Marketing plays a huge part in a daycare operations as it helps promote your daycare and its services to your potential cusotmers. And marketing is more than just printing flyers and posters and getting it out to as many places as possible.

An effectively planned and executed marketing campaign will not only help to draw you more customers to your daycare centre, it will also help you to save money spent on ineffective and unnecessary promotions.

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6 excellent branding tips for your daycare business
Here are 6 good branding tips to skyrocket your daycare business.

Do daycares need branding?
Branding is not an expensive exercise and limited to only multinational companies. All products and services, big or small, require a brand.

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?

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.

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.

Setting your marketing budget objectives
Many a times, companies either over spend or under spend or understand their market budget, with little or no idea about the consequences of doing either action. For a marketing campaign to work effective, it is critical to ensure that the campaign budget is well managed.

Developing a competitive strategy for your daycare
After learning who your competitors are, there are two strategies you can adopt to keep your competitors at bay.

Learning about your daycare competitors
Before you begin developing your competitive strategies, you need to do a little bit of study of your competitors and find out as much as you can about the competition within 500m of your daycare.

Who are the competitors to your daycare business?
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.

Dollarizing your daycare services
Dollarization is important as it helps to determine the most appropriate pricing levels for your daycare services.

Daycare pricing considerations
Buying decisions are rarely about price. It is usually about value. Before deciding on your pricing strategy, you need to answer some critical questions.

How price sensitive are our 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.

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 of doing better.

Collecting information of your daycare customers
Contrary to popular belief, customer research need not be an expensive exercise. 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.

Segmentating your daycare customers
To effectively kick-start an effective marketing campaign, you first need to give your customer a “face”. You need to know who you are intending to target. To do that, you need to perform some form of segmentation and target marketing. Without proper market segmentation and targeting, your entire marketing strategy will be without focus.

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.

Understanding the daycare's environment 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.

Uniqueness of daycare marketing
Marketing a daycare centre is significantly different from that employed by large corporations.

6 excellent branding tips for daycare businesses

Here are 6 tips to good brand management

Define why you are in business.
Know what is the key purpose of your business and what sets you apart from your competition. Ensure that all your staff are aware of that information because it is what your daycare stands for.

What you want people to think
Consider what you want people; your employees, suppliers, customers, prospects, competitors, to think when they hear your name. You need to ensure a consistent message to all of them. E.g. you cannot be the cheapest daycare in town when you advertise in to attract the right staff with the most extensive pay package.

Is your brand image believable to everyone? If not, then you need to see how you can alter your daycare operations to achieve that.

Words to define your business
What are the words you want people to use when defining your daycare. A good method will be to ask people who know your business. Are they all saying the same thing? Are those the words that you want to hear? If not, you may need to relook at presenting the right characteristics to showcase that brand image and use it consistently in all your communications.

What is the advantage you want to showcase
Pinpoint the advantages you want people to associate with your daycare and use that inyou’re your communications.

Define your brand
Look at the business through the eyes of your daycare customers. What do they will think and say about the services that your daycare is offering? How do they define your brand? What is the one consistent thing that you are hearing that they are saying about your daycare?

Build your brand
Build your brand through every impression that you make. Keep it constant and consistent.
A well-managed brand creates a strong emotional connection and strong emotional connections foster brand loyalty.

Effective branding tips for your daycare business

All products and services, big or small, require a brand. Branding is not an expensive exercise and limited to only multinational companies. Branding is simply about communicating the positive attributes of your daycare to your daycare customers and prospects.

Branding for daycare is made by the impressions made by encounters with your daycare as well as from the various communications that you have with your daycare customers and prospects on a regular basis. Building a successful brand for your daycare need not burn a hole in your already fragile pocket. These are 4 key things that you need to remember when developing a branding strategy for your daycare business:

Know the brand image you want
First, decide on the brand image that you wish to portray to your daycare customers and prospects. Remember that the first point of contact that your potential customers will have is your employee so you have to ensure that all employees are aware of your branding as well.

Be committed
Branding requires commitment and disciple. You must ensure that every effort is made to project your image well and consistently. There should be no "the colour looks the same". It has to be "the colour IS the same". There is simply no room for negotiation when it comes to branding.

Allocate for it
Nothing comes for free. If you want to build a successful brand, you will need to commit to spending what is necessary to convey the necessary message to the customers - time, effort and of course money.

Keep it consistent
You need to manage your marketing such that the impression it leaves on your customer is always consistent. Don't keep changing brand image unless it is no longer appropriate.
Remember that consistency builds brands and brands build business as it makes selling easier.