Online Marketing For Childcare Providers - A Quick Guide

With so many tools at your disposal to advertise online today, it can be difficult to sort through everything and find the most effective avenues to finding new families to enroll in your center.

Banner Ads
Banner advertising is one of the oldest forms of online marketing, but it doesn’t have a lot of bang for your buck anymore. For one thing, you’ll need to purchase a banner on a website that has very high traffic from visitors in your target audience, and that will be expensive. Even then, nowadays many people have learned to “tune out” banner ads while they’re surfing the web, finding them to be more of an annoyance than anything.

Social Media
Social media is perhaps the most trendy form of online marketing, but it isn’t the most effective. The good thing about social media, however, is that you don’t have to pay anything to create and use a business profile on the websites, like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. That’s not to say, however, that social media is free, because it does take a lot of time, and time is money.

Email Marketing
Email marketing is the online equivalent of direct mail. Direct mail has historically been very successful, but with only a single-digit response rate. Email marketing is a way to achieve similar success for a fraction of the cost, significantly lowering the cost-per-lead of marketing by mail. Because it’s all virtual, there is no materials cost or postage cost. However, if you want to get really creative, you should try an even better option which is……

Text Message (SMS)
Parents, especially moms, have a clear preference for SMS. Text messaging is asynchronous communication that has the perceived responsiveness of real time communication. SMS provides parents with quick responses and near instant gratification, but it does not require the parent and director, or call center agent, to be available at the same time. This flexibility makes SMS extremely effective when communicating with time-strapped, working parents with young children. Businesses with a center-level, or decentralized, lead follow up process see even greater gains given center directors often have multiple demands on their time. To learn more about how to properly implement SMS marketing at your center, please email neil@momtrusted.com with the Subject Line: “SMS Marketing”.

Performance-based Marketing
The most efficient marketing channel for you – period. Performance-based can mean a couple different things: it could mean lead-based marketing or tour-based marketing. In a lead-based scenario, you would only pay when an interested family contacted you through this marketing channel. In a tour-based scenario, the only cost comes when an interested family contacts you through this marketing channel and then subsequently comes into your center for a tour. The best part of a performance-based marketing model is that there is no cost if it doesn’t work for you. Mom Trusted has both lead-based and tour-based pricing plans available. To learn more, please visit contact neil@momtrusted.com with the Subject Line: “Performance Marketing”