Marketing Your Childcare Business

Every business knows the value of advertising their business. Only through advertising, can one ensure that your presence is known by those who are interested in your goods or services. For the Child Care business, advertising is no different either. When you start your childcare services, not many people know about you or your services. It is therefore very important to have a marketing plan to advertise your services. A marketing plan does not come as an afterthought, it begins right at the time that you are planning to start a location. You have to ensure that your clients, i.e. parents are willing to come to your location.

Marketing Plan
When you develop a marketing plan, you are essentially putting down ideas on how you will make your services be known in the community. The development of the plan is facilitated by focusing on the 4 P's essential to a Marketing Plan. Start off with a problem description. Indicate with the help of 4 P's your marketing strategy. The 4 P's are Product, Placement, Price and Promotion.

Product
Describe what your product / service is all about. Put down key words and phrases that will best describe your product. "I provide childcare services during the week", "I cater to children from 2 - 5 years", "I am able to offer hot nutritious meals", etc. Order the phrases in order of importance. Once you have sorted them, pick the top 3-4 phrases and key words, and this will be the best decription of your business or product. Use this as the basis of all your marketing efforts. Make sure that you go through another round of analysis by crystallizing all your top 3 ideas into even simpler "catch phrases". Phrases that succinctly describe your business.

Placement
How does your product / service reach the end-client. In this case you describe which neighbourhoods you are serving. Neighbourhoods served by daycare depend on several factors. Some services are offered to parents who are working in the area (office/commercial areas). Other services are offered close to where parents live (communities). The choice of the location plays a major role in marketing your childcare service. Other factors are how does the potential client place you among their available choices. Are you quality focused, does your daycare have a particular philosophy about your services, etc.

Price
What is the price of your service? Did you ensure that your pricing i.e. fees are reasonable? Are your fees similar to the fees charged by your immediate competition, or are they completely off the mark. If you are starting off as a new business you want to make sure to keep the prices reasonable and attract parents to register with an additional rebate. How will you ensure that you will keep you prices reasonable and that the prices cover all your costs.

Promotion
Refers to how you will promote your business, where you will advertise, how you will find your targets (potential parents) to advertise to, how will you communicate with your potential clients, what sales promotions you will offer etc.

Armed with information on the Four P's of marketing, you can start developing the actual advertising campaigns to reach out to your potential clients.

Advertising Campaigns
At the stage of the advertising campaigns you will also determine the budget. Coupled with your available budget, you will develop campaign executions to succeed in the market place. The subject of campaigns and executions is a separate topic that will be discussed in a different post.

For more daycare management tips and strategies, you can visit Parent Relief's How to Start and Manage a Daycare online tutorial.

Free resources at Parent Relief
Free Advertising to Parents - Parent Relief Online Directory
Free Daycare Software - Parent Relief bizAdvantage
Free Tutorial - How to Start and Manage a Daycare online tutorial

To learn more, please visit http://www.parentrelief.com/providers

Article Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Daniel_G.