The parents you’re trying to reach with your child care marketing spend a lot of time on social media, including Facebook. You can take advantage of this with Facebook ads targeting moms and dads likely to be interested in enrolling their families in your center. To start using targeted Facebook ads in your social media marketing, you’ll need a business page.
If you already have a business page, check over all the details on your profile to make sure everything is accurate before spending marketing dollars sending people to it. If your center doesn’t have a Facebook business page, it won’t take long to create one using this step-by-step guide.
Just because you can promote something on Facebook, it doesn’t mean you should. Facebook will often let business owners know that an organic post is doing well and say it could do even better if you promote it. Remember that Facebook earns revenue when you promote posts, so they like when you use their paid features.
Before paying to promote anything on Facebook, think about how it will help you meet your marketing goals. Posts about parenting tips and kids’ activities are great for organic engagement and may even lead to clicks to your website. However, they probably won’t drive enrollment, so they aren’t worth spending money on. Instead, focus on paying for posts designed specifically to encourage parents to submit their email address, call your center or schedule a tour online.
Facebook offers a lot of different types of ads. Think about what types will best help your center reach its goals. When implemented strategically, you’ll probably find image, video, lead generation or event response ads most effective.
Regardless of the type of ad you choose (you may want to choose a few and do some testing to determine what works best for your child care business), you’ll need to choose specific Facebook ad targeting that matches your target audience.
Facebook Ad Targeting Options
Facebook offers three types of targeting: Core Audiences, Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences.
Core Audiences
This type of Facebook targeting lets you “select your audience manually based on characteristics like age and location.” Choosing the exact location you want your ads to show helps you target parents who live and work near your center. Another powerful targeting tool is the ability to show your daycare ads to parents with kids of a certain age. When you have openings in your infant program, show ads to expectant parents. To fill your summer programs, consider targeting ads to moms with young school-aged kids.
Using this targeting option gives you lots of flexibility, but it can also take a lot of work to fine tune your audience. To let Facebook do more of the heavy lifting when it comes to targeting, you may want to choose Custom Audiences or Lookalike Audiences.
Custom Audiences
Custom Audiences work by allowing you to “upload your contact list to connect with your customers on Facebook.” This is not the most effective way to target potential child care clients on Facebook, because it’s designed to encourage repeat purchases using past customers’ phone number or email address.
Lookalike Audiences
With Lookalike Audiences, Facebook “[uses] your customer information to find people similar to them on Facebook.” When you upload a list of your current or past families to Facebook, it takes common characteristics from those individuals and uses them to show your ads to similar people. If you have a robust list of customers and many of them are on Facebook, this can be a great way to target your audience on Facebook.
Regardless of the Facebook ad targeting that works best for your business, don’t use an audience that’s too targeted. A very specific audience won’t have enough people in it to deliver an impact for your child care center.
