Today’s topic is really about keeping tabs, checking metrics, pivoting, and tweaking just all of that “stuff” that you should be doing as you’re getting closer to opening up a new business. In short, is about all the important childcare marketing metrics to track.
A Quick Rundown
This is our continuation multi-part series of opening and marketing a business from scratch. We have been using a child care center as an example. We’re just now a couple of days away from scheduling out some open houses, grand openings, and things like that. So if we reflect back and just look at some of the different things that we’ve gone through and accomplished over the last couple of weeks.
- We’ve gone from having no brand name, no logo, and no website to having all of that stuff live.
- Building out that strategic month-by-month opening plan to be able to reverse engineer the new center—a new business opening.
- Built our brand assets.
- Developed a core story.
- We’ve even written what I like to call that painted picture of how your business looks a couple of years out.
- Added branding videos and I taught you the three-by-three strategy.
- We picked keywords for your website and started working on getting you ranking in Google tracking, customer relationship management, citations, and social media.
- Lastly, over the last couple of days, we’ve been talking about buying unlimited web traffic and eyeballs, door hangers, and strategic partners.
For the last few weeks or so, we’ve run the gamut of most tactics.
The Importance of Tracking Metrics
There’s only a couple of days left, but what I felt would be needed before then and when I look at my process for marketing a business that is opening up from scratch or buying a business and then kind of doing some new marketing and things like that, is I’ve got to make sure that I’m on top of the metrics.
If you’re not looking at making pivots based on the childcare marketing metrics to track, it’s gonna continue to be a little bit of a challenge. As you’re deploying these tactics, you need to constantly be referring back to those reverse engineer metrics and the reverse-engineered sheet.
For example, if I was saying that I want to have 80 families enrolled in my childcare center before opening at XYZ price, or maybe you want to have 100 deposits and that you know that 80% of those families will end up committing and enrolling, you need to constantly be referring back childcare marketing metrics that you have tracked. And as you’re executing the various tactics, all of that stuff again is going to be tracked so you can see what’s working and what’s not working.
1. Setting Up A Comprehensive Tracking
If you’re executing tactics that are not working instantly, I don’t want you to completely change course. For example, if you go and you put door hangers or flyers in a neighborhood, just because you don’t instantly get 20 deposits doesn’t mean that that tactic is not working. Again, with that particular tactic, you need to be testing out flyers and/or door hangers a couple of times in the same neighborhoods. Marketing gets better with repetition—the more repetition, the better.
But if you were to execute that three or four times, and you have your tracking phone number or your tracking URL setup, and you get zero phone calls, well then something’s wrong. Your messages are off or perhaps, the neighborhood is off. Maybe you accidentally flyer to a neighborhood of all retirees, for example. Or, maybe your messaging was completely off.
It’s that balancing act of you want to make sure you’re not giving up too early on a tactic and you want to make sure that you’re giving a good go, going through the motions and you’re putting out good creative content, amazing offers, and tracking.
2. Identifying Tactics That Work
Not every single tactic will be a slam dunk, but the tactics that I’ve been presenting to you should work 100% of the time. The Asterix though, is “when deployed correctly”— Google AdWords works 100% of the time.
If I was trying to drive parents to my child care center, I would be deploying Facebook ads and Google Ads all day long—it works 100% of the time. If someone is typing in a preschool near me, and you can serve your ad in front of them, you cannot get better attention than that. However, if your ads are poor, or if you go after the wrong keywords and the landing page doesn’t work or the phone numbers are disconnected, you’re going to be doing yourself a disservice.
3. Tracking Performance Based On Data
The way that you keep that good gauge on this is that you’re constantly checking in on your tracking sources and pivoting based on data. Marketing is a data-driven process. If you invest a few thousand dollars in paid traffic, so let’s say Google ads, you definitely can reverse engineer, how many leads or phone calls are you generating?
How many people are giving deposits to basically back into the exact number of what your cost per deposit? So, does it cost you $2,000 to get one deposit? Is it $500, $1000, or $5000? You leverage the data and then as you’re deploying other tactics, you’re going to be running the same data.
Is Google AdWords driving you a lower cost per deposit? or is it Facebook ads? Is it the door hangers? Do your social media tactics work? Do the influencers help? Is it your map listings on Google? Is it your YouTube ads?
If you have all of your tracking setups, it makes the decisions very, very easy. But you have to continuously be pivoting and switching and moving dollars around to what’s giving you the best return.
4. Cost Analysis
Now the thing that I want to caution you on though is that you may hit critical mass with a tactic. What I mean by that is, let’s say that your cost per deposit on Facebook and I’m just going to use simple math again is $1,000. So, generate some leads and some phone calls, and you know that $1,000 into Facebook ads gives you a $500 deposit to someone joining your school.
And let’s say Google AdWords is $1400. Now you could look at that and probably think you need to put more money on Facebook. What I would encourage you to do is to put some more money in Facebook, and continue to keep the Google ad spend consistent unless that $1400 number is completely out of your budget or out of what you were planning.
What I don’t want you to do then is just to shut off Google. Because what if the threshold for Facebook, you can even throw another $500 a month, or $1,000 a month—there’s only so much attention on these platforms. Once you’ve really had that reach, your costs are gonna start to rise pretty substantially. Because all those people in your community within 10 miles around, they might have already seen your ad 50 times, for example.
5. Data-Driven Decisions
So you don’t want to cut yourself off at the knees, but you have to be pivoting and making data-driven decisions—that is the key here. You have to look at what the data is telling you. And what I want you to do if anything, is I want you to continue to increase your budgets, you’ve got to do more as you get closer and closer to opening your childcare center.
Leverage that data. Make sure that more doesn’t just mean you know all of a sudden your cost per deposit is $5,000 because you became reckless. Leverage the data, pivot, and amplify the tactics that are showing you great results.
Final Words
I definitely do not want you to just stop doing a certain tactic unless you know that everything was designed and executed to perfection. Because the tactics that I’ve been presenting to you are all the tactics step by step that I know work. I’m not giving you anything that is not proven.
I’ve leveraged social influencers and I’ve got businesses that are ranking number one or number two in Google and are driving me quality leads all day long. I’m not encouraging you to go and throw $10,000 on Snapchat or Tik Tok or something like that, however.
Execute the strategies that we’ve been going through and pivot based on the data gathered through childcare marketing metrics. I look forward to catching you back here tomorrow for one of the last couples of episodes as we launch this new business.
Get out there, make a change, and take some action.