Using Social Media Marketing to Increase Childcare Occupancy
Increasing the occupancy of your early years setting is always on your mind as a nursery manager. Your ability to keep a steady stream of incoming enquiries is the make and break of the business! In this blog, Katie, founder of Early Years Marketing with Katie, shares her top 5 tips on how to maximise your social media presence to generate enquiries.
1. Perform an audit of your current social media presence.
If you’re already using social media as part of your childcare marketing, you need to start by conducting an audit of what you already do. As a nursery manager, you need to have an in-depth understanding of your current standing to improve it. It’s easy to get into the habit of uploading a series of photos each day of activities that the children have done but is the really optimising your social media marketing to the best of its ability? Look back at your posts for last 1-3 months and take notes about the following:
- When you access your social media profile from a mobile, how does everything look? Are you able to clearly see the images on your posts? If applicable, has the header loaded correctly?
Top tip: most users access social media through their phones, your profile needs to be optimised for this!
- Have you got a link to your website visible in the bio?
- Does your bio explain what your early years setting does and why you’re different to others?
- Is there a clear way for potential enquiries to contact you through your social media profile? For example, Facebook lets you edit call to action buttons on your profile to send emails, messages or calls.
- What do you currently post about? What does it look like? How often? How many comments, likes, saves or shares do you get? What times? What days?
If you don’t already have a social media profile for your nursery, why not!? This is your easiest way to access local people quickly – get making your profile!
2. Check out your competitors and have a look at what they do!
Social media is a busy place so if you have brand new enquiries looking at your social media accounts, they are likely going to be looking at your nearby competitors too so it’s always useful to keep track of what they are doing. This doesn’t need to be everyday, life as a nursery manager is already busy!
You aren’t looking to copy your competitors; that’s not going to see the right impressions for your future enquiries. However, you can take inspiration from them. Scroll through their accounts and look at what performs well for them and think about how you can do something similar yourself. This also works well for understanding what doesn’t work well!
3. Use your findings to create a social media plan.
Let’s not waste the time you’ve used auditing your profiles and others, it’s time to improve what you do! Now you know what posts have performed well and why, you can start creating your updated nursery advertising plan!
In this stage, you want to plan out what type of content you’re going to be regularly posting. Are they long videos? Is it a short video? Is news affecting your families? Is it the activities of the children at nursery? You don’t want to post the same thing everyday but once or twice a week is perfect. You want to give your future prospects a taste of what happens at your nursery every day so showing off what the children do, the activities you create and your knowledge of child development are all great starting points.
Once you have an overall idea of the types of things you want to post throughout the week, the next thing to consider is timings. Do you need to post every single day? Do you need to post 3 times a day? If these are working for you – amazing! If not, that’s a lot of ideas to keep coming up with. You also need to consider the timings. Do evening or daytime posts work better for you?
4. Do regular marketing or social media CPD to ensure you’re up-to-date.
Yes, that’s right… marketing… CPD? As a nursery manager, your role isn’t just leading on child development, you’re also responsible for keeping the setting full. That means conducting regular CPD to ensure you’re on top of the latest trends and up-to-date within social media marketing. That doesn’t mean an hour a week, you’re busy enough. You could sign up for a newsletter from marketing agencies or follow social media marketing managers as they share the latest updates and small snippets which often take less than a minute to read or watch and could have huge implications for what you do moving forward.
Times change and they change fast – you’re missing out if you don’t adapt. In 2021, Facebook and Instagram were still photo and text-based platforms. Now, short videos are the quickest way to reach more people on social media (although this may not be the best approach for you, it depends on your audit).
5. Experiment and then review, over and over and over again!
Every 3-4 months, take a couple of hours to review your social media marketing by repeating steps 1-4. Social media changes are fast and what once worked, could quickly and easily go stale. You need to continue reviewing what you’ve been doing to understand your successes and failures.
With that in mind and the ever-changing landscape of social media nursery marketing, don’t be afraid to trial new things! Experiment with different posting times and types of content. Just because short videos didn’t work for you in January, doesn’t mean they can’t start doing well in October. Remember, we learn more from our failures than our successes!
If you’re looking for more support on how to use social media marketing to support your business goals, whether that’s nursery recruitment, generating enquiries or establishing yourself as an education leader, you can find more guidance on Early Years Marketing with Katie.
Catch Up Now: Maximising Childcare Occupancy
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About the Author
Katie has had two main careers - nursery management and digital marketing. Early Years Marketing with Katie was born out of the frustrations she felt as a nursery manager trying to constantly recruit new staff whilst keeping a steady flow of new enquiries coming in! Katie understands exactly how hard it is working in early years and loves to help reduce manager workloads so they can focus on the parts of their jobs they love!
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