4 Marketing Techniques To Increase Child Care Enrollment

With the new year now in full swing, it’s a good time to try out some new marketing techniques to take your business to the next level! Below are four quick techniques that we’ve seen lead to more enrollments for childcare businesses (both center-based and in-home). Give them a whirl and please please please let us know how they go for you! If you have any questions about child care marketing, just send an email to angela@momtrusted.com and ask!

Technique 1: Online Testimonials

We’ve been talking about testimonials for quite awhile and will continue to do so. They are just THAT powerful for your business! Put yourself in the shoes of a parent interested in enrolling their child in your daycare…would you blindly trust everything that the director/owner was telling you or would you want to verify that information with a parent who is enrolled in the program? Chances are, you would want to verify.

With good online testimonials, you’ll have parents who are walking into your center for tours simply looking to verify the great things they read online (instead of today, when parents walk in super skeptical of you and your center). This difference in mindset is hugely important and leads to a much higher conversion rate for parents who walk into your center for tours.

Notice we’ve used the word “testimonial” rather than “review”. This was done on purpose. There was recently a study conducted by Harvard Business School which determined that roughly 16% of online reviews are fake. Instead of being lumped into that dubious category, we are upfront about the fact that we focus on the positive and that any parent comments on MomTrusted.com are testimonials from parents who you have specifically invited to comment on your business. To see some of the great reviews that centers have received, check out The Learning Tree – Livonia North’s Mom Trusted profile.

Technique 2: Redesign Your Website (or Build Your First Website)

Believe it or not, having a great website is a relatively simple and inexpensive thing to obtain but there are thousands of businesses out there that currently have websites that are too difficult for the user to navigate. We’ll be discussing the fundamentals of what makes up good web design in future posts but for now, here are the basics:

Good Design:

• Clean

• Navigation is easy to understand

• Unobtrusive (no auto-playing audio or video)

Bad Design:

• Cluttered

• Difficult to navigate

• Lots of flash images, video, and audio

• Popups

If you’re interested in learning more, take a look at this article in PandoDaily discussing the standards of web design. Also, contact us if you need a website and just don’t know where to start. We can help!!

Technique 3: Create a Referral Program

You may have heard this one before. Having a referral program for your currently enrolled families is less about the financial incentive that the families have and much more about making your families aware of the fact that you’re looking for referrals. You want to make sure that your families always have you in their minds in case one of their friends is starting their child care search. Remember: there is NO marketing technique that performs better than word of mouth and it is your responsibility as the director to make sure you receive more word of mouth referrals in 2014 than you did in 2013.

Bonus Tip: At Mom Trusted, we always make sure parents know that they are helping their friends when we ask them to join the referral network. This personal touch makes them much more likely to join the referral network than they would have otherwise been. We’ve experimented with offering a financial incentive to the parents but have found that people don’t need to be paid to help their friends. Who knew. :)

Technique 4: Content Marketing

Content marketing for childcare providers is surprisingly simple. To do content marketing effectively, you need to create content which is engaging and important for the target audience. Luckily for you, by working with children all day, you have plenty of engaging content to write about and take pictures of every day. There is NOTHING more engaging to parents than their children. Even something as simple as having great pictures of the activities taking place in your daycare will help you retain your existing families and enroll new families when these pictures are shared with them. To learn more about content marketing, check out the Content Marketing Institute.

We’d love to help you implement these techniques to help make 2014 the best year it can be for your business! Simply email us at angela@momtrusted.com!