There are a lot of metrics that you can look at when it comes to running your child care center. For example, there’s obviously the enrollment numbers which are critical to look at. But, you can also look at the number of appointments that you have with parents that are coming up. I’m sure you know pretty well the metrics that I want to give you a little bit of insight on in terms of what we actually look at in all the different child care centers that we’re working with.

These are the metrics that you also need to care about if you want to see how things are moving and see if there are any patterns that you might be missing or some things that could give you some interesting insights.

Website metrics you need to care about

The simplest of numbers is just looking at how much raw traffic comes to your website. For simple math, let’s just say, a thousand people came to your website in the last 30 days. Is that a good number or not? It actually depends on the size of your center, the number of locations, etc. Those might be great numbers or terrible numbers depending on the size of your center.

Compare the metrics

The second thing you should look at is to compare the month before. So that is 30 days compared to other 30 day cycles. You’re not comparing 28 days to 31 days for example, but you’re looking at a revolving period.

Then, the next step is to compare it to the year prior. Let’s just say, you’re looking at the numbers in January of this year to January of the year prior to this one. What do the numbers look like? And why do they look like that? That to me is more important than just looking at month over month. The reason is that obviously, you’ve got different enrollment cycles. You know which month is high and which is low for enrollment. So if you’re only comparing January to December, for example, your January can look amazing or December may look dismal in terms of your traffic so you’ve got to be comparing the same month to the same month. Of course, the number should be going up and not down. If the numbers are going down, then there are obviously some issues. Again, look at the numbers. If we’re talking you got 990 the previous year and you got 980 this year, then that’s not a huge decline. But if you had 2000 and now you’re in a thousand, then you’ve got to look and see what is going on there.

Where does the traffic come from?

After you know your numbers, then from there, I like to look at where those numbers came from. In other words, what the traffic sources are for those numbers. How many people found you through Google organic search or Yahoo organic search, or Bing? Were you doing Google AdWords? How much came from the social media?

Once you have those numbers, you can start looking at how many people who visited your website actually went and called you or submitted a form on your website. How many people are submitting an application online or requesting to schedule an appointment online?

That’s really a perfect closed loop system to say: we got 1000 visitors, 500 came from Google AdWords, 500 came from Google organic search. For now, I can see that five submitted applications, there are also 10 requests for appointments. These kinds of metrics allow you to see how things are moving for your child care center. We don’t really care about social media likes, what you need to care about is how many of those people are calling you and requesting appointments.

Some final tips on metrics

If you’re working on brand awareness, then you can also care about those kinds of numbers, but these are more difficult to track. You want to look at the reach: this is a great number to measure – how many people actually got to see your message or see your brand.

These are all the metrics that we track on a weekly and monthly basis. But you can also track your search engine rankings. Are you on page 1 or are you on page 1? These are the numbers you have to track on a monthly basis.

Another idea for you what to track is if you have multiple locations, then you can look at the traffic that’s coming to your website from different locations to see if you need to try to be more aggressive in a different area because you need to raise your enrollment in that area versus the other. You can look and see how the spikes are attributing. Are you seeing a spike in traffic when radio ads are running for example?

These are all great ways to track your metrics. If you need help or have any questions, feel free to schedule a no-cost 15-minute discovery call with us. Just go to localchildcaremarketing.com/discovery and book your call today.

Today I am going to clarify the importance of reputation management for your child care center. I’m going to show you how to use map listings, citations, and directories to improve marketing for your child care center.

How to Use Map Listings for Your Child Care Center

Let’s start with Google map listings, as it is the easiest one to explain. When you go to Google and type in, for example, preschool Buffalo, New York, the three preschools that are showing up are what is called the Google three pack. These preschools are grabbing those spots in the maps and they’re not showing up there by accident. There are actually Google ranking factors that determine who will show up there.

Here are a couple of factors that Google takes into consideration: how many reviews these preschools have, how their website is structured, if their listing is up to date, etc.

However, there are also all these other places that you need to consider: Bing, Yahoo, Yelp, BizLocal, Easy Local, Yellow Pages, etc. All these websites also have listings, and they can have your listing as well. If you already have a listing, you need to keep it up to date. Because what usually ends up happening is a lot of these listings just become outdated because you’re not actively updating or managing them because more often than not, you don’t even know they exist and there are hundreds of these across the web.

Why You Need to Make Your Listings Consistent

Reason number 1: So the first one is quite obvious. If a parent, for example, is on one of these particular sites and they’re clicking to go to your website or they’re calling the number that’s on there and it’s going to a different location or a bad number or a different website – you’re going to lose out on some potential appointments because they are not going to put an effort to find the right contact information, unless you’re the cream of the crop in terms of brands and top of mind. If you do have an amazing word of mouth traction, then they might seek you out. But more often than not they’re just going to move on and go elsewhere. Therefore, your number one priority is to make sure that your listings are completely up to date.

Reason number 2: The other thing to keep in mind is that these actually populate and help show why you should be ranking high in Google. It’s showing Google: hey they’ve got a hundred other of these local listings. They all look the same. They’re all consistent. They are a reputable preschool, they are a reputable daycare, or childcare centre, for example.

So those are the two big reasons that you want to make sure that those are updated and you’ve got to keep an eye on these because they’re constantly changing. There’s new ones that are popping up and they might be grabbing old listings and phone numbers and websites. The most critical part to pay attention to is your address, because if one of these listings has it wrong, and it could be as simple as street versus boulevard versus way, for example. But if there’s two different listings they mean two completely different things.

This is definitely something that you can take a look at using some of the tools that are out there. If you’re interested to see how this works, you can always book a no-cost discovery call with us. The call is usually 15 minutes long and we are more than happy to answer any questions you might have.

Just visit localchildcaremarketing.com/discovery to book your discovery call now!

Today’s topic is search engine optimization or SEO. A lot of child care centers that we work with are curious about it because they’re often getting pitched by different marketing agencies or marketing people saying: “Hey, you need to improve your search engine rankings! You’re not ranking in Google.

However, there’s a lot of mystery behind the search engine optimization and what that actually means; what it entails. How do you actually grow your rankings?

So today, I want to give you a couple of details about search engine optimization along with some useful tactics that we’ve been deploying for other childcare centers alike to help them grow their rankings and then start to attract those parents which ultimately ends up in more placements and more students and children in different centers.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is simply working on getting your website ranking in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, as high as you possibly can. Now by high I mean the top spot is the number one spot. That’s basically as high as you can go. You can get more than one spot in the search engine. So you could be number one and number two, for example. Number one and number eight, or even have more than two. But if you’re looking at it from a simplicity standpoint, let’s say that your daycare center is in Fresno. We want to make sure that if someone’s going to Google and typing in daycare Fresno that you’re showing up on page 1 in Google.

Why is it important to rank on page 1?

Why is it so important for you to rank on page 1? Well, simply because most parents are not going to page 2 and definitely to page 3 or beyond. That’s just never happening. Less than 5 percent of people go past page 1 of Google. They’re looking at that first page, looking at the map listings or the Google three pack as it’s called. They’re looking at the results that are way at the top and that’s Google Ad Words or paid traffic. But we’ve got to make sure that you’re ranking on Page 1 of Google and SEO is that tactic or that method of getting you to rank.

Quick tips to rank high in Google

Here are a couple of quick tips on how you could grow your rankings if you were a daycare center, for example, in Fresno. The big one is really making sure that your website is constructed properly. And when I say properly I mean that it’s loading quickly, it looks great on mobile, you’ve got lots of really good content for parents to look through.

Quick tip number #1: Make sure that your website is flawless on mobile, tablet or desktop.

Quick tip number #2: Write lots of really good content.

Quick tip number #3: Drive quality links to your daycare center in Fresno via press releases, social media, local citations, etc. Building quality links is important because the more links you have that are pointing to your website, the better.

Google is going to look at that stuff and they are going to determine how high of an authority they believe your website is. Any company that promises you page 1 rankings guaranteed for a hundred dollars a month, for example, trust me they are just not legitimate companies.

Is your website optimized for search engine optimization?

If you need help or have further questions, we offer a no-cost 15-minute discovery call. Just visit localchildcaremarketing.com/discovery to book your call today.

If you’re always on the lookout for new tactics that you can use to market your child care center, here is an interesting idea you can try out a chatbot?

A chatbot is an extremely new tactic but it is the one that I think could really be interesting for preschools, daycares, child care centers alike. We’ve just started testing it with some of the schools and centers that we work with and we’re getting some pretty interesting results.

What Is a Chatbot?

A chatbot can take one of many forms. It could be a little button on your website that someone can click and type a message. What ends up happening is on the other side someone starts talking back. Now when I say someone, I’m not referring to a person but the chatbot. The crazy thing is that if you do this setup correctly, it almost looks like it’s a human on the other side.

How Does a Chatbot Work in Practice?

You might be thinking OK, this just sounds a little bit strange to me. But let me give you a practical example of how this could work. So let’s say it’s 9:30 at night on a Friday evening. Chances are that you or anyone on your staff is relaxing for the evening. But let’s say that a parent is doing some research on Google looking at different preschools and they send a message to your Facebook page. Now you can have generic messages set up so that they have an autoreply that says something like: “Thank you for your message, we’ll get back to you during business hours.” Or you could have it set up where after they send a message, this chatbot that you preprogram starts to ask questions.

It may say: “Tell us the age of your child.” And then it can have logic. So if they say a certain age, it can then move into a different sequence. Well, that would be X Y Z program or this program. You can literally preprogram all the different things anticipating all the same questions that you get asked. Tell us about the safety. Tell us about your teachers, tell us about the food, the activities, the schedules, the investment or cost.

You can literally preprogram all of that stuff up so that the parent is engaging with a chatbot and they don’t even necessarily know that it’s not an actual human. So you’re literally warming them up on autopilot. Really interesting technology.

The tool that we use is called ManyChat. We use it with Facebook and Facebook ads. We’re testing it on some of the preschool and child care center websites. Lots of interesting technology and interesting examples how you can use Facebook chatbots to engage interested parents.

As always if we can be of any service to you, you can book a no-cost 15-minute call with myself or someone on our team just to brainstorm some marketing strategies with you to see if we could be of service. Here is the link to request the call:  localchildcaremarketing.com/discovery.

There is a lot of ways to generate more estimates for child care centers. There is search engine marketing, there’s pay per click, there are banner ads, there are directory submissions and citations; lots of different tactics. But there’s one that a lot of child care centers are simply ignoring and that is mobile marketing. And what I mean when I say mobile marketing is where people tend to get a bit confused, they are not sure what that means.

The one that I’m trying to give you some content on in this blog post is really solely focused on gathering cell phone numbers of parents that are interested in your child care centers. So, for example, they may be going to your website and they’re filling out a short form that has their name, their email, their cell phone because they want more information about how to educate their children or they want to download the Secrets to Teaching Your Children Almost Anything or something like that. In other words, by filling out this form they are going to give you permission to market to them.

And what I love about the cell phone is that you can then take that number and put it into a tool where you can literally market to them on autopilot. So if someone requests information depending on how busy you are, sometimes it takes a long time to get back to them, and that is never a good thing. We want to get that solved. We can build out a tool that actually grabs their number and then starts a sequence of text messages to get them warmed up: tell me a little bit about the problem that you’re currently having, etc. It is almost pre-selling before you even get them on the phone.

Then, even if you don’t win them over to your childcare center or even if they decide that they will wait another year to enroll their child, you still have their phone number.

You can use this phone number to send them a couple of autopilot messages throughout the year to remind them about your child care center. You can send them messages such as Happy Father’s Day, Happy Mother’s Day, Season’s Greetings, or even some quick tips. There is a lot of cool things that you can send that just keep you in front of them.

In the end, don’t forget that having a good mobile-responsive website is one of the most important things today. But the one tactic that I highly encourage you to do is to start asking for cell phone numbers and then getting them into a tool where you can actually market to those people, warm them up and turn more of those to students.

Do you have any questions? Schedule your discovery call today: https://calendly.com/nojoke/child-care-marketing-discovery-call