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.