11 Proven Strategies to Market Your Daycare Business

Even if your child care business is thriving, the children under your care will eventually age out of your program and leave spots vacant. For long-term sustainability and growth, it’s important to keep your facility at capacity as much as possible. So generating a roster of families who might be interested in your business in the future becomes essential to running a profitable child care business. In turn, a full house helps retain your staff and generate the best outcomes for your business and local families alike. 

Marketing is what helps grow awareness of your child care business to people beyond your current scope. Marketing a child care business can take the form of any activity that captures the attention of new people who might be interested in your services – and then turns them into paying customers enrolled in your daycare.

The success of your marketing strategies will depend on a handful of factors unique to your business, prospective customers, and surrounding circumstances. You’ll want to evaluate what messages and distribution channels resonate most with the people most likely to become your customers, which might take some upfront effort and ongoing experimentation. 

The 11 marketing strategies below are some of the most popular for daycare and child care businesses to grow their customer base. Review each method to evaluate which paths might be good starting points to market your business. 

1. Build a Website

In this day and age, it’s almost essential to have a website. Most families will rely on digital communications and digital real estate to find and contact you. A handful of online companies make it cheap and easy to build and deploy your own website, such as Squarespace or Wix. Such platforms often include intuitive interfaces compete with drag and drop customization, pre-made designs and templates, built-in form submission procedures, and more. 

Assuming you already have a name for your daycare or child care center, you’ll want to purchase a relevant and easy-to-remember domain name to hold the contents of your website. Alternatively, you can hire someone to design and set up a website for you. 

Playground customers can opt for a professional custom-built website with their software package, specifically designed for child care centers to rank via SEO, take in lead information, and schedule tours. Book a demo today to learn more about how Playground can help you with marketing.

2. Learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

You should learn some basic search engine optimization best practices to apply to your website and any content you add to it over time. SEO best practices help Google and other search engines grade your website – applying certain techniques will help you rank more favorably, ultimately leading to more visitors over time. Make sure to include all key information – such as relevant keywords, you business name, and what you do in headings and site descriptions. 

Adding content to your site over time helps Google recognize that you are attending to maintenance. You can think of your website as if it were a garden that needs cultivation. Write and post articles featuring your services and specialties. If you have a specific target market or niche, focus on keywords and topics that people might be searching for. For example, writing an article about the “best montessori daycares in Indianapolis, IN” would help your website rank for those specific geographic and service niches, rather than writing a less specific article.

You can use tools like Moz, SEMRush, or Ahrefs to get a sense for the cadence of searches for specific topics to help you refine your best opportunities. Many of these tools offer some level of free queries and educational resources so you can dip your toes in.

3. AI Referrals, or AEO 

AEO, sometimes also referred to as AIO or GEO, refers to optimizing content for AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Gemini (Google) to refer users to your content or business. Best practices to optimize AI citations share a lot in common with SEO. AEO gives greater preference to credible sites with unique content, so the more specific and consistent you can be with making a splash in your niche area of daycare (whether niched by education style, location, or other defining characteristics). AI programs like ChatGPT allow people to find very specific content much more easily – and gives you a different type of opportunity to surface your brand to prospects looking for direct answers. Consider publishing unique data or comparisons of your business services to competitors.

4. Social media marketing

Organic social media marketing entails posting content to your business’s social media page(s). This can take many forms, but regardless you should consider that your reach will be dependent on your followers and the platform’s native algorithm. Many of your followers might be current customers, so you should consider this when designing or posting content. Similarly, prospective staff members might check out your social media pages during the interview process to get a sense of what it’s like to work at your child care operation. An active social media account will show prospects and customers alike that you are a thriving business with lots of value to offer. 

Besides posting on your account, it might be worthwhile to identify local relevant parent groups on Facebook or other forums. Not only can you post about your services (tastefully), but you can review and participate in conversations that provide context about your target audiences so you can learn to effectively speak to their pain points.

5. Paid advertisements 

A wide variety of media types will serve advertisements on your behalf to custom target audiences. These channels include Google, Instagram, Facebook, X, local television networks, newspapers, magazines, radio stations and more. First you’ll want to determine which channels your target audience prefers to spend their time on, as speaking to the right audience will maximize the value of your advertisement dollars. You can use Facebook’s ad library (i.e., Facebook) to research how peers or competitors might be advertising their services.

6. Content marketing

Content marketing efforts can be paired with several other channels of marketing, including SEO, AEO, website and social media strategies. Content marketing refers to any content you put out – blog articles, videos, resources, narratives, pictures and beyond – ideally providing value for your target audience that directly ties into your value proposition. Think: What problems do they need to solve? What are the gaps in their knowledge preventing them from making the switch to your services? How can you relate to them or engage them? For example, virtual tours, a well-told origin story, or highlights of special enrichment programs can resonate with local families and make you stand out among the competition.

Besides your own social media channels, website and ads, you can submit content to parent magazines to build trust and authority. Even if the publication’s audience extends widely beyond the geography of your target audience, you can hang the feature on your walls and post about it on your website and social media accounts to share with high-intent families. and hang it on your wall and post it on your social media, even if the publication’s audience extends beyond the geographical scope of your target audience.

7. AI Employees Expand Your Customer Service

In addition to using AI to help you gain leverage and efficiency for operations, AI can actually sub in as a preliminary point of contact for prospective families interested in your services. For instance, Camber – Playground’s AI employee for child care centers – can man a phone line 24/7 to answer questions and schedule appointments with busy parents who might be working during regular business hours. You can give yourself a competitive advantage compared to other local businesses by reducing the barriers to entry to getting in contact with you. Similarly, AI chatbots on your website might help save your staff time by reducing the number of repeat questions that need to be answered. 

Check out Camber for yourself by giving it a call and interacting with it as if you were a parent interested in your services.

8. Apply for a Google Business listing

Google Business listings (formerly Google My Business) are a way to get an extra boost in the search results. Have you ever searched for a local business and the results bring you right to a card with pictures, hours, and contact information for the given business? That’s a Google Business listing. It helps bring high-intent searches directly to your business via search results and Google Maps alike. Include as much information as relevant on your Google Business submission, including your website, phone number, a brief description of your services and specialties, enticing photos of your facilities, and anything else relevant. Setting up a Google Business profile may also help encourage customers to leave reviews for your business.

9. Reviews

Third parties vouching for the quality of your child care services can make a world of difference in converting prospective customers into client families. Legitimate reviews can also help improve your SEO or otherwise explicitly market your business. Ask your past and current customers via text, email, mailer, or otherwise to leave you a review. You can send them to Google, Yelp, TrustPilot, or whatever platform you think your audience will care about most. It might be wise to mix up the requests. You can add a QR code so that potential reviewers can easily access the page you want them to review you at. Once you have a high enough rating, you can advertise your “4.7 Star Rating” on other marketing materials.

10. Local Event Organization and Participation 

Because your business is likely highly dependent on the residents of a several-town radius, you may want to consider participating in – or even organizing – in person events where children and target families are involved. For example, an art contest for local young children, a family reading event, or a petting zoo might be great venues or events for connecting with local families and showing off the types of enrichment and development philosophy your business brings to the table. You may also want to consider partnering with relevant local businesses. For instance, consider asking your local Gymboree or child’s clothing store if you can post flyers or brochures for their services, or consider partnering to recommend each other’s services out to local families.

11. Newsletters

Whether people are finding your child care business at in-person events or online, you’ll want to establish systematic methods for collecting their contact information, even if they are not quite ready to make the jump to becoming your customer. You can keep contacts saved and organized in a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The best CRMs for child care will allow you to nurture your relationships with these contacts by sending automated newsletter campaigns or other touch points to stay top of mind. Consider adding high-value content to newsletters that match your value proposition and demonstrate your expertise to help build trust with your prospects. These efforts might double with your SEO blog posts, content marketing, and social media posting. Once you make content, it is fair game to apply that content to more than just one distribution channel.

Playground can help you automate newsletter campaigns and other marketing efforts. Book a free demo today to see how the full suite of child care solutions can help you save time and money.

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, you first need to define the audience you’re trying to reach. It might take some iterations to find where these audiences hang out and how to speak to them effectively, but the more marketing approaches you experiment with, the more likely you are to get back positive data. Once you start seeing trends in the data, you can lean into what works and iterate from there to optimize the value of the time and money you spend on marketing. Keep in mind, some of the strategies require shared resources, so you might be able to double up the impact on some of your efforts.

Want to tackle many of these marketing avenues simply and quickly? Book a demo with Playground to see all the marketing features – in addition to billing, payroll, communications solutions for child care businesses.