These days, it seems like marketing your center is a moving target. Strategies and best practices seem to change on a dime and potential families we’re reaching out to have new expectations and enrolling behaviors that didn’t exist in years past.
There's a lot of confusion about how to effectively market to our communities and parents who may be looking for care. It’s not enough to just have great curb appeal and reputation in the neighborhood anymore.
There's also a lot of confusion about brand. The word is widely used but not widely understood. Is it just a logo, color palette and trendy sans serif font? Or is it bringing clarity to your offering and perception in the market? Can it be measured? Brand marketing is not slapping your name and logo everywhere with the hope that carpet-bombing exposure is sufficient to sell your product. It's also not tattooing your logo on someone’s forehead.
Automation
While Automation is one of the most popular buzz words in marketing these days, it can be hard to know what you should automate and how. In a nutshell, marketing automation refers to a software or system that can help get your message to your community and ensure your expectations surrounding new parent follow-up are met. Having good marketing and enrollment automation helps prioritize and carry out tasks more efficiently.
Automating your marketing and enrollment processes won’t make your director’s job irrelevant. It will simply ensure that she's able to make the most of her limited time in the front office. Marketing automation will also keep your branding consistent and help you reach your goals more quickly than you might have with pen and paper.
Branding
It’s easy to assume that branding means slapping your logo on every email and material you distribute, but it goes much further. You have a logo, a color scheme and a signature font, but branding is really about bringing meaning to all these things. Good branding will clarify your marketing efforts and its effectiveness can be measured.
Branding is not only about reaching the right prospects in your community, but also communicating to them that you are the best and most trusted provider in your market. Your branding should clearly deliver your unique selling points, confirm your credibility and emotionally connect to prospective parents who receive your materials.
CRM
The right Customer Relationship Management tool can automate your inquiry-to-enrollment processes and also intelligently manage and store your customer’s information, helping you effectively communicate, market and report on the trends of your enrollment pipeline.
A CRM system can also help you win more customers more quickly by automating email and phone call follow-up and delivering key metrics to help you make better business decisions. The right CRM will keep you connected end to end, driving leads from your community events and website, working them through the enrollment funnel and integrating with your child care management system.
The ultimate goal with your organization's marketing efforts is to drive more enrollments and increase the revenue of your centers. The most successful organizations do this by automating their prospect follow-up, harnessing their brand power and utilizing a tool like ChildCareCRM to measure their effectiveness. Streamline your processes today by scheduling a demo with our solutions team to see how we can help.
