Are you creating the right impression with your daycare customers?

You only have 3 seconds to make a first impression. So what is the impression that you are leaving your daycare propsects?

Visibility
Is your daycare visible? Can your daycare prospects see the name of your daycare from the street?

Do you look professional
Does your daycare look like it is run by professionals or does it look like it is run by a group of amateurs or nannies turned daycare entrepreneurs? Are toys and equipment old and poorly maintained? Are things strewn all over the place or is everything placed back in its place after use?

Is it clear that it is a daycare centre
Is the place buzzing with kids’ laughter and shrieks of delight or does the screams of daycare teachers yelling at the daycare children fill the air?

Where is the entrance?
Is the entrance to the daycare easy to find? If the daycare has more than one entrance, is it clear which is the main entrance? If the entrance is not facing the street, is there a sign to tell daycare prospects to “walk another 20m and turn left”?

Is the entrance welcoming?
Is the entrance free of clutter or does it look like a warzone, strewn with shoes and toys that have just been played? Due to HFMD, outsiders are usually not allowed into the centres. Whilst prevention of the spread of HFMD sis a real concern, is there a small waiting area for prospects to wait whilst getting their queries answered. The last thing you want is to have to answer prospects through a gate or screen door.

Does your daycare have show-stopping capacity
Whilst there is no need to repaint your daycare every year, does your daycare look well maintained? Is the paint peeling or pipe rusting?

Being professional and sounding professional

After you have ensured that all your touchpoints are projecting a consistent image, next will be ensuring that you sound professional as well as many daycare prospects prefer making telephone enquiries before making the effort to visit the daycare centre.

Ask yourself, what is the impression that you leave your prospects when they call you?

• Are calls answered promptly ? Always ensure that the phone rings no longer than 3 rights failing which you are telling your prospects that we are too busy to talk to you. Preferably assign one or two person to pay attention to phone rings.
• Try not to put the prospect on hold. If the person that the caller is looking for or the person who can answer the prospect’s question is not available (not in or engaged in something else), say so immediately and offer to take a message.
• Employ a consistent way of answering the phone. Always start with the company name e.g. “Hello, xxxxxx daycare, can I help you” or “xxxx daycare, this is yyyyy speaking. How can I help you. Ensure that everyone answers in a consistent manner.
• If you are using voice mail, keep the voice mail message brief and friendly. Include the company name, when the call will be returned and invite caller to leave a message.
• Remember to check voice mails faithfully and delete old messages so as to make way for new ones.
• Call voice mail periodically to see if it works or if the message is still appropriate.
• If possible, place mirrors near telephones so that the person answering the phone will be able to see his/her own face when answering the phone. The caller can “see” your smile so encourage your staff to smile when answering the phone.

Creating a good first impression will go a long way in your daycare's branding efforts. Plus it doesn't take much to ensure that you sound professional. Just a little tweaking of how you run your daily operations. The returns will be far greater.

Projecting the right image for your daycare

Before your begin planning for your marketing campaign, you need to first evaluate the impression that your customer and prospects have of your daycare. Does it come about as well managed, reliable and successful? Does the customers and prospects receive a consistent message each time or is the message different each time a new marketing material is produced?

Advertising and sales materials
Advertisements – newspaper, magazine, TV, radio, phone books, community publication
Website
Direct mailers and flyers
Brochures
Newsletters
Printed materials e.g. curriculum, letters to parents, contact sheet, etc.

Signages
Entry door
Posters
Centre displays

Correspondence
Letters
Emails
Faxes
Business cards
Invoices

Logo items
School uniform
Any other things that carry the logo e.g. corporate gifts and giveaways

Questions to ask:

• Does the communications fit the image that you are projecting?
• Does the communications look alike or do they look like they come from 5 different daycares. Are the following consistent – colours, illustrations, images used, typeface / fonts, layout, messages, copy style, logo
• Does your communications appeal to your customers?

Your daycare marketing message competes with every other communication that bombards your daycare customers and prospects each day. You need to ensure that your daycare customers and prospects are receiving just one or maximum messages from you throughout rather than a different message each time. Isolate and update communications that are outdated or wrong.

Setting your marketing budget objectives

For a marketing campaign to work effective, effort must be put to ensure that the campaign is well managed.

Establish a daycare marketing budget
There are a number of ways in which a marketing budget can be derived.

• Arbitrary figure – This “best guess” requires the daycare owner to use his/her intuition and experience to determine what is the most appropriate marketing budget. A useful tip will be to use the previous year’s spending as a benchmark.
• Competitive – You can decide what to spend using what your competitors are spending as a guide.
• Goal oriented budget – You can list down what you hope to achieve and the various marketing activities that you will need to implement to achieve that.
• Percentage of sales – Based on your sales forecast for the following year, allocate a percentage of the forecast to marketing your daycare.

Spend the funds allocated
Remember to spend the funds that are allocated and resist the urge to not implement an activity to save costs.

View the daycare marketing budget as an important business investment
Marketing must be viewed as a business investment rather than as a cost.

Manage program well
Stick to the activities and deadlines listed. It is pointless to schedule a well-planned marketing campaign and not to follow up closely. There must be close monitoring of implementation of the activities as well as steps taken to evaluate its effectiveness.

Learning about your daycare competitors

Before you begin developing your competitive strategies, you need to do a little bit of study of your competitors . You need to first find out as much as you can about your competition. Resources are probably limited so it is best to focus within 500m of your daycare and expanding wider if/when you have more resources.

 

There are a number of ways in which you can achieve this:

• Speak to your current customers as, chances are, they would also have checked out your competition before signing with you
• Speak to your prospects as chances are they would also have checked out the other daycare
• Speak to your staff
• Speak to your suppliers
• Observation

 

You should be gathering as much information on them as possible. Here are some of the things that you may wish to find out:

• Estimated number of children that they have or their capacity can accommodate
• Where did they obtain their curriculum
• What are the daycare services that they offer
• What are their operating hours
• Any special daycare facilities
• What are their daycare charges
• How often do they promote their daycare services
• The number and qualifications of their staff
• Are their customers happy with their services 

Once you are done gathering all the information, you then need to evaluate and identify what are their weaknesses and how your daycare compares with theirs before you can think about how you can draw their customers over.

Developing a competitive strategy for your daycare

There are two strategies you can adopt to keep your daycare competitors at bay.

Price cuts
If their price is lower than yours, then employing a price competition strategy is one option although all marketing experts would advise against it as price cuts are followed by competitors and you’ll end up starting a price war.

A McKinsey study demonstrates that a 1% cut in price translates to a reduction in operating profits by 8%, assuming that there is no increase in registration.

Offering more value
Consider instead to compete to offering greater value to your customers by value adding to the current daycare services that you are offering. The greater the perceived value of your daycare services, the greater the chance your competitors customers will want to register their child with your daycare. Here are some ideas:

• Ensure that your current parents are very satisfied with your services. They are your best testimonials.
• Extending your operating hours so that you can cater to parent who work a little further away
• Install webcams so that parents can see their children in school
• Have a photo gallery on your website and periodically upload photographs of the children
• Develop a monthly or quarterly newsletter that is emailed to all parents
• Fine tune your daycare service by possibly offer complimentary enrichment lesson or improving upon your current curriculum
• Offer to feed the children dinner if you are extending your operating hours
• Spruce up your daycare regularly, paint tattered wall and put up new artwork done up by the children
• Ensure that your daycare is ever ready to receive new customers

Remember, the greater the perceived value of your daycare, the less likely your customers are going to haggle on the price.

Who are the competitors of your daycare business?

As a Confucius saying goes, Know yourself and your enemy and you will win all battles.

We hear the word "competitors" all the time. But do you really know who are your competitors? Without knowing who your competitors are, you will not be able to develop marketing strategies that can effectively overcome your competition

There are 2 key types of competitors that all daycare faces:

Direct competition
Your direct competitors are those that have an immediate impact on your sales and marketing efforts. An adjustment in their price or daycare service offerings is likely to have a direct and sometimes rather immediate impact on your customer numbers. Your direct competitors are the other daycare centres in and around your geographical area.

Indirect competition
Your indirect competitors are those who are not offering daycare services but services complementary to yours. These could be the home daycares, baby sitters or nannies. They may not possess the facilities that you have but they offer parents another alternative. Even home makers are your indirect competitors are instead of using your daycare services, the children are staying home with their mummies.

It is only when you know who your competitors are that you can develop strategies to overcome the competition.

Dollarizing your daycare services

Dollarization, according to Jeffrey J Fox, the author of “How to be a marketing superstar”, is a mathematical calculation of dollars and cents value of a product. Dollarization is important as it helps to determine pricing levels. Here is how you can consider dollarizing your daycare services.

Determine your daycare competitor
Identify the other daycare services that are available to your customers or prospects. Basically, list down who your competitors are.

State the benefit of your daycare
Assess the key benefit that your daycare possesses. Why should your customers register their child at your daycare? Is it the curriculum? Is it the extended hours that you offer? Is it complimentary enrichment lessons? Is it lower student to staff ratio?

Quantify your benefit
Next, look at the benefit and re-state your benefit in numerical terms. If you find it a challenge assigning a numerical value to your stated benefit, it may be wiser to select another because no one buys into the best, the lightest, the fastest, the longest, etc. It is much easier to see value in terms of numbers and facts than empty claims. For example, if you are offering complimentary enrichment lesson as your benefit, how many hours of complimentary enrichment lessons you are offering.

Dollarize the benefit
After quantifying your benefit, “dollarize” the benefit. Assign a dollar value to the benefit based on the quantity of benefit that the customers are getting. For example, what is the charge for the similar enrichment lesson outside of your daycare.

Dollarize the benefit in per unit terms
Next, breakdown the dollarized value down in terms of per unit terms. Using the example above, what is the dollar value of the enrichment lesson that the customer getting in terms per hour.

Demonstrate the true cost of your competitor’s product
From the above, you will be able to demonstrate the additional value that you are offering your daycare customers as compared to your customers.

Daycare pricing considerations

Buying decisions are rarely about price. It is usually about value. Before deciding on your pricing strategy, you need to ask yourself a few questions:

Daycare cost
What is the price you are charging for your daycare services? How much does it cost to run your daycare?

Quality of daycare services
How would you rate the daycare services you are offering? Be objective. On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the quality of the services that you are offering.

What is included
What is included as part of the basic package that the parents are paying for? Are there any additional lessons that parents can opt for?

How convenient is your daycare
Is your daycare near a train station? Are there ample parking for parents to pick up and drop off? Is the traffic near your daycare always congested? Are your operating hours “work-friendly”, meaning, does the parents need to rush to pick their kids up or can they take their time? Do you provide additional baby-sitting services for parents who need to work late?

How reliable is your daycare
How reliable are you? Do you keep parents in the know about the progress of their child and/or any incident that happened to the child? Do you give parents ample notice when you are taking a day off? Do your staff take good care of the children assigned to them? Are you understaffed?

Can they trust your daycare expertise
Are your staff well qualified? Have you been in the daycare business long?

Any guarantee or promise?
For example, does your curriculum prepare the children for school life after preschool?

All the points above will determine the customer’s perceived value of your daycare services. Customers tend to be less price sensitive to products which they feel offer them value. The greater the perceived value, the greater the price you will be able to command.

Price your products according to the value the customer receives from your product. Pricing requires good customer knowledge, dollarization skills and courage – don’t be afraid to price the products to its real value. Determine your daycare service’s value to the customer and price your daycare services to that value.

How price sensitve are your daycare customers

Many daycare businesses think that the key reason why their customers are not signing up is because of their prices. They think that by reducing the price, they will increase the number of children signing up for their daycare. Let’s take an objective look at how prices affect our customers.

Price matters less for the following type of products:
- Rare / Hard to substitute / No comparison
- Purchased infrequently
- Essential item
- Required immediately / urgently
- Emotionally sensitive
- Unique

Price however does matter for the following type of products:
- Readily available / Easy to substitute / Easy to compare
- Purchased frequently
- Non-essential item
- Not required immediately
- Emotion free
- Common

Price does matter, that is true. But not all the time. For example. Would you expect to pay fast food prices if you are dining in a fine dining restaurant? Why is it that people are willing to fork out 10 to 100 times more just to eat when you can get it cheaper elsewhere?

The key will be to help our customers see our daycare services as unique, difficult to substitute and not available elsewhere.

Knowing your daycare business well

Many a times, once we get to daycare centre up and running, it’s chasing one operational task after another. Sometimes, it is necessary to take a step back and reassess what you have done with the aim to doing better.

List your daycare services
Make a list of all the various daycare services that you provide; be it half day or full day care, the various types of enrichment lessons, payable or complementary, etc.

What do your customers think
Do you know what your daycare services do for your customers and how it makes them feel? You can learn the answer to that question by speaking with your customers. Depending on the resources you have, you can choose to survey all your customers or every nth customer.

How are you different
Looking at the list of your daycare services, how do you compare with your competitors? You can achieve this by either observing your competitors or asking your customers and suppliers, because chances are, they would either have come in contact with them or knows someone who does.

Have you improved
Evaluate to see if you have improved from a year ago or are you now overwhelmed with so many sign ups that you’ve shelved some of the “nice to have” services that you used to provide. Be objective. Or have you been losing prospects and customers to the daycare centre down the lane?

What do unhappy customers do?
What do your customers do when they are displeased? Do they have a dedicated person looking into their concerns? Or do they simply withdraw their child? A useful exercise will be to conduct an exit interview to find out exactly why they are unhappy when they indicate their intention to withdraw their child.

Most parents usually will not withdraw for minor reasons, especially when the child’s well settled in. It is therefore a good practice to find out what it is that makes the parent withdraw the child and subject the child to a brand new environment. Sometimes, the reason is unrelated to the daycare centre .e.g. they are moving to another state but if otherwise, it is a red flag for the daycare centre to re-evaluate how its business is being conducted.

Collecting information of your daycare customers

To many market research is a mammoth task conducted by specialized research individuals who conducts questionaires, face to face or telephone interviews, observation, focus groups discussions and study reports and trends.

As such many daycare centres do not conduct market research. It is either because they think it is too expensive, do not have the time to do it or do not have the specialized manpower that is able to do it. Quite a lot can actually be done with very little or no additional costs incurred. It simply takes a little tweaking of the daily daycare operations to achieve that.

You’ll be amazed how much you can gather with these simple methods.

Group current customers into geographic zones
Looking at current customers and group them into geographic zones, e.g. zip code. As part of the registration form, include a field for zip code of their place of work or place or residence. It’ll provide you with a better picture of the percentage of customers who select your daycare centre because it is near their place of work versus those who select your daycare centre because it is near their homes. This will help you determine the geographical area(s) to concentrate your marketing efforts on.

Survey your customers

Depending on the resources you have, you can choose to survey all your customers or every nth customer. Find out why their signed up with your centre (this can also be included in the contact / registration forms), what the customers think about your products and services, is the product meeting their needs, etc. However, remember to keep question period short – 5 questions minimum and spread it over a span of time of at least 2 weeks especially if you are surveying every nth customer.

Observe your customers

Spend a few hours for 1-2 weeks and observe your customers to find out the information that you wish to gather. For example, do your customers drive, do the children come with their breakfast or do they eat it at home, etc.

Monitor incoming phone calls

When a prospect calls up to enquire about your daycare centre, take a few seconds to gather some additional information such as where did they hear about you or where they are from. Once again, remember, to keep it short.

Track responses to ads and direct mailers

There are two simple ways of doing that.

• Track the responses for a week or two after the marketing campaign has run. E.g. track how many phone calls or walk-ins you receive after you had distributed your flyers.
• Include an incentive to respond. Include offers which requires them to bring the source of their communication to claim the incentive. E.g. include a “bring this coupon to redeem your gift” (discount).

Setting your daycare marketing objectives

Before embarking on any marketing campaign, it is always most important to identify the various objectives in which you are hoping to achieve with your marketing campaign, given the limited resources available to a daycare centre.

Know your customers
The daycare centre should seek to get to know their customers better. The daycare should employ effort to learn more about their customer so that they can better provide the daycare services that they are expecting.

Know your marketing environment
It is also important for the daycare to know the environment in which it exists. Daycare centres, regardless of how small an outfit, do not exist in a bubble. The marketing efforts employed will be highly dependent on the internal and external environment in which it exists. You will read more about the marketing environment in The daycare environment’s impact on its marketing

Tailor-make your marketing
From the information gathered in the first and second points, the daycare should then relook at its current business and tailor the daycare services and pricing to specifically address the needs of the customers, marketing environment and competitive realities.

Following that, the daycare should develop marketing messages which they know will grab the attention of the daycare customers, make them interested enough to find out more, either via phone call or visit, and motivate them into engaging their daycare services.

Customer satisfaction
Once the customer has successfully signed up with the daycare, the daycare should develop a customer service strategy to achieve maximum customer satisfaction, therefore ensuring that the customer continues to enroll the child in the daycare as well as word of mouth advertising.

Assumption is the mother of all foul ups. Effort should therefore be made periodically to talk with the customers to obtain their inputs on the daycare services and how it is meeting their needs and wants.

From the information gathered, the daycare should be able to accurately determine what are the areas that require fine tuning and what are the areas that it has done well.

The daycare environment’s impact on its marketing

For a daycare center to successfully identify what sort of marketing strategies to employ for the daycare, it is important first to evaluate the environment that affects its marketing strategy. There are 2 types of environmental factors that the daycare will need to assess; its external environment and its internal environment.

 

External environment
External environmental factors are issues that affect the daycare business but are outside of the control of the daycare business. The daycare just simply needs to know what it is and work around its constraints.

• Political – what are the governmental rules and regulations in which the daycare is required to adhere to.
• Economic – what is the economic situation. – recession? Inflation? Etc.
• Sociocultural – what is the expectation of the people with regards to daycare services. Are they expecting just a nanny care service or are they expecting something more. Thjs will impact the daycare services that should be offered.
• Technological – this will impact the way in which we communicate with the customer as well as how we promote the daycare centre.

 

Internal environment
There is also an internal environment in which the daycare exists which will affect the marketing which will require the daycare business to do some “soul-searching”. Internal environmental factors are those that are within the daycare’s control. The daycare will need to look at the daycare business as a whole and identify its strengths and weaknesses. Strengths will be those factors that the daycare is proud of or good at. Weaknesses are basically areas of improvement. A good guide will be to benchmark the daycare against a close competitor’s.

 

In internal environmental scan will require the daycare to conduct a close evaluation at the following:

• the daycare services it provides
• the price of its daycare services
• its current strategy to promote and market the daycare
• the way the daycare is operating
• its staff and their qualifications
• its finances and budget

With the information gathered on the daycare’s internal and external factors, the daycare will be able to make a more informed decision on its marketing strategies.

Uniqueness of daycare marketing

The marketing of a daycare centre will be significantly different from the marketing adopted by the larger corporations.

Firstly, daycare centres usually do not have the marketing budget that the larger corporations have. As such, they need to ensure that they get value for their marketing dollar spent. Larger corporations can have campaigns dedicated for brand building/awareness. Daycare centres on the other hand will not only require their marketing campaign to build brand awareness but include some form of marketing action as well.

Secondly, a daycare centre is not likely to have a full-fledged integrated marketing campaign with advertisements, direct marketing, online market, etc. It is more likely that the daycare centre will spread out their marketing efforts throughout the year, employing only one or two marketing methods each time.

Finally, it is highly unlikely that a daycare centre will be fully equipped with a marketing director, creative director, marketing executive, etc. It is more likely to be the principal and/or supervisor performing that function, in addition to the other administrative duties that he/she will need to see to.

Identify profitable customers for your daycare

You intend to start a daycare business. You are ready and raring to go. Your marketing plans are all set and you have put aside a nice budget that’ll help you inform your potential customers about your daycare business … but wait! Do you know who your daycare customers are? Does your target day care customer have a “face”? Do you know where they live, what’s their lifestyle, etc?

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