Kindergarten Marketing Strategies with Case Studies

According to experts, the world of child care has transformed, and what worked to increase enrollment in 2019 will no longer be effective in 2022.

To properly grasp parent demands, ECE leaders must think outside the box about everything from the impact of the pandemic to the millennial parent surge. Moreover, this must happen quickly after such a hectic year for centers to bounce back stronger than before.

However, with 17 percent of parents delaying sending their children to kindergarten, finding solutions to assuage parent anxieties will be the primary issue for ECE providers in the post-2020 period.

“As teachers and administrators, it is our responsibility to reach out to parents and remind them of the numerous benefits that early childhood education provides to children,” argues Allison McDonald, an early childhood education expert and founder of No Time for Flashcards.

Preparation is essential if you want to learn how to motivate your children’s parents, discover the best marketing ideas for your kindergarten after 2021, and implement concrete strategies that will increase enrollment at your center. This comprehensive guide will provide answers to your most pressing kindergarten marketing questions in 2022.

Why Starting a Kindergarten is a Good Idea

Personal Childcare

One perk of beginning your daycare service is that you may care for your children while you are doing so. Parents paying hundreds of dollars each month to have someone care for their children are not uncommon.

As a childcare business owner, you have the opportunity to care for your children, allowing you to witness more of their developmental milestones and growth. It also has the additional benefit of saving you money.

Extra Money

Many stay-at-home moms and dads launch childcare enterprises to supplement their income. However, the parents have already decided to put their careers on wait to raise a child.

Starting a daycare business helps you to accomplish this while also earning additional revenue. It also provides an opportunity for your child to socialize with other youngsters, which is beneficial to their social development.

Emotional Reward

The decision to start and run a daycare business has both personal and emotional benefits. While working with children for most of your workday might help you appreciate the essential things in life, such as health and friendships, it can also help you avoid the stress of working in an office environment where you must file paperwork or attend meetings.

The capacity to communicate and be patient are two other skills learned from working with children. The appreciation you will receive from both your parents and children will be emotionally rewarding.

Adults vs. kids

Another advantage of beginning a childcare business is that you will be working with children rather than adults. But, of course, children have temper tantrums and are not always well-behaved, which may be highly stressful to the person responsible for their care.

Children, particularly young children, are, on the other hand, often forthright and honest in their expressions of how or what they feel, which is a refreshing contrast from the adult world. Working with children can also help you better understand different human personalities and human development in general, which can be beneficial for your future job.

Main Kindergarten Business Challenges

Early Childhood Education businesses face a distinct set of barriers and challenges that are specific to their industry. However, the fact that they are a necessity in our hectic world does not diminish the fact that owning a childcare facility can be incredibly difficult from a business aspect at times.

The difficulties are numerous, but the rewards are plentiful when it comes to having the opportunity to teach and care for sensitive children. Learn about the following challenges and practical answers for starting and running your own Early Childhood Education business.

Paperwork

Information on the child, parent contact information, invoices, and state-mandated paperwork can quickly accumulate in a household.

Add to that the regular paperwork associated with running a business, such as vendor bills, and you’ll find yourself in desperate need of a competent office manager to keep up with it all. In addition, when files are misplaced and payments are mixed up, it is challenging to keep things under control.

Keeping up with all of the necessary reporting can also be challenging when dealing with unexpected visits from the authorities, which can arrive at any time.

Solution:

Allowing the Learning Clubhouse program to handle the tedious paperwork for you will save you time and money. Their automated system will enable you to have all of your paperwork information in one location, making managing your business even more convenient for you. Keeping parents informed and connected to your business is simple with a touch of a screen. The advanced software will save you both valuable time and money by allowing you to manage your business more efficiently and effectively.

Developing Parental Trust and Communication

During busy drop-off and pick-up times, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that parents are your clients and consumers. They are the ones who are footing the bill for child care, and it is their satisfaction that you must strive to achieve in the end.

When working in the Early Childhood Education field, failing to communicate effectively with parents can be a costly error—assuming that parents are aware of everything that can result in disaster.

Parents want to know what is going on, whether or not their child is experiencing any difficulties, and whether or not there have been any illnesses that could quickly spread. If you don’t communicate effectively, rumors about your company will apply, and your company’s reputation will suffer as a result.

Solution:

Maintain your parents’ involvement in your business by actively including them and speaking with them consistently. Make phone calls to parents when necessary, or utilize software like Learning Clubhouse to communicate with them in real-time. Would you please make specific that parents are informed as soon as possible about any problems their kid is experiencing at school, whether it is during drop-off or pick-up time? Create a communication standard and thoroughly train your team to ensure that interacting with parents is a seamless experience for everyone. Excellent communication can also help establish trust between your company and the parents, which will reap significant benefits in repeat business and referrals.

Retaining Skilled Employees

Many daycare centers are faced with the challenge of maintaining qualified staff members who are enthusiastic about their jobs. It is much easier to fill a position than to keep someone on staff for an extended length of time. A high turnover rate can cost a company both time and money in the long run.

Are you familiar with the licensing requirements in your area? For example, do you require a qualified and licensed employee regular with the proper preparation and serving of food following your state’s food guidelines?

How can you discover employees that will be content with their salaries while also being satisfied with their jobs? Unfortunately, all of these challenges are ones that many business owners confront when attempting to retain highly competent employees.

Solution:

You want to hire employees that have a genuine passion for working with youngsters. These staff members will be knowledgeable about the licensing rules in your area, and they will put the children’s needs first and foremost in their considerations. Daycare workers put in long hours, discipline children, and exhibit a tremendous deal of patience that exceeds grades. They are also underpaid. When interviewing a possible staff member, look for indicators that they enjoy working with children, such as volunteer work or other contacts with children during the initial interview. If a staff member is previously involved with children, the likelihood of being satisfied will be significantly higher.

Also, consider creating different milestones and altering remuneration to incentivize employees to stay with you for extended periods to increase their chances of advancement. Small gestures such as a special treat, thank-you letters, and encouraging conversation can go a long way toward demonstrating your appreciation. In addition, please make sure that your employees believe you care about them and that you are always ready to listen to their concerns when they arise. Finally, create a close-knit, family-like atmosphere among your employees to make them feel that their place of employment is a second home.

Unstable Finances

Maintaining a consistent flow of cash to support business finances might feel like a delicate balancing act at times. For example, what happens if you have a classroom that isn’t full of students? What methods do you use to find new nursery clients?

Collecting tuition from parents can also be a difficult task, and accepting late payments can cause significant delays in the company’s financial operations. In addition, there are many different ways to make tuition payments, including via check, cash, or debit card, and keeping track of all of these different sorts of fees can be challenging.

Making sure that your company is operating at peak performance will help to alleviate stress levels. A successful firm relies on having enough revenue to cover expenses such as payroll, insurance, and taxes, among other things.

Solution:

Contracts should be signed with your clients. A contract will assist you in ensuring that monthly fees are paid on time and that parents are fully aware of the terms and conditions of having their child cared for at your establishment. It also ensures that parents notify you in advance if they no longer want your services, giving you enough time to find a suitable replacement. Market vacancies by offering discounts to current parents in exchange for recommendations, advertising in the local newspaper, or using social media to get the word out about openings.

Another excellent approach to increase business is to become a member of the local chamber of commerce in your area. Even joining for a year will assist in raising awareness of your company in your neighborhood and fostering ties with other business owners. In addition, create a waitlist for your company once it has reached maximum capacity to fill vacancies as soon as they arise in the future. Finally, consider adopting software such as Learning Clubhouse to automate billing, keep track of finances, and conveniently track spending to keep your firm profitable. Learning Clubhouse is an example of such software.

Pros and cons of a Kindergarten Business

Pros

• You are not committing the raising of your children to a stranger.
• You will have the opportunity to see your child’s “firsts,” such as walking and speaking.
• Your children will be interacting with children from different families.
• As long as there are children, there will be a need for childcare.
• You will be in charge of your destiny.
• Your earnings are entirely up to you.
• You won’t have to worry about the cost of professional attire or the gas to commute to and from work.
• You are in charge of determining the hours you will be working.
• Household expenses can be deducted from your taxable income.
• You get the satisfaction of knowing that you have made a difference in someone else’s life.

Cons

• You will not be able to provide your full attention to your children.
• A family’s well-being is negatively impacted by having other people’s children in your home all day, every day. It causes tension and necessitates a great deal of patience and hard work on everyone involved.
• The daycare children will be encroaching on everyone’s personal space, including your bedroom.
• They’ll be making a lot of noise, no doubt.
• They will cause damage to your toys, books, dishes, beds, walls, furniture, lawn, and other belongings, among other things.
• The days are long, and the hours are long. Your daycare needs to open early enough for parents to go to work on schedule. You must remain open in the evening for a sufficient amount of time to allow parents to drive their children to daycare.
• During the day, you are highly confined to your residence.
• You do not interact with your coworkers in any way.

Kindergarten Marketing Strategies

Transparency in marketing with technology

Parents are looking for child care that stands out from the crowd; waiting for them to come to you is not the best course of action to pursue.

Choose the proactive approach instead of the reactive one, and demonstrate to parents exactly what you value and why they should put their trust in you with their children.

Whether through paid advertisements or customized webinars, there is an infinite number of methods to connect with tech-savvy parents. Here are a few suggestions:

• Virtual school walk-throughs: Host a virtual open day to welcome new parents into your school from a distance. Get to know your parents even better by pre-recording short videos to demonstrate how your classes run, live-streaming a tour of the facilities, or even sitting together for a virtual coffee date via group video chat.
• Webinars on frequently asked questions: Make a list of the parents’ questions, and then organize a live webinar to address them in further detail. Parents can even participate in the dialogue while speaking, giving the impression of an in-person conference.
• Social media ads: Now that you know exactly who you’re talking to, you can use that information to filter social media advertisements by age and area, ensuring that only the appropriate people see your brand.

Key takeaway:

• Would you please use virtual and digital tools to replicate in-person marketing touchpoints and educate prospective new parents on everything they need to know about your child care business?

Streamline your marketing communications

The experience of trying to keep parents informed over a global health pandemic highlighted some significant holes in the marketing strategies of many early learning providers.

In and of itself, selecting the most appropriate message and determining whether to send it by email, text message or messenger app, among other options, might feel like a full-time job.

However, the reality is that you require these two tools to do effective preschool marketing:

• All-in-one marketing platform: Many marketing platforms are available for sharing visually appealing branded communications, but the trick is to choose one that can handle everything. The key to success is customization, which is why you should select an intelligent marketing system such as Mailchimp or Marketing360 that allows you to create unique communications that will impress new parents.
• Child care management system:  Built-in messaging, quick access to payment information, and real-time insights into day-to-day activity are features of a fantastic child care management platform that can improve parent-teacher communications. The correct platform will interface with your customer relationship management system (CRM) and other enrollment systems to ensure that every email, text, and message is targeted and personalized.

Key takeaway:

• Make use of all-in-one technologies to streamline your communications and reduce the amount of time spent on administrative tasks.

Use your team’s marketing concepts.

The majority of people are fed up with change after such a tumultuous year. In your role as an ECE leader, it is your responsibility to ensure that your teams are prepared for the proper type of change—the kind that will create resilience and enhance employee morale at a time when they are most in need.

This is especially true for a marketing overhaul, which involves putting everybody on the same page right away.

Here’s how to go about it:

• Prepare your teams for change: Make them aware of the changes by detailing exactly what they should expect through streamlined, simple-to-understand communications. As a bonus, this is a fantastic moment to invite them to like, follow, and share any new social media outlets you’ve recently added to your marketing arsenal.
• Demand insights and feedback from teachers: Teachers are on the front lines and know their students’ and families’ needs better than anyone else. Asking them for parent insights or general input from the beginning will help you get them on board with your marketing redesign. They might come up with a brilliant new idea that you would have never thought of on your own.
• Put employee well-being at the forefront of marketing: As a result of everything they’ve been through, expecting them to do additional work will probably not go over well. So make sure that your new marketing plan is beneficial to employees rather than detrimental to them.
• Use technology to communicate your marketing news: Just as with your external communications, a streamlined platform is the most effective approach to ensure that all employees receive the same information simultaneously.

Key takeaway:

• By integrating your employees in the process from the beginning, you may assist them in gaining control over new changes.

Promote Referrals

For the majority of child care services, word of mouth is a highly effective marketing tactic. There are two elements to consider:

• First, do your customers accurately represent the value you provide?
• Are your consumers compelled to refer you to others?

Through an online communications platform like Educa, proper parent communication and engagement is essential to convey our message accurately. Educa allows you to exhibit your approach while providing parents with insights that help them comprehend your educational philosophy.

A more difficult challenge is converting contented parents into engaged advocates. Here are three suggestions:

• Make a prize available.
• Raise your standing among your children’s parents.
• Third, make a statement that will be remembered.

Many organizations have successfully offered referral incentives — such as a free week — to encourage parents to communicate. There is, however, a commercial component to this that may not be appealing to all viewers.

Another alternative is to have a high-profile relationship with one’s parents. Again, online parent communication software (such as Educa), which includes a free app and a discreet channel on the parents’ phone, is a fantastic approach to keep top of mind with parents. When a parent is actively using the track daily, they are more likely to take advantage of referral opportunities when they arise.

Key takeaway:

• Keep your eyes peeled for opportunities to do something unique and unforgettable. This could include activities that the parents enjoy, a service response that goes above and above, or a random act of kindness. These are the kinds of things that spark conversation, and your child care provider may be recommended.

Case Studies

Montessori School

Background

Challenge

Even though Hill Point Montessori has an excellent educational curriculum, the school’s enrolment has been falling for some time. In the past, they were virtually entirely dependent on word of mouth to expand. In addition, because so many students were graduating from their program, it wasn’t easy to replace the extra capacity with new students.

Recruiting new elementary-level students at Hill Point Montessori was a particular challenge for the school. They lacked the marketing expertise to assist local parents in clearly understanding Hill Point’s distinct differentiating characteristics. Many parents chose the free public elementary option because it did not require them to make any distinctions.

Hill Point Montessori needs to attract new families, particularly new parents, to continue growing. They were well aware that they needed to get more parents to visit their school and appreciate the importance of their educational program. Unfortunately, they were only averaging 1-2 tours per month, despite their conversion rate on tours being extremely high. It wasn’t enough in the end.

They expected to have 30 open seats across all of their classrooms for the forthcoming school year, and they were right. Hill Point Montessori, which charges average yearly tuition of $13,000, was on the verge of losing $390,000 in potential revenue due to low enrollment.

They came up with two primary identities to focus on. First, parents with preschool-aged children and parents with elementary-aged children are two different groups of people.

The following step was to do a competitive analysis to determine the marketing methods employed by other local schools in the area. Their competitors had better websites, a more significant social media presence. In addition, they had made investments in Pay-Per-Click advertising (although it was clear there was a lot of wasted ad spend).

Strategy

• It was decided to concentrate all of their efforts on parents with elementary school-aged children as their target audience. Hill Point Montessori had the most amount of unused capacity in this area. In addition, because they did not have to compete with a free public school option, obtaining preschool children was less complicated.
• It was very evident to WSI Connect that every aspect of the marketing campaign had to bring parents to the school for a scheduled tour of the facilities.
• The creation of a new responsive WordPress website marked the beginning of the implementation of the marketing plan.

• They subsequently optimized the content for search engine optimization, which significantly improved their search engine ranks.

• They concentrated on improving conversion rates in several areas and created content that highlighted their highly competent academic and administrative staff members.
• They included many call-to-actions (CTAs) to direct parents to a dedicated landing page for the registration process for the tour.
• Several photo galleries for their programs, summer camps, and extracurricular activities have been added to their website to provide potential parents with a more detailed view of their educational environment.
• After completing the tour form, parents are sent to a “thank you” website, including films emphasizing a recent parent testimonial, a school overview, and recent commencement speeches.
• Additional information on the tour process and the following steps are also sent to parents via an automated email response.

• A monthly content calendar and an inbound marketing program were established to attract and educate new parents about Hill Point Montessori and the Montessori Method of education. This includes blog posts shared across their Google My Business, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest profiles, among other things.

Results

Google Organic growth has increased by 96 percent year on year.

As a result, there has been a 300 percent rise in school tours.

As a result of excellent tour conversion rates, they have generated a profit of 356 percent per month!

Final Thoughts

If you’re searching for a kindergarten marketing strategy, these tips will guide you along the way. In addition, reading our case study should help you formulate a well-informed plan that can help your business reach kindergarten students in various ways.