Marketing your childcare business

Marketing is critical to all types of business, as it helps you better understand and anticipate your customer needs. It gives you the right tools to quickly adapt to a changing market and ensures your childcare business competes successfully.

Early years and childcare providers are a unique type of business organisation, as you are marketing yourselves to parents and carers to offer to look after and educate their children.

You should involve families in your business and marketing planning, so the service you develop meets their requirements, as much as possible. This means that you need to think carefully about the messages you want to give to both parents and children about your provision, and what you can offer.

Marketing is about more than flyers and posters. It is about being aware of what you want your business to achieve, how you want it to be viewed by others and how you communicate your message. 

A good overall marketing strategy for a business, needs to explore 3 areas:

1. Your market – who are your customers and who do you want to attract in the future?
2. Your messages – what information do you need to get across and what impression are you trying to create? What is your Unique Selling Point (USP)?
3. Your methods – what activities will ensure that the right message reaches your target market? Do you utilise a variety of methods including social media, local advertising and community engagement?

Tax-free childcare is available to around 2 million households to help with the cost of childcare, enabling more parents to go out to work and provide greater security for their families.

Information for parents and providers is available from Childcare Choices.

Providers can use the Childcare Choices partner information toolkit for resources to help communicate details of this scheme to parents.