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, and childcare 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 set up 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 the 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 We Use
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 of 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 me 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.