How to Grow Your Childcare Organization with Facebook

Did you know - 93% of marketers use Facebook for advertising?

And with over 1 billion daily active users, Facebook is the largest social media platform for marketing your centers. Often, childcare organizations have trouble marketing to a qualified parent audience. Fortunately, Facebook makes it easy to manage, market, and scale your centers. With expansive features like custom tabs, CTA buttons, organic posts optimized for growth, and various ads - you can transform your Facebook Page. Plus, ensure your childcare content reaches the right demographic by learning about Facebook's algorithm.

Check out this ultimate article to see how to grow your childcare business with Facebook's lesser-known marketing features.  

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Use Facebook As the Ultimate Digital Marketing Tool for Your Centers

Social media is sometimes undervalued.

It's seen as a simple tool for family engagement – mainly used for posting fun photos or exciting updates about your center. Occasionally your content reaches your target audience. But unfortunately, most of your posts end up on the feed of either non-parents or parents who aren’t currently searching for care.

However, Facebook becomes the ultimate digital marketing tool when you pair the right content with dynamic lead generation. Use Facebook to attract, capture, and retain families.  

How Can I Get Started?

First, learn how to set up a Facebook business page from scratch or simply convert your personal profile to a business page. If you go with the latter - Facebook will transfer your profile picture, cover photo, and the name of your childcare organization. Facebook will also allow you to choose which uploaded or tagged photos/videos, friends, followers, and pending requests to copy over from your previous profile.  

Remember to use a profile and cover photo that positively represents your business. Use images of staff, teachers, or classrooms. Then, add a CTA button such as ‘learn more’ or ‘sign up’ to help drive traffic to your childcare website. 

Next, choose the right category for your Facebook business page. There are six options: 

1. Local Business or Place 

2. Company 

3. Organization or Institution  

4. Brand or Product 

5. Artist, Band, or Public Figure 

6. Entertainment, Cause, or Community 

Childcare businesses with 1-2 centers should pick the local business category. On the other hand, multi-site childcare organizations will need to classify their page as an organization or institution. That way, you'll have more opportunities to grow your multi-site business with additional Facebook marketing features.

Download our Ultimate Facebook Guide for a proven Facebook marketing strategy to boost enrollment.

How to Build a Reputable Facebook Business Page  

Step 1 is choosing a category for your page. After, you'll want to familiarize yourself with powerful Facebook tools to supercharge your childcare organization's marketing efforts. Surprisingly, there are a range of underutilized, dynamic Facebook features to help you scale your childcare business. These tools will help you effortlessly market to prospective parents and engage your enrolled families.

Previously, your Facebook options were limited. Now - you can use Facebook to drive more organic traffic. Organic traffic encompasses visitors that naturally find your website, pages, or social media (because it's ranking well in the SERPs). Boosting your organic traffic is more cost-effective than PPC (pay per click ads). In fact,  70% of marketers deem organic traffic from SEO as more effective than PPC ads. 

Meaning, the price of converting prospective families to schedule a tour or enroll for care will cost less. The farther your organic reach soars - the more you'll fill your enrollment pipeline. Enhance your Facebook page to gain initial interest and attract families with ease.

1) Establish A Vanity URL 

There are a variety of ways to optimize your Facebook page. A vanity URL is a unique URL branded for marketing purposes. Essentially, they're custom URLs that are easier to read, search, remember, and share. Using a vanity URL to make your page easy to find builds your Facebook's SEO and organic reach. 

2) Upgrade Your Photos and Images  

Facebook is a highly visual social media platform. So, it’s vital to use high-quality photos for your profile picture, cover photo, and image posts. Use cohesive brand logos, colors, and fonts for each post or upload. 

Example Facebook image and ad

3) Choose A CTA Button to Create an Actionable Goal  

Displaying calls-to-action (CTAs) as buttons on your page results in a 45% boost in clicks. Your childcare organization should ensure your CTAs are a clear, concise action that directly relates to an offer, service, or piece of insight.

To drive even more leads, place a CTA button on your Facebook page and have it integrated into your cover photo. Families will be more likely to follow through and actually click your button because they're seeing it twice. Boost enrollment with CTAs.

You can alter the CTA button's look-and-feel, colors, or icons. Facebook lets you choose from nearly 20 CTA buttons. See some of the most popular ones below.

• Learn More
• Contact Us
• Sign Up
• Call Now
• Download
• Shop Now
• Apply Now
• Book Now
• Send Message

Pro Tip: Link posts receive 73% less engagement than video posts. Prioritize posting short-form videos on Facebook with tools like Biteable, Lumen5, and more. 

Facebook CTA buttons

4) Use Custom Facebook Tabs (sidebar) 

The sidebar tabs on your Facebook Page are customizable. Include crucial information about all (or one) of your childcare centers. Choose to display an additional CTA for higher conversion success. Or even answer questions to engage your prospective families. This gives potential enrollments more opportunities to interact with your childcare organizations’ page and content.

Also, prospects who are  browsing can easily return to a specific point on your page or locate your website. Sidebar or custom tabs make your Facebook Business Pages simpleton navigate. 

5) Create Engaging Content and Clean Up Your Posts 

Did you know - high-quality images on Facebook are 10x more likely to get engagement?

The way you format your photos will either make them stand out or fade into the background.

Declutter your posts, re-size, and sharpen images. Include real-life moments of fun holidays, exciting changes, or a memorable field trip. Then, optimize the headlines of your posts with keywords. 

Best Practices for Using Facebook to Scale Your Childcare Organization 

1) Highlight Upcoming Events  

Post upcoming events at your center locations to spread awareness about unique programs or featured offers. Plus, these event postings allow you and your marketing teams to collect email addresses and contact information to capture more leads.  

Event postings are a perfect time to get creative and think outside the box. Some event examples include – parents' night out, open houses, upcoming tour dates, virtual parent-child cook-offs, in-person silent disco party, outdoor story time, and much more.  Childcare event - virtual cooking class

2) Update Your About Section  

Always keep your ‘About’ section up to date. Be sure to include essential details like your hours of operation, social media links, and contact information [website, phone number, email, etc.] If you’re sharing one page for all your centers, display each location's map to help inquiring families understand that you have multiple sites.  

Finally, make sure to add and update your page roles. Assign a designated page administrator, editor, and more. Doing this ensures the right people have access to edit your organization’s Facebook page.

Tiny Treasures Preschool about section on Facebook

3) Explore Publishing Tools Like Facebook Lead Ads 

As you know - Facebook has an ocean of marketing tools for childcare businesses to dive into.

Facebook ads are a paid-for service created through Ads Manager and offer more advanced customization solutions. There are many advertising objectives to help you reach your specific childcare business goals and the audiences you care about most. For example, Facebook's Carousel Ads are great for displaying a series of photos in a visually-appealing way.

Further, automatic placements allow you to make the most of your marketing budget. Facebook automatically places your childcare ads on all relevant platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network (a tool to increase your reach), and Messenger. With this tool, you’ll reach qualified prospective parents that are actively searching for care. It helps lower your ad spend. 

Plus, custom audiences easily find parents through different sources (email lists, website traffic, engagement, or interaction of prospective leads on your Facebook page) to build a qualified list of leads. And you can use custom audiences with a specific type of ad, like. Facebook Lead Ads. Facebook Lead Ads help push your Facebook page to inquiring parents. They include a contact form where parents give you their name and phone number/email address. That way, you can collect vital contact information from parents for personalized follow-up later on.

Generally, Facebook ads optimize your ROI by identifying the most efficient audience. You'll maximize the return on your marketing expenses.  

Facebook Lead Ads

What to Know About Facebook’s New Algorithm for A Wider Reach  

Facebook is constantly changing its algorithm.

Since 2018, Facebook has consistently updated its algorithm to enhance the user experience. Understanding what these changes are and how they factor into your childcare organization’s marketing helps you better improve your Facebook page and content. If your page is in line with the current algorithm, your content will be viewed by more high-quality leads. Thus, generating more inquiries and tour bookings.  

Here’s a timeline of everything you need to know about Facebook's algorithm so far:

2018

• Meaningful interactions (update) prioritizes posts that receive comments.

• Pro Tip: Consider delegating the task of commenting, sharing, reposting, and replying to all prospective families that are interacting with your content to an individual on your marketing or enrollment teams.  

2019

• 2019 – The “why am I seeing this post?” tool is implemented.

• Pro Tip: Create meaningful, valuable content that’s specific and relates to your target demographic.

2020

• 2020 – News credibility and the customizable data-sharing preferences update takes place.

2021 and Beyond

• 2021 – Enhance the user experience.

• First, Facebook takes every post available in a user’s network (a.k.a. the “inventory”), and it scores those posts according to predetermined ranking signals, like the type of post, recency, etc.

• Then, it discards posts that a user is unlikely to engage with, based on that user’s past behavior. It also demotes content that users don’t want to see (i.e., clickbait, misinformation, or content that they’ve indicated they don’t like).

• Pro Tip: Build content and optimize your page around the user’s experience and the behavior of your prospective families, which can be tracked and sourced.  

Other Key Elements That Factor Into the Algorithm

• How recently the post was published 

• How frequently your childcare enterprise posts content 

• The number of likes, comments, the value of information, and shares on the post.  

• How often your childcare organization interacts with the audience viewing your post 

LineLeader Takes Your Facebook Marketing Efforts to the Next Level

Facebook is an excellent digital marketing tool for growing your childcare organization. It provides powerful features that help attract prospective families to your centers. Get your content in front of an interested, relevant audience to optimize your marketing efforts.

After you improve your Facebook marketing strategy - you'll likely have an influx of new leads to manage and organize. Did you know that you can integrate your Facebook account with a Childcare Experience Platform to streamline lead management? In fact, LineLeader by ChildcareCRM is the first and only solution to deliver full-featured customer relationship management (CRM) software, a family engagement app, and childcare management software (CMS) in one unified platform. LineLeader integrates with Facebook to automatically create a lead record and schedule follow-up as soon as a family inquires via Facebook Messenger or fills out a Lead Ad. 

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