A whopping 82% of shoppers wants a brand's value to align with their own.
Parents are more loyal to childcare brands who ‘get them.’ Meaningful relationships do more than drive business success - they propel your passion forward. It's essential to connect with parents and highlight the message of your childcare business to promote positive relationships from the get-go.
Today, we’re here to dive into four successful childcare marketing ideas (that really stuck with parents).
Hopefully, these examples will help spark ideas and reinvigorate your own approach to marketing in childcare. ✨
Table of Contents
- Refine Your Childcare Marketing
- Marketing Campaign Toolkit
- Build a High-Converting Campaign strategy
- 4 Examples of LineLeader Customer Marketing Campaigns that Really Worked
Refine Your Childcare Marketing
Marketing is a process. And without careful planning, it’s tough to see its rewards. A good way to create an effective campaign is by outlining the childcare marketing goals you want to achieve.
This strategy will lay the groundwork for attracting new families. Grow enrollment by:
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picking an objective
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pinpointing your audience
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mapping out your messaging or the written contents of your campaign
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aligning with the values, needs, and wants of your prospective families
1) Conduct market research
Researching your market before you launch a campaign can help you understand your competition, improve communication with your target audience, and identify new market opportunities. There are a variety of tools available to help you conduct market research - all from the comfort of your office.
Gone are the days of hiring team members with clipboards to approach consumers face-to-face. Survey Monkey, Attest, and Sprinklr all offer digital market research tools to help guide you through the process of understanding your audience, your competitors, and industry trends. A little research prior to your campaign (whether it’s to increase enrollment, camp attendance, or grow your waitlists) will help drive your business strategy.
2) Define your childcare target market. 🎯
A market segment is a group of consumers that could potentially enroll at your childcare center. These customers are usually grouped by attributes they have in common, such as a child's age or desired start date.
First, you should identify your market segments and determine how big each segment is.
Be careful not to fall into the trap of defining your market as “everyone in your community,” when you generalize your advertising because you're afraid of isolating a potential family or parent, you can’t effectively communicate.
3) Develop your buyer personas.
To write a marketing plan that effectively targets your childcare centers’ target market, you must first define your audience personas. Audience personas are representations of real people, with their own identities and motivations. By understanding who your customers are and what they want, you can create marketing materials that speak directly to them. This can help lead to more tours, enrollments, and revenue.
Start by listing out the kinds of programs and classes you’d like to offer at your centers’. Then, figure out who the primary decision-maker is and who the primary influencers might be in each scenario.
- Primary decision-maker: (usually) the individual(s) taking financial responsibility at your center. For smaller childcare businesses (1-2 centers), this is an Owner or center Director. On the other hand, larger childcare enterprises will have childcare leaders or Corporate Executives (of enrollment, communications, operations, or marketing) making the calls. 💰
- Primary influencers: are also crucial in the purchasing process...they can sway the decision-makers. This will be your Assistant Directors and staff (administrators). Even educators can influence certain purchase decisions, like proposing family communication or curriculum planning technology.
4) Have a nice mix of print and digital marketing to promote your centers.
When you're trying to decide how to get the word out about your childcare center, remember that it's important to clearly define what makes your centers stand out against the competition.
Do you have a discovery nature program and STEM-focused classes?
Highlight those unique elements in your marketing materials. From there, decide how you want to deliver your message. Promotional letters and brochures are effective print collateral for local communities; digital advertising is also an option if you want to reach more people at once.
Digitally marketing your childcare business makes it easy to:
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Expand your reach by targeting a wider audience.
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Meet today’s Millennial parents where they’re at – since most search for childcare online.
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Have a cost-effective strategy and see a greater potential for your return. In other words, advertising your childcare business online is cheaper than printing out flier after flier.
Marketing Campaign Toolkit
Marketing campaigns are made up of several key phases.
Metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) - Define your objectives and set measurable goals, like boosting your tour conversion rate by 10% within the next two months. Detail a specific number and timeline.
Choose your channels. Once you know what you want to accomplish, it's easier to decide which media channels will reach your target audience most effectively. For example, if you want to target parents who visit family blogs and digital publications, then Facebook ads are a great option.
Build creative assets: A great marketing campaign should have great creative assets to match. Create high-quality content such as videos and blog articles that will engage potential clients.
Set your budget – Finally, budget wisely! How much will each ad and paid promotion cost per family lead? It's important to factor in all costs before starting your campaign so you don't have any surprises along the way.
Build a High-Converting Campaign Strategy
1) Create a Strong Message
Pinpoint your program’s key talking points, or what you want to promote. Maybe you offer a 30-day potty training program, enrichment programs, or late-night hours...
Figure out what makes your business stand out from your competitors and use that in your marketing. Strong messages drive responses.
With the right tools, you can send relevant and personalized content to target the unique needs of all your families. For example, drip campaigns can automatically send customized content, based on how families previously interacted with your other campaign messages.
Tip – Place a ‘reply prompt’ in your emails and texts. This will increase the number of parents who respond. For example: 📱
- Include a question such as: ‘Are you still interested?’ or ‘What’s your child’s favorite toy?’
- Ask your parents to send in a picture of a memorable moment.
- Request that parents reply to your texts with their favorite emoji (this is one of our customer favorites!)
Schedule a demo today to see how automated emails and texts make your enrollment process easier for staff.
2) Communicate Through Multiple Channels
To market your childcare center effectively, you need to use a variety of marketing channels. To reach parents, use Facebook or Childcare Listing Directories (like Winnie and Kinside) to capture interest from new families, while also sending emails and texts at regular intervals. This omnichannel approach keeps your center top of mind and helps you cut through the noise of all the other advertisers they see.
And remember: When you’re marketing in a variety of areas, you need a process for capturing and organizing leads at scale. Integrate your listing directories, website, social media pages, and phone with a childcare experience platform that automatically collects family information and triggers new communication workflows to encourage parents to move forward with enrollment. Use a mixture of email and text marketing campaigns to attract prospective parents. 
3) Establish Regular Communication
Create a regular communication schedule to remain top of mind with families. This is especially important for waitlisted families that are searching for care with you and the center down the street. Try sending...
- 2-3 emails during the first week families are on your waitlist
- 1-2 emails in the second week
- After that, scale down to 1 email per week.
4) Use Automation to Save Time and Connect Faster ⏰
We found that 5-10 workflow automations are ideal to properly guide families through enrollment, saving staff more than 40 hours of work every month. Reduce costs and boost enrollments by automating your advertising and family communications. Minimize the number of manual tasks you or your staff need to complete daily.
In addition to saving time, workflow automation helps you standardize enrollment across locations. Ensure you and your staff are all on the same page and sharing the correct branding and messaging.
Example workflow for guiding families through enrollment
5) Make It Personal
Drip campaigns are a great tool for multicenter childcare organizations because they're highly targeted, deliver timely results without staff having to lift a finger, and more than 90% of consumers say they're more likely to be loyal to companies that recognize and remember them.
It’s crucial that you prioritize personalization with today’s parents. Drip campaign marketing uses a series of personalized emails and text messages to engage parents in your enrollment pipeline. For example, if a parent clicked the blog link in your email, they can be considered more engaged than a parent who simply opened it without clicking anything. These two parents can then be nurtured on different paths that fit each of their levels of interest and care needs.
“It's been absolutely amazing, and I would highly recommend [LineLeader by] ChildcareCRM. We see the benefits of using it to do drip campaigns to market to parents that may be considering us and turn them into enrollments.”
-Linh Nguyen, Franchisee Owner of Kids R Kids: South Riding
Example drip campaign content flow
6) Stay Consistent to Build Your Brand
Ensure that your marketing materials have the same wording, imagery, and logo so that people can recognize your brand and develop a positive association every time they hear about you. Establish a reputation as your childcare organization scales by making sure that everything you do is done in a professional manner. Consistent presentation of a brand increases response rates and ultimately, revenue by 33%. For example, Code Ninjas uses black and blue in their logo to symbolize sophistication and reliability.
7) Choose the Right Marketing Tool to Track Your Efforts 📈
Reports are your bread and butter for measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and enrollment initiatives. Marketing reporting is crucial for childcare operators. There’s no way to tell if your campaigns are truly the cause of any successes or failures unless you have the right tracking in place to report on these efforts.
It can be scary to start tracking marketing performance across your centers.
You’re (typically) flooded with a lot of numbers, cluttered Excel sheets, and mental gymnastics that go into finding the data you need.
Don’t worry! LineLeader has your back. Get marketing insights that allow you to stop spending money when you’re not getting a return. In just a few clicks, you’ll see reports on conversions, campaign success, marketing ROI, and much more – without the hassle of manually recording and calculating your data.
As our Co-founder, Chuck Gibbs, likes to say, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”, hence why he started LineLeader.
4 Examples of LineLeader Customer Marketing Campaigns that Really Worked
1)Celebree School
What Makes This Work:
- 86% of consumers use the Internet to find local businesses.
- Because Google ads are automatically placed at the top of search results, parents can find Celebree’s website faster – boosting conversion rates.
2) Brightside Academy – Ohio
What Makes This Work:
- Brightside Academy hosted a donation event and promoted it through social media to increase volunteers, profits, and overall event visibility.
- 79% of US marketers generate sales using event marketing, which is a great way to promote your childcare events (open house, parents' nights, new programs, etc).
3)Childcare Network
- With the help of LineLeader, Childcare Network enhanced their website form by changing the button from ‘Contact Us’ to ‘Tuition and Availability’ to promote transparency.
- Making this subtle change on their website increased inquiries from 300 per week to over 2,000 per week.
4) Cadence Education
What Makes This Work:
- Cadence Education – a long-time LineLeader customer – builds text marketing campaigns to reach parents through their preferred form of communication.
- Cadence increased their average text response rate to 25% (well over the industry average) by using LineLeader’s childcare enrollment software.
LineLeader by ChildcareCRM Helps You Launch Childcare Marketing Campaigns with Ease
Marketing and promoting your childcare centers are essential to success. The more you increase your visibility, the more parents hear about your center and are inclined to inquire for care. It’s vital to build effective campaigns as much as possible to encourage enrollment. LineLeader is your #1 childcare enrollment software for easy-to-use marketing automation. With the help of LineLeader Enroll, automate normally manual communications with hands-free marketing campaigns for every stage in the family's enrollment journey and:
- Automatically follow up with every lead across centers so no opportunities fall through the cracks.
- Let parents schedule tours from your website to eliminate the back-and-forth of scheduling and increase attendance.
- Nurture families with multi-step, response-based email and text campaigns.
- Engage parents with personalized messages using
our drag-and-drop email template editor.
Download the guide to scale your marketing campaigns, practically in your sleep.
Schedule a demo to see, in real-time, how priceless LineLeader Enroll features save you valuable time.
Encouraging feedback from both parents and staff is key to continuous improvement. LineLeader’s feedback management features allow childcare centers to collect and analyze feedback, identify areas for improvement, and implement changes. This commitment to continuous improvement fosters a positive work environment and enhances parent satisfaction. 📈
See LineLeader In Action For Yourself
LineLeader is a powerful tool for streamlining the parent and staff journey in childcare centers. By offering marketing automation, enrollment operations tools, and comprehensive CRM features, LineLeader helps childcare businesses optimize their processes, improve communication, and enhance overall efficiency. Embrace LineLeader to transform your childcare center’s operations and ensure the success of your childcare marketing and enrollment efforts.
