Category: Child Care Social Media Marketing

How To Handle Negative Reviews For Your Child Care Business

At times, our child care clients contact us about the best way to handle negative reviews on their Google listing and/or Facebook page. It’s an unfortunate circumstance to be in but we do have some suggestions on the best way to (1) respond to the negative reviews and (2) improve your rating on those sites.

First, it is important to respond to negative reviews in the most professional way possible, even if you feel like the comments are very unfair. It is important to remember that potential new parents will very likely review not just the negative review but also your response to the review. They will not know the details of the situation and won’t be able to decide who was in the right just from this brief review & response snapshot. So my best advice here is to take the high road, thank them for their review and state that you will be using the feedback to improve your child care services for the families you serve. If you get into ugly details, it will not reflect well on your business, even if you are truly in the right. You are being evaluated on how you handle an unhappy parent and the right response is always a professional and courteous response.

Some of our clients have asked how they can get negative parent reviews removed from their Facebook or Google reviews page all together. Unfortunately, I have never seen these attempts succeed because they are very difficult to prove or fight with Google / Facebook as fraudulent or unfair. So instead of wasting time trying to get them removed, it is best to overwhelm those few negative reviews with many more positive reviews.

The ideal scenario is that your parents leave reviews on those sites at a reasonable pace – say a positive review 2 or 3 times per month, every month. Your audiences there will want to see a continuous feed of spaced-out reviews over a good period of time. That will look better than 5 reviews submitted on the same day but then no more for 6 months.

On a future blog post, we will get into specific suggestions on the best way to request those important reviews.

Thank you for reading and we look forward to working with you soon on your child care website.

Install A WordPress Blog On Your Child Care Website

If you haven’t considered what a blog can do for your child care business, this blog post is for you.  One of the main data points the search engines consider when ranking websites in their results is how much traffic a website gets and how long the visitor stays on the website.  Your goal, as a business owner, should be to drive people to your website and get them to stay, clicking through to additional pages on your website.  One way to do that is to create a blog and create blog posts that cover topics that would be of interest to your target audience.  You would want to create those blog posts using keywords, tags, categories, etc. that all utilize your top keyword phrases for your website.

Now that you understand the need for creating and publishing frequent blog posts for your website and how it can greatly benefit your website’s engagement and overall traffic, we can look at how to install one and what it might look like on your website.

Our child care WordPress blog installation service includes the creation of your WordPress blog / database, installation of the files, custom-skinning the blog to match the graphics on your website and designing the format pages for your blogs, categories, etc.

Please checkout one of the child care blogs we created for one of our clients recently.  You will find a main blog page, a categories page, the blog detail page as well as the search bar.  Let us know when you are ready to install one on your website and you can be blogging in under a week.

Get More Google Reviews for your Child Care Business – How to share your Google Maps Profile with Customers

We all know how important it is to have those critical Google reviews in order to attract more inquiries & business, right?  When someone searches for a service in their local area, those local results show up in the Google results and those yellow stars and the # of reviews are front and center.  It is good business practice to encourage as many happy parents / clients as possible for your child care business to periodically request those reviews and provide the link to your page to make it easy for them.  Today, I want to share how to easily retrieve the link you need to assist your child care clients / parents in leaving you reviews on your Google Maps Business Listing.

How to get your Google Maps Profile Link 

Open your Google Chrome browser and login to your Google account (associated with the Google Business Profile for your business.)  Once logged in, search for your business on google.com.  Your business profile will return in the right hand column (on a desktop).  Scroll down until you see the “Get more reviews” button.  In the popup window, you will see the Review link – copy and paste it into a TXT file and save it to your computer.  Or, if you want to ask a client to leave you a review now, you can use the Email or Facebook buttons in this popup window to send the request.

Now that you have your review link, you can share it via social media post or in your newsletters and you definitely want to include it on your website.

Announcing New Service: Facebook Banner Design Templates!

We have listened to our clients – Facebook marketing help is here! 

Our child care clients have asked for easy, affordable ways to boost their Facebook marketing posts.  It can be difficult and time-consuming to create exciting and creative posts yourself for your Facebook posts.  Let us help.

We have started with 20 pre-designed child care Facebook banner templates.  We have created ready-to-go advertisements for your next announcement / promotion.  When you are ready to promote your child care business, consider the new template themes we have created:

  • Summer Camp
  • Enrollment Announcements
  • Enrollment Specials
  • Careers / Jobs
  • Request Parent Testimonials
  • Featured Parent Testimonials
  • Is Your Child Ready for School?
  • Play, Learn Grow

Visit our Child Care Facebook Banner Design page for more details!

How To Encourage Parents To Review Your Child Care Business

One way to set your child care business apart from the rest when prospective parents are searching the web for a business like yours is to have solid online testimonials.  By online testimonials, I don’t mean the type that you manually add to your website via your website’s backend editing system. I am referring to online reviews with your Google Places listing, your Facebook business page, your Yelp business page, etc.  These reviews & ratings, or lack thereof, may up in the search results, alongside your business listing.  If your business needs more online reviews, here are a few tips for encouraging parents to rate you on these important places on the web.

(1) Make It Easy For Them

Save and be ready to share the direct links to your online reviews with parents.  So, instead of sending people to your Facebook business homepage, send them directly to the Reviews section within your Facebook page.  Just navigate to the reviews page and save the URL in the address bar of your browser.  Include this link when you send the request for parents to review you so they don’t have to try to find where to go, increasing the chances they won’t do it.

(2) Get the Timing Right

If a parent shared with you how happy her child was in your summer child care program, don’t wait 6 months later to ask him/her to share their feedback online.  They may not recall the details as well and might not be as willing to submit it if it’s been too long.  It would be best to ask the parent within a day or two of them sharing a positive experience with you to make the request.

(3) Offer an Incentive to Review You Online

If you’re still struggling to get enough parents to submit a review online, consider providing an incentive for those who leave feedback.  You could occasionally run a promotion where you offer a discount or coupon for the first five people who leave a review during a specified period of time.  Or, you could say that everyone who reviews you during a time period is automatically entered to win a prize.  Be creative and get the word out.

Good luck and please contact us to get started on your child care website project!

Custom Facebook Banner Graphics for your Child Care Business

Does your Facebook business for your child care business get you noticed?  Do you think it’s doing an acceptable job of driving more inquiries to your business?  If not, it may be time to upgrade the appearance of it.

There are 2 places where you can, and should, feature attractive images so that when your page comes up in searches, potential new parents can see that you’re a professional operation.  One is the profile graphic (smaller, square-shaped) that would generally feature your logo.  The other is your timeline banner graphic that appears at the very top of your Facebook page and is the focal point when someone first visits your business page.  Instead of having a generic photo here, we can design custom graphics for both that speak to your audience and are consistent, from a design standpoint, with your business.  It is important for your branding to be consistent across all of your marketing channels including your website, your advertisements and your social media outlets.

We can not only create your professional new business website but we can also design these graphics for you as well.  Here are a few examples of what we have done for other clients. Get in touch if you would like to get started!

6 Facebook Post Ideas for your Child Care Business

Aside from posting photos of your cute kids in your classrooms, do you often wonder what you should post on Facebook?  Here are some suggestions for your social media posts in 2018 to get your parents (and potential parents) connected and engaged:

  1. Latest News & Events: What are you planning for 2018?  Special upcoming visitors or field trips?  Planning to add new playground equipment?  Share exciting plans with your parents and potential parents on Facebook!
  2. Share a video: It is so easy with cellphones these days to create high-quality, short videos (1 minute or less) that are easily uploaded to your child care Facebook page.  You could capture special events, lunchtime, outdoor time fun or children engaging in learning activities in the classroom.  Make sure and get permission from parents of any children appearing in the videos beforehand, of course.
  3. Link to your Google and/or Facebook Reviews: Have you been directing people to your Google & Facebook pages for reviews? Excellent!  Thank those parents by responding to their reviews and then share them occasionally on your feed and remind your parents that you love your parent reviews!
  4. Inspirational child-rearing quotes and phrases: Spread positivity and encouragement now and then by referencing inspirational (or funny!) child-related quotes.  Don’t forget to give credit to the author.
  5. Engage your audience: Ask your followers to participate in a Facebook poll or to comment/share their own stories on parenting.  Considering a field trip and can’t decide between two options?  Start a Facebook poll – fun!
  6. Remind people why you’re different: Capitalize on your visibility with your audience and share key benefits you offer that your competitors may not.  Remind people why your business is different through success stories, your specialized curriculum and unique learning opportunities for your children for example.

Good luck and if you’re not already a client, we hope to be doing business with you soon!