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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.

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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.

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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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