At this stage in the pandemic, even if your school isn’t back to full yet, your enrollment rates are starting to trend positively again and you’re looking to hire great teachers so you can continue to fill your school. But in order to attract families and staff back to your school, you’ve had to tweak your messaging and unique benefits to align with their increased health and safety concerns.
Regardless of how you’ve adjusted your messaging and what unique benefits you’ve added to your school/ program over the past year, when advertising to parents and potential candidates you need to make sure that your messaging is bolder and more compelling than ever before – in today’s world, it takes a little extra convincing to believe that your school can truly meet their expectations and needs.
To ensure that your school’s enrollment and hiring advertisements stand out from the rest in your area, here are eight key ingredients that you should be including in every single piece of your marketing materials (taken from the book The Ultimate Child Care Marketing Guide).
1. An Attention-Grabbing Headline
An attention-grabbing headline is the most important element of any marketing piece you create, whether it’s print or digital. It’s the thing that will capture a reader’s attention and compel them to read your message. Your headline should either sparky curiosity by setting it up as a question, gently leverage parents’ emotions and needs, or include an unusual fashion of specificity (such as, “Get $263 of Free Child Care!”).
2. Unique Value Statement
Whenever possible weave your unique value statement into your marketing message in either the headline, copy, or tagline. Including your UVS in your overall marketing message will also help you test it’s effectiveness and discover whether or not your UVS actually excite parents or not.
3. Benefits
Communicate the benefits that your program can offer to children and parents, and bring forth your strongest ones in the headline of your marketing piece, and use bullet points to list your benefits in the copy of the ad, flyer, brochure, or web page.
4. An Irresistible Offer
This is your call to action for the reader. Your irresistible offer should clearly tells the reader what you want her to do next. Give them a reason to call your school now. Even people who are your ideal customer are unlikely to call your business unless you actually give them a compelling reason – an offer – to do so.
5. Deadline
Your offer, or call to action, must have a clearly stated deadline. A deadline is the best way to get people to take action; without one they will probably put your promotion aside to come back to later – which of course they usually forget about.
6. Testimonials
Include at least one testimonial in every marketing piece you create, and the more you include the better! You can refer to parent testimonials as “Rave Reviews,” and can use this theme as the primary focus of your ad. Your ad copy could state your program’s top unique benefits, and then be backed up by several testimonials that support them.
7. A Guarantee or Promise
When you offer a guarantee, it automatically sets you apart from all or most of the other programs in your area. A guarantee is also a form of social proof – proof that you as the child care business owner or director are willing to put your money where your mouth is to guarantee your clients satisfaction. Most child care programs in your area probably don’t offer a guarantee or promise because they are too afraid that their customers might demand their money back, but the probability of that happening is so low that it’s worth the risk of offering it and doing so will really set you apart from your competition.
8. A Unique Identifier
One of the best ways to precisely measure your marketing ROI is to include a unique and distinct offer or offer code on each marketing piece. It will enable you to definitively measure the number of inquiries (leads) and the number of resulting enrollments you receive from each marketing effort. Without this information, you will have no clue about which marketing pieces are working for you and which ones are not.
