Boosted Posts vs. Dark Posts in Facebook

,

If you are new to advertising your business on Facebook it’s important to understand the difference between boosted posts vs. “dark posts”.

In short, a boosted post is published from the News Feed on your Facebook business page. A dark post is created and published with Facebook Ads Manager or Power Editor. A dark post DOES NOT show up on your Facebook business page, although it shows up in the News Feeds of other people (that you choose through targeting) as coming from that business page.

Think of your Facebook business page as a “store front,” “community center,” or “brand center” where you can create messaging that supports and engages your audience so you can build a relationship with people that are already interested in what your business has to offer. Now think of dark posting as a function of “Ads Manager” which is more the back-end advertising machine of your business.

Dark posting allows you to run multiple ad posts with different messaging to as many different target groups that you need. You can run ads to people that have visited your website, ads to different demographic audiences you create, lookalike audiences, etc. And it doesn’t all show up as an advertising mess on your Facebook business page. It is all organized in Facebook Ads Manager.

You can also split test. You can switch out images if one isn’t working for a particular audience or test different copy or offer ideas. You constantly want to be split testing your ads for improvement and using dark posts allows you to do this.

Hopefully this clarifies a little better on what it means to advertise on Facebook. Happy marketing!

For more tips and tricks, get the social media content guide cheat sheet, just for childcare centers. 

/by

Social Media Basics: One Simple and Free Way To Organically Grow Your Business Page

,

This is a really simple tip that can organically increase relevant traffic to your Facebook business page.

Check out the video to learn how:

Login to Facebook and then choose the option to use Facebook as your business page. (The video below will give you instructions.)

You will then see a separate news feed that is the news feed of your “business page.” From here you can search for and like pages and also comment on and like other business page posts. This can give you a boost of organic traffic and also give you ideas for content to post on your own business page.

Want more tips and tricks on growing your social media following, just for childcare centers?

/by

Social Media Ads For Child Care: To Text Or Not To Text

So Facebook has come out with some new changes to their rules on what ads on their platform can look like (again!). I’m going to run through the changes quickly and give you some tips on how you can make it work for your childcare business when you’re creating your own Facebook ads.

You may already be aware that Facebook used to have a limit of 20% text on ads. Basically, if your graphic for your ad consisted of more than 20% text it would be rejected. Facebook would measure this by placing a grid over your graphic. This was always a bit tricky because it depended on where your text was placed on your image.

Well, Facebook has now abolished this rule so you can go crazy and have a graphic with 100% text. Instead, we now have a vague guideline about recommended text overlay, which is, unfortunately, a little more complicated. Now, instead of having a “yes or no,” your ad’s image will fit into one of four different classifications ranking the amount of text overlay. These are:

– Ok
– Low (which is actually higher than Ok)
– Medium
– High

So the bonus is you can now have more text freedom and joy when creating your ads! However there is a downside. Facebook has said you now may be penalized if it thinks your ad has too much text for your audience. Instead of just getting the ad rejected, which was the case before, you now just may not get as much reach if you do go crazy with text, or you will, but it will cost you more.

According to Facebook, people prefer to see ads with very little or no text on imagery so it seems like Facebook is telling us not to use text on graphics at all. But we won’t really know what works for your audience until you try it out for yourself. Which makes it a little bit more complicated when creating your ads. Below are some tips to try and help you out…

1. TEST! TEST! TEST!
No one can be too sure yet if using a whole bunch of text is going to cost you more or if sticking to 20% or less text will get you a further reach. Maybe your ad with all your additional text will actually get you a further reach BECAUSE of your additional text. I recommend testing a few graphics out with additional text and with none at all and then comparing results of your reach and the cost of the campaign.

2. Don’t get rid of your logo.
Don’t let Facebook scare you off from using no text at all. Your logo is important and should still be used in your marketing. Logos raise brand awareness and shouldn’t be dismissed to get a cheaper ad.

3. Manual Bidding
Now that you can go crazy with text on your ad, you may have to also test with manual bidding to get more reach. Again, this all goes back to testing and comparing results.

In all, it goes back to the basic rules of marketing which is test, see what works with your audience, tweak, and test again. Hopefully you see some results and send a ton of traffic, leads, and enrollments to your child care center. Thanks!

Want more tips on how to do social media for your child care? Click here.

/by

5 Tips On Marketing Your Child Care Center With Carousel Ads

No I don’t mean a carousel like the one in the picture above :-)

Don’t know what a carousel ad is? If you’ve ever seen a post on Facebook where there are multiple images that you can “scroll right” through, that is considered a carousel ad. It can be a great method to engage your audience, tell a story, and display your unique benefits.

This is an example of a carousel ad, where the company is also illustrating the unique benefits.

Carousel ads usually outperform regular ads on Facebook, and I’ve seen this as well with my own clients.

This article will walk you through the ideas and techniques that you can use to market your child care center on social media with carousel ads.

1. Capture attention with the first image.

Use a graphic that will capture the attention of parents. This is your first “statement” to the audience in a series of pictures that will encourage them to scroll through.

2. Display the unique benefits of your child care center.

Use QUALITY and attention grabbing photos taken around your child care center. Images of kids looking at the camera or close ups of detail work really well. Highlight your unique benefits. For example, if only use organic cleaners, take a pic of the bottle on a cool background. This will attract parents who find this important.

3. Use carousel ads to highlight your staff.

Use the 4-5 pictures in the carousel ads to promote your professional staff and tell something about each one of them. Put a face with your child care and watch your ads go a long way!

4. Try to be creative and precise.

The only way you are going to get your advertisement read is by producing a unique one. Just like in any marketing, instead of writing the same old words and phrases use new and creative phrases.

Old: Well-equipped classes
New: Lego Mindstorm training for kids.

5. Tell a story

Carousel ads are really effective in telling a story. Create a carousel ad that relates to the growth and learning of a particular child or tell a story of a special event at your child care. Or even about how you first started! This is a great chance to get creative.

So, that’s all from this side! Get creative with it and have fun. If you have used carousel ads, let us know in the comments.

Want more tips on how to market your childcare center, click here.

/by

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 can be tied back to your center and linked. Make sure there is a clear call to action such as “Click here to read more” or “Check out more testimonials here.”

If the post is supporting your child care philosophies and what you have to offer you can still link back to your website. For example if it is a picture of kids in the extracurricular yoga class you can say something like, “The kids having a blast in Miss Mary’s weekly yoga class. Yoga is beneficial for kids because it reduces stress and supports healthy habits. Click here to learn more about our yoga programs…”

Even if you aren’t linking back to your website, think about how the post is supporting your brand and values. Craft every boosted post so that it fosters a sense of community, teaches, inspires, and creates a relationship with the parents that are interested in what you have to offer.

When boosting a post it will have to pass all of Facebook’s advertising policies. One big thing is that the image cannot have more than 20% text. Here is a really simple tool where you can upload a graphic and check to see how much text is in the image: Click here.

While boosted posts are great for quick and easy marketing for your child care, Facebook is also a whole advertising platform that can help you turn clicks into enrollments. Read more about Facebook advertising beyond boosted posts here.

Click here for the content guide cheat sheet for more tips on social media for childcare.

/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 me they’ve gone on to use this tool to create other stellar marketing materials for their child care.

2. Over

Over is a mobile app that allows you to easily create graphics on-the-go to upload to social media right from your phone. Snap photos around your child care, layer on some text, add effects, and there is your post for the day. Easy as that!

3. PicMonkey

PicMonkey is another go-to tool that I use for creating graphics for child care centers. It is similar to Canva in that it is easy to use and offers an array of templates and project types to get your started. A bonus feature of PicMonkey is that you can create some amazing collages, which you can use in any marketing promotions or on the Pinterest boards for your child care center.

4. Pixabay

I always get asked by child care center owners and directors where they can get stock photos. While I highly encourage you to use photos from around your child care center as much as possible, sometimes you need specific pictures to express an idea, holiday, etc. Pixabay is a GREAT resource for FREE stock photos.

5. Social Image Resizer Tool

I am so excited to have just discovered this tool. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent inefficiently resizing images for different social media uses. No more! Check out this website to help you resize your images!

6. Facebook Grid Tool

Ok so originally this article was going to be 5 tools but I couldn’t leave this one out. As most of you know, but maybe some of you don’t, paid ads on Facebook can not contain more than 20% of text. I use this Facebook Grid Tool almost every day to make sure I am under their 20% rule. You REALLY don’t want to upload images with more than 20% and get your ad disapproved. While it might be an inconvenience to you to re-upload a different graphic, it also counts “against” your Facebook account and could lead to it getting shut down someday. I wouldn’t want that to happen to you!

Hope this helps! Have fun creating some graphics for your child care business.

Want more tips on how to do social media for your child care? Click here.

/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 you stand for and it’s where you gather and communicate with your community.

It’s been shown in various studies that you need at least 7 points of contact with a customer before they do business with you. Well guess what? This is a great platform for creating multiple points of contact for potential child care clients to get to know, like, and trust your child care business.

I hear a lot of child care owners getting frustrated because they don’t have a lot of likes on their Facebook pages. It’s important to focus on ENGAGEMENT and not how to get more LIKES on your page. Engagement creates relationships, gets your posts seen by a larger audience, and is a good investment of time. While it’s great to grow your fan base, compare it to an email list. If you grow your email list but send out unengaging emails that never opened, what is the point? You need to have interaction with your potential clients. When you have engagement and are posting out useful, valuable content, your fan base will organically grow.

I am focusing on Facebook because I don’t see a whole lot of child care owners leveraging their Facebook pages and getting results. Once you know how to do this for your business, you can transfer it onto ANY social media. It is good to focus on just one or two while you are learning.

Ultimately, Facebook is a marketing machine where you can send traffic to your website, collect leads, and turn leads into enrollments. How to do this is a whole long course by itself (which we will be releasing soon, click here to stay updated!) but it is very important to get the basics down in communicating with your audience on Facebook before making this leap. If you know how to communicate to your audience on an organic (free) level than you will get better results with your paid advertising

Want more information about Facebook can market your childcare, click here.

/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 Facebook Ads Manager you can get even more targeted. In Facebook Ads Manager you can run ads to people that live in your area with certain degrees, that have gone to certain schools, that have particular job titles such as preschool director, child care provider, child care assistant, etc. You can run ads to people that have just moved to the area (so may be job hunting) or even people that work for other child care businesses! Explore around the demographics options and you will find endless options to find potential staff that might be right for your center.

In the ad/post make sure to explain why your child care would be such a great place to work! Video of your employees having fun or talking about why they like to work in child care and at your business works really well. If you don’t have video, images of your happy staff also works.

Just as with posting the job anywhere else, don’t post boring job descriptions that state pay and hours! Give people reasons to want to work for you, people choose jobs for many reasons beyond pay and hours. You’ll want to write your ad so that you find people that are a good fit.

Good luck, I can’t wait to hear your results!

Get the content guide cheat sheet for more tips on marketing your childcare.

/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 you’ll want to log in there and then look underneath your “Tools” option on the right and then select “Audiences”.

You can create a whole lot of “audiences” from here. This includes:

1. People that visit your website.

Ya, it might be creepy but yes Facebook can track the people that visit your website. You can place a tracking “code” onto your website that will start to build an audience you can market to from within your Facebook Ads Manager. This is so powerful and usually where I see my best conversion rates! You are getting in front of people that are familiar with you, interested in your product, but haven’t joined your email list yet, or maybe just need to be reminded of your service a couple more times before clicking for more info. This is a really great way to get in front of your potential customers.

2. Your email list.

The average person gets 150+ emails a day. While email marketing is absolutely essential in marketing yourself, Facebook advertising provides an awesome complement to this strategy. It gets your information and services in front of the people that are interested in your product but aren’t necessarily opening your emails or reading them all the way through. Tap into this and you’ll see great results!

3. Your LinkedIn list.

Say whaaat? Yes you can export the emails of your LinkedIn Contacts, upload them to Facebook and create ads for those people. It gets your offers and services in front of your best leads from LinkedIn (without paying for LinkedIn ads, which cost way too much in my opinion when you can just do this neat trick.) If your not sure how to export your contact read my article here.

All of these are great Facebook marketing strategies to tap into leads that have already shown in interest in your business and what you can do. Depending on your type of business there are a variety of offers, lead magnets, and ads you can create for specifically for these different groups. It’s especially a great way to get your LinkedIn contacts and website visitors ONTO your email list so you can start creating a deeper relationship with them.

I hope this article helps you in your Facebook marketing! Comment below with any questions you might have!

Get more social media for childcare tips here! 

/by