In today’s competitive child care market, parents are bombarded with options yet trust traditional advertising far less when choosing who will care for their child. Thus, social proof – such as authentic reviews on platforms like Google, Yelp, Facebook, and the Better Business Bureau – is a great way to supplement traditional marketing. 

These real-family testimonials build credibility, improve SEO and AI recommendations, and serve as powerful marketing content for your website, emails, and social channels, ultimately driving more enrollment. 

This guide gives child care directors a complete, practical reviews strategy: choosing the right platforms, claiming and optimizing your profiles, soliciting genuine feedback, responding professionally, sharing positive reviews, and maintaining momentum. Follow these steps to turn satisfied families into your strongest enrollment asset.

Why should my child care business have a review strategy?

People are inundated with marketing at all hours of the day. Many people don’t trust traditional advertising for decisions much smaller than whom to trust with their child’s safety and development. But social proof can go a long way: People have evaluated you from a comprehensive standpoint. They have interacted with you over a long period of time and therefore a wide variety of circumstances. 

You can also use reviews to advertise your business. You can leverage them for various distribution channels, such as email marketing, direct mail, lead generation content, and more. You can consider using either the collective star rating, or excerpts from specific reviews for a more qualitative approach. 

Reviews also help with your search engine optimization and AI referrals (SEO and AEO). Many search engines and AI chatbots like ChatGPT use reviews to help verify the legitimacy of your business and recommend your content or page depending on the context. Having relevant reviews from real people helps feed these algorithms and surface your brand to more relevant people more often.

1. Determine where you want reviews

There are a handful of different review platforms that you can collect business reviews on, ranging from Google to social media pages to dedicated review hubs. Ultimately, you’ll want to evaluate which platforms will be most popular, recognizable and trusted to your target audience. Determine your ideal customer profile – which effectively means determining overarching shared attributes of your highest value customers – and which platforms are most recognizable, accessible, and trustworthy to them. Some of the most popular platforms for submitting and displaying business reviews include:

• Google

• Better Business Bureau

• Yelp

• Facebook

• Capterra

If you have an app associated with your business – such as a whitelabelled Playground login for families and staff – you also may want to consider pushing reviews to the respective app stores. Also, consider that it may be worthwhile to diversify platforms.

2. Claim your profiles

The next step will be to claim the profiles for your review platforms of choice. Most platforms allow a representative from the company to vouch for and manage the page (more on management/maintenance below). This will look slightly different for each platform, but generally you will want to search for your company’s page (or add it if it isn’t preexisting) and there will be a button or option to “claim” the page if you are the owner. You may need to fulfill some email verification or other security items to gain control of the profile. 

Once you control the profile, you can generally adjust copy, images, categories, and other information for your business. It’s best to optimize these custom options for SEO by including relevant keywords, engaging images, and otherwise useful information to people who may be researching your business.

3. Solicit reviews

If you’ve been operating your child care business for some time now, you probably have a plethora of past and current customer families that you can leverage for reviews. If you have a customer relationship manager (CRM) or comprehensive child care management software platform like Playground, you likely already have the contact information and capability to draft, email and/or text message your audience. If you don’t have a built in AI tool in your CRM, you can still use tools like ChatGPT to help you draft messaging for your reviews. 

A sample email might read:

“Hi [Name],

We’d love to hear your feedback about [Center Name]. Families like you help other parents make confident decisions. It would mean a lot if you could leave a quick review when you have a moment.”

Make sure to include a link to the review platform in this message or other relevant instructions. In general, you want to keep things brief, to the point, positively framed, and easy to navigate to improve your response rate.

However, this isn’t the only route to soliciting reviews. You can ask families in person, send out direct mailers, post a sign with a QR code in your lobby, post on social media and beyond. Keep in mind, if you have any past or current customers whom you are not on favorable terms with, you’ll want to use discretion when soliciting reviews in bulk. 

4. Responding to reviews

When reviews start coming in, it’s a good idea to monitor them. You want to keep your finger on the pulse of feedback so you can lean into what people like and correct what people may not like. Similarly, you want to be able to flag any illegitimate reviews, which the platform in question may then remove on your behalf depending on their policies.

It’s generally considered best practices to respond to reviews, whether good or bad. This can show onlookers that you are active, attentive, and responsive. It can also help assuage any hesitation they may have if a bad review does come in.

5. Share reviews

It’s good marketing practice to leverage positive reviews as much as possible. If you have a high score on a platform, consider highlighting that on your website, in your email signoff, on your social media, and any other marketing channel you may use. You can also take excerpts of people’s reviews to highlight as appropriate. This is a great way to build social proof and trust with both existing customers and prospects. If you are going to use a customer’s identity when sharing reviews, be sure to get explicit permission to do so.

6. Maintain best practices

Once you’ve got a process established that works for you, you can build an ongoing system to continuously solicit new reviews from newer customers. This will help keep your review pages fresh for prospective customers doing research and will benefit SEO and AEO efforts. It will also help you build a robust rating score, which will help protect you from the potential impact of an occasional negative review. If you have a CRM – such as that offered by Playground – you can set up automatic solicitations where you don’t have to think about the process. To learn more about automating this process, you can book a free demo, or check out Playground reviews yourself.