How to Make Your Nursery’s Marketing Count
When you are investing valuable time in trying to attract new customers, it pays to plan, says Jacqui Burke…
- by Jacqui Burke
Many early years businesses do not have a marketing plan. Some do a bit of marketing, perhaps on rather an ad-hoc basis; others tend to rely purely on word of mouth.
But at a time of increasing competition, with new players such as schools and academies coming into the market, having a good plan becomes increasingly important.
Where to start
A well-thought-through marketing plan will ensure that you spend your time and money on the right sort of marketing activities.
That means it needs to consider the following four questions about your business:
1 | What is your aim?
Your marketing plan should be based on your business objectives. Are you seeking to expand your business, launch new services, transform your business, or just attract a few more customers?
Doing this thinking first will ensure that you don’t waste money, time and effort on inappropriate activity.
2 | Who are you targeting?
It is sensible to identify those people who are most likely to be interested in using your service and target your marketing towards them.
This means investing more in what we call market research and less in the actual marketing activities themselves.
This might mean identifying areas where there are parents with young children living and going to speak to them, and perhaps asking parents you know to pass on a leaflet to other parents they know who are in a similar situation to them.
Tip: Tailoring content to appeal to different target audiences will also make your marketing more effective. This activity is often referred to as market segmentation. Customers can be segmented in various ways. You may wish to use the following criteria:
- funding source: free entitlement funding only, parent fees
- working pattern: full-time employees, part-time but eligible for 30 hours free entitlement, working fewer hours, not working, commuters
- location: walking distance, live in surrounding villages, work nearby, passing through close to your setting.
Think about how you might be able to offer your services more flexibly in order to appeal to different market segments.
3 | What data do you need?
It is important to decide what data you need before you begin to conduct any market research.
The questions about customers you might want to answer include:
- What kind of childcare do they want, eg full day, 30 hours, preschool, after-school club, etc?
- How far are they prepared to travel?
- How much are they prepared to pay?
- What do they think about what’s currently available (spoilt for choice or can’t find what they need)?
- What do they think/know about your setting?
- Do they currently use any other providers of childcare and are they likely to continue to do so in the future?
I often ask early years businesses if they conduct market research and they say that they do, but when asked for more detail they acknowledge that they only research the needs of their existing customers.
This might be helpful if what you are looking for is more of the same types of customers, but if you are considering making a change to your business, such as considering if you should open longer to provide services to working parents, then the parents you need to research are those that you don’t currently have a relationship with.
So how can you make contact with those parents and find out what they need/want?
Surveys can be a very valuable market research tool. To get the most out of them, remember the following points:
- Be clear about what you want to find out and why (so don’t ask questions just for the sake of it)
- Keep it short
- Use simple language and test it first
- Make it easy for people to complete
- Incentivise it
- Demonstrate that you have acted on past results
Survey Monkey is an excellent tool for producing free online surveys.
Social media is a useful medium for conducting market research because it’s free and easy to use, and because people tend to openly share a lot of information about themselves online. You can:
- Observe what parents say about your competitors by viewing comments made on Facebook or other social media sites.
- Follow competitors, customers and prospective customers on Twitter to see what they are talking about/what’s important to them (this can be done discreetly by creating Private Lists).
- Invite people to participate in an online poll or survey about your services by sending it out via social media.
- Offer your Twitter followers or Facebook fans a taster session, discount or special offer on a new service in exchange for helping you to find new customers.
4 | How do you compare?
Market research may involve researching your competitors so that you know how you compare.
This can help you to design your services and position your business so as to be more attractive to parents. You might want to find out:
- How many providers are there in your area?
- Is there an oversupply of places or a shortage?
- How many of them offer what your target customers want?
- Are there new settings opening?
- What do your competitors offer?
- How much do they charge?
- What do parents think of them?
Some tried and tested methods of conducting competitor research include:
Website reviews It shocks me how much information some settings put onto their websites. However, be aware that the information might be out of date.
Ask other people Staff who have worked for your competitors, and prospective customers who come for a look around, who have probably also been to visit your competitors.
Ask them directly There is no harm in approaching your competitors directly in the spirit of sharing some benchmarking information that you will all benefit from.
Mystery shopping Mystery shopping is a very commonly used way of conducting competitor research across a very wide range of sectors. This could be as simple as looking online and trying to find information as if you were a parent, or calling them and asking the sort of questions that a prospective customer might ask. But could also involve visiting for a show around or even taking advantage of a taster session.
