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Should You Create A Landing Page For Your Facebook Ad?

Something to consider when marketing your childcare business on Facebook is WHERE you are sending new potential customers to. If you just send them to your child care website then you probably aren’t capturing their information. Why do you want to capture their information? Studies show that you need to have at least 7 connection points with a potential customer before doing business. This is ESPECIALLY true in child care, an industry heavily based on trust, with a lot of time and consideration put into the decision making process. If you capture their email and telephone number, you then have endless opportunities to follow up with them and create a RELATIONSHIP with them via email, text, a follow up call, etc.

A landing page is a spot where the potential customer can sign up for more information/events/giveaways, coupons etc. This is the key way to collect important data and contact information from your potential customer. Landing pages are a great way to utilize Facebook ads to capture the information of families in your area.

First, its important to understand that a landing page is a standalone web page distant from your main website that has been designed for a single objective. The main reason for this is so not to distract your visitor from the intended goal, such as joining your email list. You can use websites such as www.leadpages.net to aid you in creating beautifully designed landing pages. They have tutorials and templates which make the whole process easy to handle.

The main type of landing page for a child care center to focus on is Lead Generation. A Lead Generation landing page is used to capture visitor data such as name, email address and telephone number. A lead page will have a form to enter details and a description on what the visitor will gain in return for submitting personal data. For example, you could be offering a coupon if they book a tour of you childcare center and for a visitor to be able to book an appointment they would need to hand over their contact details.

Below are some tips to get the most out of your landing page to drive your business…

1. The best way to get your visitors to sign up is to keep the data required to the bear minimum, people don’t like giving over personal details at the best of times so keep it as streamlined as possible.

2. Make your call to action (CTA) big and prominent and above the fold (able for people to see without scrolling down too much) so viewers can’t miss it.

3. A landing page should have a single purpose and thus have only one single focused message!

4. Make sure you show your service or product being used in context, pictures of cute kids works well. Imagery is key here.

5. Use testimonials if you have them. Viewers are more likely to sign up if they read positive feedback on the service you are offering!

6. Experiment with A/B testing, testing different imagery or copy and letting your viewers decide.

7. Make sure you include contact details and social media links so viewers can read up on your childcare services, you’ll look more trustworthy and viewers are more likely to sign up!

That is all for now, I hope this information helps and guides you to creating a successful landing page to further your childcare business and get the most out of your social media ads!

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

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8 Top Tips On Using Video In Your Social Media

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Ever thought about creating video ads to drive traffic, sales and awareness? Or just not sure if your video ads are ticking all the boxes? I’ve noted some helpful hints and tips to help you get on your way and start converting those viewers to successful new enrollments at your child care.

Videos get three times as much engagement than any other content but unfortunately it’s largely underutilized. Facebook has reported that video posts per person has increased 75% globally and 94% in the U.S. Now you see how video is becoming more and more important, use the steps below to create awesome video ads to drive traffic to your childcare business today.

1. Think About The First 3 Seconds

Have you ever noticed that videos on desktop and mobile news feeds play automatic when you’re scrolling through? So you probably have around 3 seconds to grab that viewers attention before they scroll on past. You need to get your viewers invested immediately with engaging content, minimal text and optional background music.

2. Offer It Up

Don’t do an advertisement unless you have a compelling offer for your call to action. End the video with a call to action….maybe a coupon with a discount or even an invitation to an an event like a family fun day or open house at the end of the video.

3. Get Personal

Videos are a great platform to show off your personality. If you record yourself, speak directly at the camera and make the viewer feel like your connecting with them. Make sure you sound excited about your business and show off what you have to get people to convert. Never forget that people make connections with people not businesses.

4. Captions Galore

Be sure to add captions to your video so they can still be watched and understood with the sound off.

5. Curiosity Got The Headline

Make sure your headline is eye grabbing and compelling, you want your viewers to be instantly interested. It’s also a great idea to start doing some split testing here, change your headlines and see what’s getting the most attention and conversion.

6. Don’t Forget The Text

Adding text to a video is an awesome way to help the viewer get the information without watching the whole video. Use iMovie or Movie Maker to do this and only state important points.

7. Be Descriptive Please

Make sure your description is detailed and informative, say what you need to say to support your video content.

8. Always Analyze

Facebook provides deep insights and allows you to understand your audience like never before. Having this knowledge will prepare you to deliver content attracting more of that audience. Metrics to note are: your demographics, avg view duration, 10 second views, sound on, sound off, and clicked annotations.

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

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

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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?

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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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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.

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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.

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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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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 of the screen you’ll see a tab that says “Posts”.

Click on this and you will be shown a screen that looks like the one above. This gives you a graph of when, on average, your fan base is online. In this example, the largest amount of our fan base is online around 6pm. I definitely notice an increase in engagement if I post closer to this time than at say 6am.

Check out your Facebook Insights and experiment with different posting times and see what gives you the best results.

Want more tips on using Facebook for marketing your childcare? Get the content guide cheat sheet here.

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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.

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