Whether you choose to advertise funded places to the parents in your area is up to you. For one, your nursery might not be able to sustain more/any funded places. For two, taking on funded children can lead to a loss (check out our nursery funding calculator to see what we mean).
However, more parents means more income and more earning potential. You can add on consumables, create packages, and make it so funded places are worth more to you than they might initially appear.
So, how do you market those funded places so parents take up your offer? Read on and find out.
These starter tips are taken from our Nursery Marketing: The Ultimate Guide ebook. Take a look to learn the rest and take your marketing even further!
Top 6 nursery marketing strategies
1. Social media marketing
Whether you use it or not, the statistics say there’s a lot of people on social media and a whole lot of them will be parents. As of January 2023, there were 57.1 active social media users across every platform you’ve heard of.
If your nursery business isn’t on social media in some way, you have next to no reason not to be. It’s free, and only starts to cost if you want your posts to be seen by people who wouldn’t see them normally. This is called ‘boosting’, and will only be applied to the posts you choose.
You can also pay for adverts, which is more complicated than we can go into here. To read more about how to make ads for social media platforms, check out this post from HubSpot on social media marketing.
2. Paid search advertising
Paid search advertising means advertising online, usually on Google as this is the search engine most people use (82% at last count). These ads appear at the top of search results (the first thing you see once you’ve typed a search and hit ‘enter’) and say ‘Sponsored’ above them.
These types of ads cost the advertiser (you) money every time they’re clicked, which is why they’re also sometimes called ‘pay-per-click’ or ‘PPC’ ads. This cost is set by putting an amount of money you’re willing to pay into Google Ad Manager.
This amount is called a ‘bid’, and Google shows ads with the highest bids along with a few other factors which we can’t explain well here: check out this Google guide to learn more about ads. Your competitors are likely to be bidding against you – do a search or nurseries in your area and see if their nurseries appear first and say ‘sponsored’ to find out.
If you’d like to try paid search advertising, start small and start simple. Try one ad for a few days, see if it gains you any enquiries, and then turn it off to analyse the results (which you can do through Google Ad Manager).
This can turn into a full-time job, so be prepared to hand responsibility to someone else!
3. Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is at the heart of everything online. If you have a website, you need it to be the best it can be so search engines will show it to people looking for and around it (‘Blossom Tree Montessori’ vs ‘Montessori nursery’, vs ‘nursery near me’).
SEO takes many forms. From blogs to homepages, you need a little SEO weaved through so they’re not lost amongst everything else your competitors are doing. But it’s easier than you think.
Search Engines like simplicity, in website performance, usability and readability. You’d be surprised at which websites do ‘better’ than others in being seen on search, as it’s not all about flashy animations.
Make sure your website is readable with colours that contrast well, use the word ‘nursery’ a lot as well as your setting’s name, ensure your links are clear and above all, make it easy for visitors to get around.
And put a huge button on your homepage to your enquiries form. It’s where you want your valuable visitors to go after all.
Don’t have time to put together a good website that follows the above rules? Check out our Be Seen nursery website builder and let Blossom build your website for you!
4. Local targeting
Local targeting is more straightforward, and often has a more direct impact on your enquiries as you’re speaking to the people you need: locals. While it’s nice to think parents might travel far to visit our fantastic settings, what’s more likely is that they choose the best nursery round the corner.
Find a local magazine you can put a print advert in, highlighting what makes you special. Or print flyers with the same message that you can either drop round houses yourself or have the local newsagent place in the local newspaper for you.
You can also print big banners to hang outside of your nursery for parents walking past. That’s about as local as you can get!
5. Local events
You can either attend an event being held by someone else, like the council, community or a school, or you can run one yourself. Our advice would be to join someone else’s, not least because there’s less organisation needed.
Depending on the event, all you might need is a table, someone to attend the stand and a way to record enquiries. You can use paper, or bring in a tablet to record them straight into your software or use your website’s enquiry form.
If you’ve got some kind of popup banner, or a poster, get them up so it’s obvious what your stand’s about at a glance.
6. All/some of the above
Nursery marketing is more than a one-trick pony. No business has ever flown to the top of the market without doing more than one kind of marketing.
If you’re using paid search advertising, make sure it points to a good website. Use your banner at events, not just at your setting. Use flyers that go straight to your signup form. Mix and match tactics to find what works for you!
A marketing strategy always involves more than one ‘channel’, or place that you’re marketing your nursery. Choose the ones that you think will work best for you, and your funded nursery places will get snapped up as fast as you can take them.
To read more about how to market your nursery, download our Nursery Marketing: The Ultimate Guide ebook!
