How can you harness the power of social media to help promote your early years business?

In this guest article from our partners at the Early Years Alliance, we look at how the rise of the 'parent influencer' is helping their members.

We all recognise the huge challenges across our sector – from shortfalls in ‘free entitlement’ funding to increasing staff and business costs including rises in the national living wage and increases in business rates.

For many small and medium-sized providers, these changes can make it even tougher to breakeven every year. It becomes even more important to keep families registered with you while attracting new registrations.

Proactively marketing your service rather than relying on word of mouth or an occasional open day will help to maximise every opportunity available to reach new families in your area.

Most of us think that marketing is simply about selling products or services, but this is only a small part of the picture. Successful marketing will allow you to better understand your customers and for providers, this means parents and carers and, most importantly, children in your care. By getting closer to what they like (and dislike) about your service— you can continually improve what you do. It also gives you a competitive edge over other local providers.

Parent power

Digital communication has transformed how people communicate and seek out information. Most people enjoy social media, mobile technology and regularly use the internet to be reassured or find out more about specific products or services.  You should therefore always include digital elements in your childcare service marketing plan.

As well as reaching your families in the right way to promote what you do, marketing is also about creating authentic connections.

Marketing approaches have changed significantly in recent years. What you share or communicate nowadays is more subtle, relatable and emotional. It’s also more about encouraging customers to find you, rather than you going out to look for them.

That’s why there’s been such huge rise and popularity of roles such as ‘bloggers’, ‘Youtubers’ and ‘influencers’ over the past five years.

Recommendations and reviews from friends, peers or well-known celebrities are hugely relevant – mostly across social media and digital platforms in influencing people’s choices.

Parents as influencers

In the past, it was largely word of mouth – mostly shared at the nursery or pre-school gates. With so many parents now online sharing their views across social media or through favourable reviews on reputable childcare platforms – parent formal (and informal) networks are huge and getting much bigger.

Parents often share their personal experiences of childcare with others. We know that this directly influences choices made by these parents and their subsequent choices.

For many parents, particularly those families who may have just moved into an area without any established social networks, it can be difficult to find exactly what childcare they want. There are so many choices or options available.

Many parents are therefore reassured by personal recommendations by other parents who can relate to their experience.  If personal recommendations aren’t always possible, online testimonials, social media posts and positive reviews by parents are very persuasive and the next best thing.

That’s why encouraging parents using your service to share and leave positive reviews and recommendations about your service on reputable childcare search engines, on social media including your Facebook business page is integral and should be a priority in your marketing plan.

For this reason, childcare providers' most important ‘influencer’, aside from happy children in their care, are parents and carers currently registered at their service.

Perfecting your presence

If a parent is looking for local childcare, they are most likely to start that search online — whether they are starting from scratch or undertaking some follow-up research after receiving a nice recommendation from a parent friend.

It’s important you have a professional-looking online presence that showcases the best of what you do and you can be found on easily when searched. You must have an awareness of where parents search online for childcare and make sure your childcare service appears there or you’ll lose out to your competition.

This may include:

• via a search engine such as Google
• childcare search engines such as daynurseries.co.uk or childcare.co.uk
• a local authority website
• a local family information service
• social media such as Facebook

 

Marketing and Social Media for the Early Years online training course

This is just one way to market your service and attract new parents to register with you, our new CPD-recognised set of courses developed in partnership with the Early Years Alliance provides further advice and information.

Find out more

The course costs just £18.50 to buy online or Alliance members can purchase for £13.50 via the Special Offers section of their EduCare Learning Platform. 

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