Daycare Advertising Strategies – Tips to Increase Enrollment
The choice of the advertising medium you should use will depend on your local market’s acceptance towards specific advertising channels – that is, some advertising strategy will be more effective than others depending on your target customers’ taste and preferences. Additionally, the choice will also depend on your budget. Some advertising strategies are expensive, and some will not cost you anything (e.g. online classifieds sites such as Craigslist).
You will need to try different advertising methods to identify channels or strategies that are effective in your local market. Over time and with experience, you will learn which advertising strategies are the most effective in terms of response rate and cost. The following are advertising strategies or ideas commonly used by daycare centers:
Directories
Ensure that your contact information is in your local phone directory, e.g. Yellow Pages. Yellow Pages (online and book format) is still a very popular directory that thousands of parents use to search for daycare centers.
Brochures
You should have a brochure of your daycare center outlining all relevant information such as programs, fees, teachers, and the overall learning philosophy. Very easy to distribute, brochures are an excellent medium to convey center details to potential customers.
Daycare Registries
A daycare registry (or directory) is a list of daycare centers around your neighborhood managed by an individual, agency or a referral center, which generally serves your local area. Its sole purpose is to help parents find childcare providers. Please ensure you list or include your daycare in daycare registries in your market. To find active daycare registries in your area, ask other providers or look in the phone directory (e.g. Yellow Pages).
In addition, there are many daycare registries available on the Internet. Most online daycare registries allow you to include your daycare’s basic contact information at no cost at all. Furthermore, many online registries provide parents with a search engine, making it easy for them to search for your daycare quickly. As more and more parents turn to the Internet to search for daycare centers, online daycare registries are becoming extremely effective in generating potential customers.
Online Classifieds
Thousands of parents also turn to online classified sites such as Craigslist () and eBay Classifieds () to search for daycare centers. Classified sites function similarly to a newspaper classifieds section. It allows people to post ads about their services or products that they want to sell. From time to time, you should post ads about your daycare services in online classified sites.
For more daycare management tips and strategies, you can visit Parent Relief’s How to Start and Manage a Daycare online tutorial.
