When it comes to filling your centre, it is important to consistently generate tours, build up your waitlist and successfully convert your leads. To generate tours and maximise conversions, your centre will need to have an effective marketing strategy to move your potential families through your sales funnel.
A sales funnel is the journey from your prospect’s first contact with you until they convert. In childcare your prospect would be potential families. This is the process of turning a ‘cold’ or undecided prospect into a ‘hot’ lead that is ready to enrol their child at your centre. A sales funnel is made up of these four key stages:
During this initial stage, you are making your target market aware of your brand and what it has to offer. This may be through Facebook ads, google search, video reviews, driving past your centre or hearing about your centre from a friend. The main goal of this stage is to make your prospects ‘problem aware’ and ‘solution aware.’
Remember, you want to be reaching your target market. This means you need to know who your prospective families are and how to reach them.
Once your prospects have been made aware of your centre, the next aim is to convert the ‘problem’ and ‘solution’ aware prospects into leads. This can be done through re-targeting Facebook or Google ads, email marketing and providing a lead magnet such as a discount, resource, or event (such as an open day).
We find that the open day events we create for our centre’s bring in a lot of potential leads and successfully move prospects through the sales funnel. Prospective families are more willing to click ‘attending’ to an event, send an email or phone than to book a tour straight away.
In these final stages of the funnel, your aim is to convert your warm leads, whether that be a new addition to the waitlist or confirmed starting family. During this stage it is important to have a well-thought-out tour game plan as well as the follow up communication. Getting leads is one thing, nurturing them is another.
Finally, you will want to utilise your enrolled families to spread the word about your centre and provide other prospective families to start their own sales funnel. We encourage google, Facebook, video, and even incentivised word of mouth strategies.
If you need help creating your sales-funnel, get in touch with our team today!
Contact us today and let our team of early years specialists work their magic.
