Start a Day Care - Secret Marketing Tool

Marketing your new service is an ongoing and vital concern when opening a day care. A well publicized Open Day is the secret, highly effective marketing event that anyone starting a day care can organize. I speak from personal experience having held just such an event when opening my day care and the business that resulted from that one day was phenomenal.

This magical 'Open Day' can be organized just before or, shortly after, you open a day care. The purpose of the event is to allow prospective clients to come and view your facility, ask questions and generally discover your amazing day care service. I deliberately organized a fantabulous event so will detail exactly what my Open Day entailed thus giving you some ideas for when you start a day care.

- Prior to the event, I contacted my local radio station and arranged to run some advertising for a couple of weeks. I arranged to have the ads run during drive time when I knew my potential clients would be traveling to and from work.

- As part of the deal the station provided their fleet of novelty cars to attend the event with staff on hand to give out freebie promotional materials. That really provided the X factor!

- I had promotional flyers printed and paid a few kids to distribute them locally.

My intention was to entice people in by providing a fun, family day out and to that end I arranged;

- A bouncy castle.

- Face painting.

- Story telling.

- Clowns.

- Snacks for everyone.

- Local politician to do the official opening ceremony (so all the local newspapers came to take pictures and do a feature - free!).

I opened my day care for tours so people could see first hand what I had to offer;

- The day care is on show so excellent presentation is vital. Every playroom was laid out to best showcase the space and equipment.

- Staff were positioned in all the rooms ready to talk, answer questions and hand out business cards.

-I personally floated around, greeted people and addressed queries.

- We also arranged a raffle and asked people to provide their contact details (nice little database thank you) with the prize being a voucher for the day care.

It was a great day and I still get business from people who attended, saw an advert or simply heard about it on the radio. Word of mouth advertising resulting from this event was also phenomenal. A well organized, properly planned open day will be fun and memorable and people will talk about it. Many of my clients heard about me from friends or relatives who had attended and left impressed with my day care. So, when opening a day care put your events hat on and utilize the best day care marketing tool out there.