integral part of their life by hosting sports events, get-togethers and much more.
Visitations
Finally, you want to ensure you are always available for visitations. Parents might want to check in on their children without notice. Your service must be equally as good when the parents are there and when they are not. Visitations will help you see what needs to be improved for your daycare center to stand out from the rest.
Providing a variety of activities can attract people who might normally stay away, so offer them something new every time- like cooking or pottery classes!
Classes should have an end goal but also present different challenges along the way so everyone is engaged at their own pace. People love feeling accomplished with tasks. It makes them feel needed and important, encouraging retention on behalf of both customers and employees.
Daycare Success
Get people talking about what you do best. Showcase your daycare’s successes in the community, whether it be through a parade float or advertising campaigns.
Always remember that marketing is all about transparency. If someone asks for an itemized list of fees and prices, give them one! Transparency builds trustworthiness so make sure any information they seek is presented accurately with no hidden agendas or surprises waiting at the door.
The more people feel like they can rely on your center as a place where children are safe while parents work towards bettering themselves, the chances are other families will want to come back time and time again.
Innovations in Industry
Keep an eye out for any innovations in the industry that might interest your parents and try to stay ahead of the curve with these changes so you can offer them as soon as possible! It is important not only to keep up with what’s happening within childcare but also outside it, such as if a certain type of toy becomes popular or more vegetables are being added into children’s diets.
Evaluate your competitors regularly; this will make sure you know who they are, how they operate, and what sets them apart from you in a way that would entice potential customers away from their business. Keep on top of social media trends by reviewing sources like Mashable or BuzzFeed since both those sites post content about the latest social media innovations.
Examine your marketing strategy and see what you can do to make it more effective. Your marketing strategy should be based on a philosophy of target-specific, measurable results that are continuously measured against predetermined benchmarks for success.
Your Daycare A Star Among Others
Now that you know the answer to the question of “how do I make my daycare stand out”, you are well on your way to do so. Your daycare is no longer going to be a common name among the many others.
Your daycare will stand out. It will attract the parents and children that deserve your service. This is the consequence of the upcoming effort you will place into the growth and optimization of your branded daycare.
Get the Secrets to Increasing Child Care Enrollment
Our team researched what the most successful child care programs are doing to grow enrollment. Discover what we found and how your program can replicate their successes. Download our free guide.
