You can’t just be a marketer and decide you do childcare marketing.
You need to understand the sector. You need to understand how parent psychology works, how families make decisions and why the decision-making cycle in childcare can take a lot longer than people expect.
You don’t just wake up one morning and say, “I need childcare,” then enrol at the first place you see.
For a lot of families, this is one of the biggest decisions they’re making.
They’re thinking about whether their child is going to be safe. Whether they’re going to be happy. Whether they’re going to fit in. Whether they’re doing the right thing by leaving their child there while they go to work.
They want to feel good about the decision.
That is why childcare marketing needs a long-term strategy. You have to understand the fears, the desires, the wants and everything else that goes into that family’s decision.
Most agencies just want to put you out there and market you.
It’s not that simple.
Do you actually need more leads?
This is normally one of the first questions I ask.
Do you really need more leads, or do you have another type of problem?
If you do need more leads, what has stopped leads coming to you before calling us? What has been the blockage so far?
Is there something wrong with the centre?
Is there strong competition?
What is your signage like?
When did you last advertise?
What is your reputation like?
When did you last get a review?
Are families enquiring but not booking tours?
Are they booking tours but not turning up?
Are they touring and then disappearing?
Are families enrolling and then leaving again a few months later?
When somebody says to me, “Martin, we need more leads,” my reaction is really: why do you need more leads? What is the problem we need to solve here today?
Because it is almost never just more leads.
More than likely, you probably do need more leads. Most centres need a consistent flow of enquiries.
But if your funnel is leaking everywhere else, all you are doing is spending more money to pour more people into something that isn’t working properly.
Before you spend another dollar getting more enquiries, I want to know that the rest of the process is doing its job.
Where are families dropping out?
If you are getting enquiries but none of them are turning into enrolments, the first thing I want to look at is your enquiry system and your follow-up system.
Speed to lead is everything.
A family enquires and a centre thinks, “They’re looking for care, we’ll worry about that tomorrow.”
By tomorrow, that family may already have contacted another five or six centres. They may have already booked a tour somewhere else.
It’s not 2014 anymore.
You can’t sit there and assume people are just going to come to your centre because you have a vacancy.
The process should be easy for the family.
They should be able to enquire easily. They should be able to book a tour easily. The follow-up should feel flawless and they should be reminded about what they have booked.
Then you need to look at the next part.
If people are booking tours but not turning up, why?
Did they reschedule?
Did anyone follow them up?
Did they get cold feet?
If people are attending tours but not enrolling, you have a different problem.
Now I want to look at the tour.
A great tour feels like it was meant to be.
By the time that family walks through the door, you should already know a lot about them.
What is the child’s name?
How old are they?
Why are they coming into care?
Have they used childcare before?
Was it a good experience or a bad experience?
What does the family expect from care?
What outcome are they hoping for?
If a parent starts work at six in the morning, show them what your morning routine looks like.
If they tell you their child was constantly sick at their previous centre, explain your cleaning processes, your illness policies and what you actually do.
Don’t just walk somebody through and say, “Here’s room one. Here’s room two. Here’s where we eat.”
The tour should be about them.
You shouldn’t have to sell the centre.
You should be solving a problem.
Families are trying to make a decision they can feel good about
This is one of the biggest things I think marketing agencies miss about childcare.
Families want a guilt-free experience.
A parent doesn’t want to sit at work all day thinking, “I’m not there for my child. Have I made the wrong decision?”
They want to know their child is safe.
They want to know their child is comfortable.
They want to know their child belongs there.
And they want to know there is actually something happening at the centre that is benefiting their child.
If a childcare centre understands the family’s situation, they start to feel more like a partner in that family’s life rather than somewhere they simply drop their child off.
That is a completely different relationship.
The same idea should run through everything.
I always say an ad should be able to make you nod your head.
You see it and think, “Yep, that’s me,” or, “That’s interesting.”
Then that same feeling needs to continue when they click on your website, when they make an enquiry, when somebody calls them and when they eventually walk through your front door.
Your website can’t sound like every other childcare centre
One of the biggest mistakes I see is centres trying to be the same as everybody else.
“Nurturing educators.”
“Nutritious meals.”
“Safe and secure environment.”
The centre down the road has those things too.
Nurturing educators is a given.
Tell me how your educators are nurturing.
Why are your meals more nutritious?
Why should a family care about your kindergarten program?
What does any of that actually mean for their child?
If you are saying the same thing that the centre down the road is saying, then you are just a comparison.
You are not an option.
A family should be able to land on your website and understand where you are, what you are about and how their child is going to feel in your centre.
Then make the next step obvious.
Enquire.
Call.
Book a tour.
Those are the actions that matter.
Sometimes I’ll tell you not to spend more on marketing
There is one situation where my advice is very simple.
If your centre has a bad reputation, don’t spend more money sending more people towards the problem.
Fix the problem.
If that means rebranding, improving the centre, changing something internally, fixing educator issues or dealing with whatever caused the reputation in the first place, put the resources into that.
Whether the reputation is fair or unfair doesn’t really change the problem.
Families know what people say about you.
Fix it first.
Once you have a centre you are genuinely confident in, then I believe you should be marketing it consistently.
The biggest occupancy mistake I see is centres waiting too long.
They panic when occupancy starts falling and then suddenly decide they need marketing.
I don’t like feast or famine.
You want a steady flow.
We also look at what you already have
Getting from 78% occupancy to 90% does not necessarily mean buying thousands of dollars more advertising.
You may already have opportunities sitting inside the centre.
What are you doing with referrals?
Are you asking families for reviews?
Are you collecting testimonials?
Are families talking about you in local community groups?
Do any of your existing families own local businesses or work for organisations you could build a relationship with?
What does your community actually know about your centre?
Sometimes centres get comfortable when they are full.
The advertising stops.
The community work stops.
They stop asking for feedback.
Nobody notices until suddenly next year doesn’t look as full as last year did.
Know your numbers
If you are serious about occupancy, you need to know where your enquiries are coming from.
You need to know what is coming from Google Ads, what is coming through organic search, what is coming from Meta and what is coming through other sources.
Then you need to know what happened.
How many enquiries?
How many booked tours?
How many of those tours actually turned up?
How many enrolments?
How many families left?
What is your weakest day?
What is your strongest day?
If you are getting twelve tours a month and only enrolling six families, there is something worth investigating.
If you improve that without generating another enquiry, your occupancy can still improve.
If plenty of families are enrolling but occupancy keeps dropping, then I want to know whether you have a revolving door.
Are families leaving as quickly as they came?
Knowing the numbers tells you where to look.
What we do differently
The reason I believe Enrolment Boost is different from a general marketing agency is simple.
We understand the industry.
We only work with one client per suburb, and we try to keep our finger on the pulse of what is happening in the childcare sector.
We want to understand what is changing before it becomes a problem for our clients.
When we start working with a centre, I don’t only want access to an advertising account.
I want to understand the CRM.
I want to look at Meta.
Google.
Organic search.
Search Console.
Analytics.
Your website traffic.
Your competitors.
Your demographic.
I want to know what you did before.
How much did you spend?
What did you call a conversion?
Was a conversion an enquiry, or was it actually a booked tour?
They are two completely different things.
I also want to know what makes the centre genuinely marketable.
Maybe you do something unusual.
Maybe your centre doesn’t charge families for public holidays.
Maybe your educators have been there for years.
Maybe there is something your approved provider believes deeply in that nobody has ever properly communicated.
The best campaigns normally have something real underneath them.
One thing that never ceases to fail is when you have an approved provider who actually cares about the outcome of the service, not just the money.
Are our children walking out of here better than when they walked in?
That is something worth marketing.
How do we know whether it is working?
The honest truth is that attribution is never perfect.
A family might see a Facebook ad, search the centre on Google three days later, drive past the building on the weekend and then call the phone number.
Which one gets the credit?
The Facebook ad?
Google?
The sign out the front?
The phone call?
You can spend a lot of time arguing about attribution.
Of course we track what we can.
I want to know enquiries, booked tours, attended tours and what those tours are costing.
But at the end of the day, the thing that matters most is when the owner says:
“Yeah, we’re getting predictable tours and predictable enquiries.”
That is when I know something is actually working.