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.

Child

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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Marketing For Authors

Authors - especially business authors - are often subject matter experts. They are authorities in their fields. As such, they have something of value to contribute, and so, they write. And if they're lucky, their work is published, at which point, having said their piece, they should be comfortable trusting their success entirely to their publisher. Right?

Wrong. As the "maker" of their "product," writers have a tremendous opportunity to "market" themselves, in the very traditional sense of the word....without conflicting, in any way, with the roles of their publisher, their agent, their promoter or their publicist.

Stephen King

In 1960, E. Jerome McCarthy introduced his seminal "4 Ps" approach to marketing. McCarthy divided the marketing process to four areas: product, price, promotion, and placement. Simply put, "product" is what you sell, "price" is how much you charge, "promotion" is how you tell people about your product, and "placement" is how you get your product to market. McCarthy's simplistic approach provides a gentle roadmap for the marketing novice (and the seasoned marketer as well). A better understanding of the "first P" - product - quickly illustrates the author's marketing role in his own success.

On the surface, your "product" is your work: an article, a poem, a book. And in the simplest terms, this is correct. But as an author, your product is much, much more.

Let's assume, for the sake of this article, that you have written a book. Chances are, as you wrote your book, you had an end product in mind. You may have visualized your product by its genre: a novel, a history, a reference manual, whatever. You may have imagined your book as a manuscript, a first edition, or a seasoned bestseller now available in paperback, hardbound, and digital form. You may have even thought of your book as a set of technical specifications (type size, paper quality, cover design, etc.). All of these perspectives would be legitimate as inspiration, and each would provide a different set of guidelines for development.

Now let's further assume that you had set out to write a novel - specifically a horror novel. Being well-read yourself, you were no doubt familiar with other authors. Some of them you may have considered inspiration, some you held in such great contempt that you secretly feared your work would be compared with theirs. Either way, you probably knew, well in advance of typing your first word, who your "competition" would be - from a product standpoint.

But to think of your product as an object - even one of great imagination - would do great disservice to your potential for success, because your product is not as tangible as any of these considerations would suggest.

Let's step outside the "4 Ps" structure, for a moment, to consider another important marketing concept: Brand. Unlike a product, "brand" is completely intangible. It is a perception: a concept that exists in the mind of the consumer. You can't touch it, and you usually can't smell it, but it's definitely there.

If you were to ask a room full of people which automobile manufacturer was synonymous with "safety", a good number of them might say "Volvo." Now, we all know that Volvo manufactures cars, not safety. But in the process of making cars, Volvo has developed a reputation for making "safe" cars, and in the mind of the consumer, "safety" is the Volvo brand.

Brand has amazing power. It taps into rational and emotional aspects of the consumer's decision-making process, and distinguishes one product from another. Consumers who are familiar with a company's brand will draw conclusions about that company's product, even before they have seen the product.

In your case, you probably didn't set out to "make" your brand, either; rather, you probably set out to "make" a horror novel. But in the process of developing your novel, you adopted a style, and this style - whether you know it or not - is about to become your brand.

When you were considering your "competitors" as a writer of horror novels, you doubtless thought of a fellow named Stephen King. King is the master of horror. Horror is the King brand. Any reader familiar with King's work, upon seeing a new cover in the bookstore bearing the King name, immediately knows what to expect from the book.

Yes, brand is powerful. But more importantly, brand lasts! Imagine you were walking through a bookstore 20 years after reading Carrie and Cujo and The Shining­, and you came across a new bedtime story by Stephen King. Would you take it home and read it to your 3-year old?

Here is the great paradox of marketing: "Your brand is not your product, but your product is your brand." Almost no one sets out to "make" a brand. (Well, if you're a brand strategist, that's exactly what you do, but most people "make" thinks like books, or sneakers, or earth-moving equipment.) But in the process of making their "product," they also develop a brand. And in time, the brand becomes more powerful than the product itself, until, eventually, the only thing the consumer knows about you - even before you make your next product - is your brand.

The message for authors is simple: Take control of your marketing; own your product; make your brand.

And write carefully.

Marketing For Authors

This article was adapted from a presentation written by Laura Pasternak, for the 2010 Berrett-Koehler Book Marketing Workshop hosted by ASTD (the American Society of Training and Development). It is one in a trilogy of articles, including "Branding for Authors", "Marketing for Authors" and "Glaring, Glittering, Garish, Gitomer!" - all available online through EzineArticles.com.

Laura Pasternak is Principal and Chief Brand Strategist at MarketPoint, LLC, a brand management firm that helps businesses improve results by identifying, integrating and managing customer-driven brand equities and strategies. Visit http://www.yourmarketpoint.com or call 1.866.21POINT toll-free to learn more.