What do you want to achieve with your marketing efforts? Do you want to increase enrolment, raise awareness, improve retention, or something else? Be specific and realistic about your objectives and how you will measure them.

Who are your ideal families and what are their needs, preferences, and challenges? How can you reach them and communicate with them? What are the benefits of choosing your setting over others? Conduct market research and create buyer personas to understand your audience better.

How much can you afford to spend on marketing? How will you allocate your resources among different channels and activities? What is the expected return on investment (ROI) of each marketing initiative? Track and evaluate your spending and results regularly to optimize your budget.

What are the best ways to reach and engage your audience? You can use a mix of online and offline channels, such as your website, social media, email, flyers, posters, brochures, events (such as open days and nursery tours), referrals, etc. Promote your business by networking with other local childcare providers, schools, libraries, children’s centres and other local business offering support to young families. Developing strong relationships with local health visitors, children centres and your local early years support team is also beneficial. Choose the channels that suit your goals, audience, and budget, and create a content calendar to plan and schedule your posts and campaigns.

How will you execute your marketing plan and deliver your message? What are the key messages and calls to action that you want to convey? How will you differentiate yourself from the competition and showcase your value proposition? Use clear, consistent, and compelling language and visuals to attract and persuade your audience.

A strong brand starts with you having clearly defined values and guiding principles, a purpose for your nursery and distinct long-term goals that you are striving for. Once you have these sorted, you can then start to create you brand identity. This includes your name, your logo, colours typeface/text style, and images that you choose to present your nursery. You will need to consider all the platforms that you will be using such as your website, social media and marketing materials and will need to be consistent with you branding and design across all of these. It is worth ensuring that any colours and font you chose work equally well on phone screens, tablets and computers screen as well as on printed materials. A strong brand is important because it will help you to stand out from you competitors and will, over time, help you to create loyalty and build trust. It can also be helpful to create brand authority which will demonstrate your expertise and knowledge in the early years sector. You can do this by creating informative, relevant blogs for your families, sharing educational resources, and engaging in conversation with your parents and carers.