Digital Marketing for Daycare Centers: Drawing in Families With a Multi-Channel Approach
If you own a daycare center, imagine that:
- You have parents clamoring to tour your facilities.
- You have a waitlist for every classroom in your building.
- You’re considering expanding your space and hiring new staff.
- Your Google Business Page is full of 5-star reviews.
- You have 100% clarity on how your digital marketing performance is going.
Yep, you’d be pretty excited about that situation. And we can help you make it happen. This guide will explain how The Houston Marketing Agency can help you execute the perfect digital marketing campaign for your daycare to build a more successful brand.
We’re a Marketing Agency Specializing in Daycare Centers
We know digital marketing. We have experience in what works and doesn’t work in your field.
Contact us to set up a free initial consultation with no strings attached.
We Have a Proven System for Creating a High-Performing Daycare Center Digital Marketing Campaign
We implement clear processes and strategies to get results for our clients, making us a top-performing Houston Marketing Agency.
We’ll focus on three crucial components of your digital marketing journey:
- Setting up data analytics, allowing you to track your campaign’s performance.
- Driving inbound traffic to your website.
- Converting that traffic into customers — or in the case of daycares, student enrollments.
This may seem very clear-cut, but the results won’t mean much to you if they aren’t trackable.
Can you answer the following questions about your daycare’s digital marketing campaign?
- How many organic visitors did your site get from Google last month?
- What is your cost per qualified lead from Google Ads?
- What is your website’s conversion rate?
If you have no clue, we can help. We’ll walk you through our process and help you understand how it works. While we are a digital marketing agency, we’re also a “data agency.” That means we can help shed light on what works and what doesn’t, allowing us to build you a personalized, holistic, high-performing campaign.
Phase 1: Build Robust Data Analytics
Trackable KPIs
Daycare center digital marketing best practices start with data. If you don’t have reliable tracking for your data analytics or are making decisions based on a gut feeling, you aren’t going to get the best results.
Some crucial KPIs that you should be tracking for your daycare center include:
- Number of tours given each month
- Enrollment rate
- Average daily attendance
- Churn rate
- Staff attendance rate
- Parent satisfaction
- Revenue per child per day
While these factors aren’t directly related to digital marketing, they’re incredibly important to the success of your daycare. Other KPIs that are centered around digital marketing would be things such as:
- Number of website visitors by channel
- Cost pers by channel:
- Cost per website visitor
- Cost per lead
- Cost per qualified lead
- Cost per conversion
- Cost per conversion
Data Fidelity
We’ve noticed that many of our digital marketing agency competitors lack data fidelity. When we’ve inherited campaigns from other agencies or freelancers and dug into the data, we’ve discovered issues such as:
- Double counting conversions
- Not tracking every step of the funnel to clearly understand drop-off and conversion rates
- Tracking irrelevant conversions, i.e., someone making a Google Maps “direction request” to your daycare center
At The Houston Marketing Agency, we strive for perfect data tracking that is completely relevant to your daycare’s digital marketing campaign.
Phase 2: Maximize Affordable Inbound Traffic
Let’s face it, some people just aren’t going to go digital when searching for the right daycare center for their children. Instead, they’ll rely on recommendations from friends and family or go for the known most popular locations in their areas.
But for those who don’t already have an idea of where they want to send their kids, digital research is of the utmost importance. People searching online for daycares want evidence that the center is trustworthy, clean, has good reviews, and more.
Location is also a huge factor. Most parents want a daycare center that is either near their home or near their place of work. To get the most out of this, you want to display paid ads and also do what you can to get your business in the Google Local Pack. We’ll show examples of these below.
Since Google has become synonymous with searching for something online, it’s clear that this is the best place to begin when analyzing your digital marketing data.
As you see above, nearly 25,000 people are searching for “daycare centers near me” or some variation every month. That’s almost 300,000 per year.
If you get more location-specific and search for daycare centers in Houston the numbers aren’t as big, but there are still almost 200 interested parents per month looking for you.
Why do you need to know this?
Because if you’re not performing well in both organic and paid traffic, you’re missing out on potential enrollments for your daycare center.
Organic
There are two places you can rank organically on Google for keywords like “daycare centers near me.”
The first is known as the Google Local Pack.
The Google Local Pack is where you want to be, so you’re probably wondering how your daycare center can rank there.
Local SEO is complex, but the basic formula is:
- Have an optimized and highly-reviewed Google Business Profile.
- Have plenty of localized content on your website.
Below the Google Local pack on the search engine results page, you’ll see the organic results.
How can your daycare center rank in the top organic results?
Again, we could go on and on about everything that comprises SEO, but you’ll want to start by:
- Creating a content-rich, comprehensive website
- Optimizing your on-page SEO such as title tags, meta descriptions, etc.
Paid
Every paid channel will not perform the same for you, so you may need to experiment to see what works. It may depend on factors like your daycare’s learning model, the age of prospective parents, location, and more.
Here are some places you may want to consider spending your daycare center’s digital marketing budget.
Google Ads
The SEO information we discussed above also applies to Google Ads, a paid option that will help you rank at the top of the results page. You’ll often see sponsored links throughout search results.
And if your digital marketing agency does your sponsored ads right, your target audience will click on these, leading them to your site and a possible enrollment.
Note: There are different types of Google Ads we can test to measure campaign performance. These include:
- Search
- Performance Max
- Display
- And more
YouTube Ads
YouTube Ads for daycare centers provide affordable, highly targeted visual ads.
Parents who are ready to invest a lot of money in their children’s care are looking for a center that:
- Is safe
- Is pleasing to the eye
- Has qualified staff
- Provides nutritious meals and snacks
- Has protocols in place for food allergies
- Offers a variety of stimulating programs for children
- And more
A high-quality video showing your welcoming and engaging daycare facility can go a long way in drawing in potential families.
Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok Ads
Regarding Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, you should understand that these platforms are generally used by different demographics.
While there’s sure to be some crossover between age groups among the various platforms, you can assume that:
- Facebook is a preferred platform for GenX.
- Instagram is a preferred platform for GenX and Millennials.
- TikTok is a preferred platform for Millennials and Gen Z.
While most parents of daycare-aged children are probably Millennials or Gen Z, grandparents of preschoolers could also be involved in the search, so don’t rule out Facebook for your marketing.
Phase 3: Increase Conversion Rates
The strategies we’ve already discussed focus on getting users to your website. This is an important first step in the process.
But that’s only the beginning. A big part of your job is converting those users to enrollments and then keeping these families loyal to your center for any children they have in the future.
Let’s look at some practical ways to make this happen.
Use CRO Best Practices
Conversion rate optimization may include:
- Ensuring your images and videos are high-quality and unique.
- Having a mobile-friendly, easily navigable website.
- Adding reviews and testimonials to your site.
We can’t go into every possible strategy here, but here are some things daycare centers can focus on with their websites to increase conversion rates.
Use CRO Best Practices
Many users searching for specific businesses aren’t going to check out every single section of a website, but parents trying to find the best daycare center for their child sure will. Make sure every piece of information you provide is valuable and aimed at encouraging parents to enroll their children with you.
What is your center’s philosophy of care? How do you handle food allergies? What are the specific programs for children of every age? Make sure anything a parent might want to know is included.
It’s also important that you don’t make these pages too text-heavy. Use icons or photos with smaller amounts of text to help readers get all the information they need.
Make It Easy To Schedule a Tour
Most parents aren’t going to enroll their children in a daycare center they haven’t seen for themselves, so tours are vital to your marketing strategy. Instead of having a form parents fill out to receive a call back at some point in the future, invest in a good scheduling software so an appointment can be made then and there. Making things as easy as possible for the user will increase your conversion rates.
While they’re still waiting for a response from the daycare center down the street, you could already have them in your doors to experience the magic of your center.
Include Testimonials on Every Page
It’s important to have a section for testimonials on your website since prospective parents want to read other parents’ opinions of your daycare center. But an even better idea may be to have one or two positive reviews at the top of every section of your site. When parents are inundated with good feedback about your center, they’re more likely to sign up their children.
Another great idea is to have testimonials from teachers as well. Beneficial messages from the people who will be taking care of the children can be quite effective.
Step Up Your Email Marketing
Many daycares have waiting lists, so email marketing is important. If you’re booked up for this year and people are coming in months and months in advance, you need to do what you can to stay top of mind.
People look for daycare centers long before they need them, so what’s the best way to email drip people with automated campaigns every couple of weeks?
One idea might be age-based emails. For instance, you might send an email right before the child’s second birthday with things to look out for in the “Terrible Twos” or education about other milestones along the way. This will help parents know you remember their child and are an authority on child development.
Digital Marketing for Daycare Centers Doesn’t Have to Be Hard
The Houston Digital Marketing Agency is here to help local and national brands predictably increase leads and sales, no matter their industry.
We’d love to help you increase enrollment with our digital marketing for daycare centers. We even offer a 100% refund if we can’t improve your performance within three months.
Contact is today to learn how to get started.