A Child Care Center Marketing Plan

One of the leading factors that will contribute to your success or failure when you start a child care center is marketing. In order to win customers and grow into a larger business with more than one facility or just to maintain your existing group sizes you need a solid marketing strategy in place.

Here is an outline of a child care center business plan to guide you.

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Identifying a Hungry Market

The first step in putting a child care center marketing plan together is to identify your market. This may seem obvious at first but there are many niches or sectors in this industry. These range from infant care, regular child care for preschoolers, after school care, weekend and evening care. The niches vary by the age of the children, location, what time the children are there and also increasingly by the quality and style of care, facilities and educational program.

The most successful operators identify a niche that is not being catered to sufficiently in their local area and they move into and dominate the market. Doing extensive market research for your childcare business and working on differentiating yourself from competitors are the keys here.

Packaging and Pricing Child Care Services

Once you have defined your niche you can then look at clearly defining the services that you offer to meet niche demands and you can look at ways of packaging your services in a way that appears to enhance their value. While still being flexible in what you offer you can put together attractive packages with catchy names such as 'Saturday Koala Club' for example. List what is included with each package and offer discounts for customers signing up for a full package (clients who prepay for every Saturday for three months in advance get 10% discount for example).

It is also important to do research into child care pricing so that you can come up with rates that make your business marketable.

Branding

By now you should have a fair idea about the child care brand that you will be establishing. Give some thought to thinking about how you want the public to perceive your business and note down a company philosophy and the values that you want to project to the community. Then you can meet with a graphic designer and start discussing how to visually represent the brand that you want to create with a logo design.

Child care Center Advertising and Promotion

The next step is to get word out about your new child care center and the services and packages that you offer. Advertising is an important part of any marketing plan and you should look at the many options available and start running some campaigns several months before opening for business.

Networking and Cross Promotions

Advertising is not the only way to go about attracting clients. You should look at ways of cross promoting your services with other local business and network in your local community to meet a wide range of people.

Don't write off working together with competitors to cross promote each other's services respectively. If you get an enquiry and find out that the child in question would be better suited to a program at another daycare then you are doing the parents a favor by letting them know. And if the other daycare center is also referring children that they feel are more suited to what you have to offer then this arrangement is a win win for all involved.

Word of Mouth Marketing

If you serve your existing customers well they will refer friends to you. This kind of 'word of mouth' advertising is free and can be fully exploited by giving your clients every reason to talk about you to their friends. Providing a great service is one thing but there are many other ways to get customers talking about you. Make their interaction with your business so unique, interesting and memorable that they can't wait to bring your center up in a conversation with their friends.

Refining a Sales Process

If your advertising and networking efforts are successful you should start to receive a good number of enquiries from families. At this point you need to have developed an effective sales process right through from making the appointment, the interview session, a tour, some soft selling and then closure of the deal.

Don't Stop Marketing to your Customers

Keep marketing to your existing customers even after they have signed up with your service. There are always additional products and services that you can sell to maximize the revenue that you make off each client.

Many small centers spend too much time focusing on the day-to-day work of running their business and neglect their marketing. To make your child care business a success you need to ensure that you, as the owner, or another trusted staff member can devote a large part of their day towards marketing. This will ultimately help to determine how successful and profitable your business will be.

A Child Care Center Marketing Plan

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Child Care Center Business Plan Template

If you are planning on seeking funding or investors for your daycare startup then a solid child care center business plan will be essential for proving the feasibility of your idea to them. There are also some other compelling reasons why you should take the time to prepare this important blueprint for business success. If you are going into business with a partner, a business plan will allow both of you to make sure that you are thinking along the same lines. And even if you are going it alone and have nobody to impress, a plan offers you a way of getting all your thoughts and research down on paper in one structured report.

A business plan allows you to see if your child care center is viable and helps you to set goals and benchmarks that you can later measure your progress against. Below we offer a child care center business plan template. The ideal way to put together a plan is to look at a few that have been done for other child care centers and then make adjustments to suit your unique situation. It can be an extensive report or something brief that fits onto one page.

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What to Include in a Business Plan for a Child Care Center

1) Executive Summary

This is a summary of your daycare business plan and it should be written after the plan is complete. Detail the contents of your plan and declare some of the conclusions that you have made.

2) Company Mission

Put money aside for a minute and write a little about how you want to fit in with and impact your community in a positive way. Write about the importance of child care in society and your personal philosophies on early childhood development and daycare. What kind of image do your want to project?

3) Table of Contents and Introduction

Introduce the reader to your business plan and let them know what kind of daycare you have in mind. What is the basic concept? What services will you offer? What age groups will you care for?

Set out a contents page so that readers can easily navigate their way through the report.

4) Background

You should include some background on the child care industry to help readers to better understand the present state of the industry and how your business will fit into it. Personal backgrounds of yourself and other key players should also be included to let readers know who you are and what led you to the conclusion that you want to enter this industry. What skills, experience or attributes do you have that make you particularly well suited to setting up and managing a child care center? Attach any supporting documents such as your resume to the business plan as an appendix.

5) Objectives

Summarize your financial goals as well as any expansion plans that you have for the daycare over your first two or three years in business.

6) Startup Requirements and Financing

List out all anticipated startup costs and other hurdles that must be overcome before you open your doors to families. How you propose to finance the new business?

7) Business Structure and Legal Considerations

Will the child care center be a sole proprietorship, a partnership or a corporation? Include details on the daycare licensing process for the state in question as well as other local regulations that must be complied with such as zoning and building safety requirements. What insurance policies will be necessary to protect the business and its owners from property damage or liability claims?

8) Organization

How will your daycare be managed? Your daycare business plan should include information on the ownership structure (if there are other owners involved). Set out a plan for taking on and managing staff including hiring practices, necessary qualifications, wages and other policies. Outline job descriptions for each position and set out a clear hierarchy showing which managers are responsible for which employees.

9) Market Analysis

A good business plan will usually have an analysis of the local market. This is where you can present the findings of any market research that you have undertaken. Your market analysis should include information gained from surveys with prospective daycare clients in the area to find out more about them and about what they are looking for in a daycare service. You can include demographic data about your local market here and attempt to establish some typical customer profiles. Discuss your proposed location and why you think its location is strategically significant.

Look at a variety of niches within daycare such as infant care or after school care and decide on the niches that you will go after with your set up and your marketing. Give details on all local competitors and suggest ways that your daycare could offer unique services that differentiate it from these other market players. Look at their strengths and weaknesses and try to come up with the ideal service for your market that is an improvement on the services that are already available.

10) Marketing Plan

Put forward a marketing plan for gaining new customers. Outline a branding strategy, a pricing strategy and how you will consistently promote your daycare to local families. Try to identify precisely what advertising and marketing methods you would use to get leads and what sales approach you would use to turn prospective families into new clients. Write an online marketing plan discussing a proposed website for the child care center as well as a strategy for bringing targeted traffic to the site.

11) Financial Plan

Lastly, you should include some detailed financial forecasting. Estimate revenues and expenses over a period of two years and set these out in a spreadsheet. Profit or loss can then be projected based on these estimates. Put forward several different scenarios where for example costs are higher than expected or income is slower than expected. Identify the break even point or the point that the business becomes profitable.

A good child care business plan template along the lines of the one that we have outlined above will give you a clear direction of where you want to go, will help you to measure progress along the way and ultimately will help you to reach your personal and financial goals.

Child Care Center Business Plan Template

For more ideas on child care center business plan templates and samples check out Start a Daycare Business. We have reviewed some of the top Daycare Guides that are helping beginners to fast track their way to success in the child care industy.