Entries by Camille St Martin

When Should You Boost A Facebook Post To Promote Your Child Care Center?

Boosting a post is one of the quickest and easiest ways to increase engagement and grow likes on your child care business Facebook page. Some businesses invest a couple dollars into boosting every post just for this reason. But we all have a limited budget and what does engagement and likes really get us at the end of the day? (Besides a fleeting good feeling that people are starting to notice our child care online.) Your boosted posts should also be sending your website traffic & sending out a message to let people know what your child care business is all about.

As in any marketing, it is important to remember your overall goals when deciding where to spend your money. If you are going to invest money into boosting a post make sure the post is:

1. Sending your website traffic

And/Or

2. Supporting and demonstrating your child care “brand”, philosophies, and values while providing something of value

If the post is a link to send your website traffic, you don’t just have to stick with the standard “Now enrolling at….”. Get creative! You can link back to blog posts, testimonials, reviews, photo galleries, etc. Most content you post … More

June 19, 2016 by

Social Media For Child Care: 6 Tools To Create Stellar Graphics

The most engaging social media is all about imagery. No matter the social media platform, images are what grab the attention of your audience. And you don’t have to be a graphic design expert to create engaging images. All you need are the right tools and you will be on your way to quickly creating images that tell the story of your child care business. Here is a roundup of the top 6 tools to help you create awesome graphics for social media.

1. Canva

This is one of my go-to tools for creating beautiful graphics for social media. The website is very intuitive and you can use one of the thousands of templates they already have or build your own. This is a wonderful tool to build images that let your child care brand shine! While some of the templates are not free, there are quite a bit that are free to use.

From the menu, you can select a layout, search for images, purchase stock photos, add effects to your image, and customize the graphic to match your brand color palette and fonts. Play with it, get creative, and see how your audience responds! My clients have told … More

June 19, 2016 by

Child Care Owners: What Is The Point of Facebook?

How many of you child care owners are thinking – WHAT is the heck is the point of social media? I don’t want to take time out the gazillion other things I have to do to post on Facebook, to the 150 fans I have, that never see my status updates anyways. Why does this all matter? Why should I care about posting on Facebook for my child care business?

It’s important to understand that beyond all the advanced targeted advertising you can do on Facebook (click here to get tips on how to do this), at it’s very basic element, social media CREATES and SUSTAINS RELATIONSHIPS with your potential child care clients. Your Facebook page is the face of your business, a complement to your website, where potential clients interact with you. Your posts should support your brand, tell your story, engage your fans, and create relationships.

When you learn how to craft engaging posts, Facebook serves as a great platform to market yourself for minimal investment. It serves as a continuous engagement point with your families, prospects, and community as a whole. It allows prospects to get to know you, for free. Your Facebook page represents what … More

May 19, 2016 by

Child Care Owners: When Should You Post on Facebook?

One of the biggest questions I get asked is WHEN businesses should be posting on Facebook and other social media sites.

The answer is different depending on the audiences and the industry. However, when posting for child care centers and for Child Care Marketing, I’ve noticed better engagement in the afternoons and evenings, when people might be taking breaks from busy work days, or winding down at home.

You’ll want to experiment posting at different times of the day to see when your audience responds best. Sometimes if I post and don’t get much engagement from that post, I’ll employ a little trick. I will simply delete and re-post at a different time of the day and watch engagement take off. Sometimes it’s as simple as that!

Facebook also has a metric that will allow you to see what times of the day most of your fans are online, which will allow you to get a better sense of when it is the best time to post.

To find this information, you’ll want to go to your Facebook Business Page. On the top you will see a tab that says “Insights”

Then, on the left hand side … More

April 19, 2016 by

Finding Child Care Staff With Facebook Ads

Facebook ads can be an effective way to get leads for new enrollments at your child care business but did you know you can also use Facebook ads to find staff?!

I know finding qualified staff for your child care is one of the biggest issues child care owners are facing today. If you’re struggling, it might be worth it to try out some promoted posts or a Facebook ad campaign. I helped a Child Care Marketing client set up an ad campaign a couple weeks ago and her director just hired on 3 new people that applied after the campaign!

There are a couple ways to go about this strategy. The simplest way is to just boost a post out to your Facebook fans and their friends. Another option when boosting a post is to choose people to target. You can target people that live in your area that have interests that are related to early childhood education, preschool, pre-k, child development, etc. Try this out and see what kind of results you get. Targeting when boosting a post though is extremely limited so it can be worth it to try out Facebook Ads Manager.

Once you get into … More

April 19, 2016 by

Facebook Marketing 101: Market To Your Warm Leads

For those of you not in the marketing world, a “warm” lead is someone that has already shown interest in your business, whether they’ve joined your email list, visited your website, connected with you on LinkedIn, followed you on social media, etc. but they haven’t bought from you yet.

A warm lead needs to be nurtured. It’s been shown that customers usually need at least 7 points of contact before they buy from you. This is where SEO, Google AdWords, social media, email marketing, direct mail, and all that fun stuff come in. The whole point of ALL of that is to create a relationship with the customer so they get to “know, like, and trust” you and your business before making a decision.

Now on Facebook there are a whole variety of ways to target audiences based off of different demographics (I consider these “cold” leads – they’ve never heard of you) but did you know you can tap into your warm leads too? These are people that already know, like, and trust you and this is where you are most likely to see results when using Facebook ads.

If you haven’t played around in Facebook Ads Manager yet … More

January 19, 2016 by