Guest blog - Five tips for marketing your nursery or pre-school
In this guest blog, I will be sharing my five tips for marketing your nursery and pre-school. I know from experience of supporting my sister over the years that often settings do not have a dedicated marketing resource and fall to nursery or pre-school managers to take this on alongside your other responsibilities. Therefore, my suggestions below are easy to implement ideas and tips that shouldn’t take too much of your time up, but have good results.
Tip 1 - Know your audience
Spend a little bit time thinking about who you are trying to reach with your marketing activity and what barriers and motivations they have when looking for a nursery. You can then tap into addressing any barriers in your key messages for campaigns. For example, if they are worried about funding, have content that talks about how the funding works and what support you can provide with getting it set up.
Some key things to know about your audience are:
What is your geographic target audience?
What age group children are you looking for? This can help you with running more targeted campaigns across Meta (Facebook products) or Google.
Are they likely to be funded places? Or non-funded
What time of year do parents look at nurseries or pre-schools? This will give you insight into when to up your marketing activity.
Tip 2 - Make the most of the meta-verse (beyond Facebook)
Paid adverts are a great way to extend your reach to new audiences. Since Facebook became Meta, they are really focusing on how advertising campaigns can be across multiple social platforms they own and this gives you a chance to go to where your audience is.
I quite often see people do boosted posts, but my top tip is to take the time and set it up in ad manager, as this gives you the opportunity to do different placements (e.g. also have it in Instagram stories or affiliate sites) and also more detailed targeting to ensure you are reaching the right people. Start small, test what works and then build it up over time.
Tip 3 - Balance your social media asks
I was always taught really early on in my career I was taught the 70/30 rule and I think it really still applies today. The rule is that 70% of your content should be focused on community building and 30% should be focused on your sales messages. This makes sure that you have balance in terms of the mixture of messages you have going out and makes it more interesting for your target audience.
Your audience will love anything that gives them an insight into what your nursery or pre-school is like and the experience their child would get.
Tip 4 - Strengthen your website
Your website is your shop window for prospective parents, so think about what would reassure them and make them feel better about sending their child to nursery. For example, could you have content about transitions, the approach you take in your nursery and testimonials. Testimonials are a great way to reinforce the quality of your service and mean more than anything you could say yourself about the quality.
Tip 5 - Google adwords - find the people that are already looking
Search adverts are a great way to reach people that are “in-market”. By this I mean people that are actively searching for nursery or pre-schools in your geographic area. Making them a great audience to go after. These are loads of guides available from google adwords to get you started and they will even give you recommendations on how to optimise your adverts once they are running.
Natasha Milsted, Chartered Marketer
Natasha Milsted is a Chartered Marketer with a first-class degree in marketing, a professional diploma in marketing and is currently completing my MBA with the Open University. She is an experienced marketing leader with over 15 years’ experience in delivering high performing marketing campaigns and strategies.
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