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How Do You Get Child Care Leads From A Blog?

Do you have a blog for your child care business? Even though most child care centers don’t, setting aside time to consistently create valuable content will set you apart from the competition and give you a ton of opportunities to communicate with potential families, drive traffic to your website, and get leads!

How do you get leads from a blog? With my own clients I’ll craft content with lead generation in mind. If you’re posting your blog on social media (which you should!) think about what would make someone that is actually searching for child care to click over. Sure, a craft how-to post or recipe is great from time to time, but is it enticing for leads searching for child care? More appropriate for this goal would be a child care search checklist, what makes a child care safe, a post on what makes your educational style different than other child care centers, “How To Tell If (insert your child care name) Is Right For Your Child”, an interview with the owner, “The Ultimate Resource For Transitioning Into Child Care” etc.

So now you have a topic, the blog is written, then what? Post the blog on Facebook, then create an ad with the post targeting families with children ages 0-5 (or whatever is appropriate for parents of the blog post you are writing and the age group you want to fill at the center). You will need to do this in Ads Manager, but this will give you the opportunity to show your Facebook post to your prime target market (while also getting your page more likes as an added benefit).

I’ve been sending my clients hundreds of website visits per blog post doing this. But what about the leads? Sure, I send them a click, but then what?

Make sure to end every blog with your phone number and/or a button to your inquiry form. Here’s an example of what I end every blog post with:

Does this sound like it might be a perfect place for your child to thrive? Give us a call at [preferably a tracking number so you can measure success] to book a tour and come see for yourself what a [your school] education is like!

Or for more info about our programs click the button below and we’ll send you an email!

Then we’ll end the blog with a button like this, sending people to the online inquiry form:

That way you are leveraging your blog posts into a lead generation machine!

The next step is to create Facebook ads to people that have visited your blog post (this is called REMARKETING) but that is a whole other article! For now, think about how you can leverage your blog for lead generation. Stay tuned for future tips on how to write a good blog!

Never Be Stumped About What To Post On Social Media Again…Click To Get The Social Media Content Cheat Sheet, Just For Child Care Centers

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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.

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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! 

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