How to scale occupancy quickly?

Scaling Up Your Childcare Service’s Occupancy: A Guide to Success with Care for Kids

As the Centre Director of Sentia Early Learning, Angela Hunt understands the challenges and opportunities that come with managing occupancy rates and the need to scale these numbers quickly when required. 

In today's competitive childcare landscape, it's essential to utilise online platforms like Care for Kids effectively to boost your service's visibility and attract more families. Especially when one in every three childcare searches starts on Care for Kids or Toddle. Being able to engage these high-intent parents is critical to capturing the greatest market share in your service’s area. As Angela explains, “This is how families find their way to quality early learning and care nowadays. They do all their searching online.”  

We’ve outlined the strategies Angela implemented with us that have resulted in her being able to trace at least 10% of Sentia’s current occupancy level back to this Care for Kids partnership. With just one enrolment paying for the whole year of marketing, it’s a quick win for childcare owners and operators with a significant return on investment.

Below are the strategies that will help you to also scale up your service’s occupancy effectively.

1. Enhance your online presence to gain meaningful market share:

“I’ve always known that families go to Care for Kids when they’re looking for childcare. It’s something they trust” Angela Hunt, Sentia Early Learning.

As Angela understands, Care for Kids offers service providers, no matter what size their business, the opportunity to reach the greatest volume of high-intent parents, grow their digital footprint and gain meaningful market share.

The extent of the Care for Kids reach enables you to capture parents who may not know your brand or business. Care for Kids offers families convenience; the ability to find and connect with all their childcare options in one place, including those they may not have considered before discovering them on the platform.

Sentia’s Platinum level subscription ensures their listing on Care for Kids is seen by as many parents as possible when looking for care in the area. Reaching this large, engaged audience helped Sentia to scale their occupancy and secure enrolments.

2. Become the centre of attention:

“Our investment in Care for Kids has meant that families can find us more easily. We stand out” Angela Hunt, Sentia Early Learning.

There’s a reason Care for Kids is used by over 3 million parents every year. Our platform and customer experience design is data driven. Being parents ourselves together with dedicated research, we know what families are looking for and our listing pages have been designed with these needs in mind, resulting in high conversion rates for our partners. We’re proud to deliver the most parent leads in Australia to the ECEC sector. 

Care for Kids customers can create compelling and informative listings enhanced by high-quality images and videos, detailed descriptions of your service’s facilities, programs and staff. You can emphasise your unique selling points and leverage the Care for Kids parent and suburb insights to set your service apart. “Care for Kids has the know-how to really help us showcase our centre. With photos and videos; just keeping our content fresh.”, explains Angela. 

Pro Tip:  Our latest research tells us that parents want to know about the following key areas when looking for childcare. Providing this information on your listing, like Sentia does, will more likely result in a parent enquiry, leading to enrolment:

• Communication; how do you communicate with families and how will they get updated on their child’s progress and wellbeing?
• Long-serving team; will their child see familiar faces each day rather than changing carers regularly?
• Support with child development; will your service support families with developmental stages and concerns with milestone targets?
• Information about the daily routine; are your routines consistent and structured or more free flowing?
• Trust and quality; displaying your parent reviews and testimonials on your listing provides assurances for new families. 
• Up to date fee and vacancy information; ensuring your listing is accurate allows families to make an informed decision about your service, leading to tour bookings and enrolment.

3. Partner with a supportive team so you can spend time on your business:

“I’m confident it’s running in the background and that I have a team of professionals looking after everything so that I can focus on really getting to know the families walking through our door and give them the attention they deserve” Angela Hunt, Sentia Early Learning.

Managing and operating a childcare service demands your full attention, and Care for Kids understands this. That's why we offer the right marketing solutions that allow you to focus on what truly matters – supporting the families at your service. 

By relying on Care for Kids as a partner, Angela and her team were able to save time on marketing their service and invest that time back into Sentia’s families and offering to create advocates out of each new enrolment.

With a Care for Kids subscription you can leverage the power of google, social and other digital marketing platforms in one place. Care for Kids is at the forefront of digital marketing to bring you results through one flat rate subscription. 

4. Partner with a team who adds value:

“Care for Kids offers so much. The main thing is just the ‘way-finding’. We need people to find their way to us” Angela Hunt, Sentia Early Learning.

As Sentia Early Learning has experienced, their partnership with Care for Kids is more than just creating an eye-catching listing. Our team is focused on ensuring our partners get the most out of their investment to reach whatever goal they may have; whether that’s scaling occupancy quickly, promoting a new service opening or standing out from competitors. 

Our strong relationship with Newscorp enabled us to feature Sentia Early Learning in a prominent editorial piece with the Sunday Herald Sun, as part of our Thank You Educators campaign. This opportunity gave Sentia valuable exposure to a wide and relevant audience.

By understanding our customers' specific needs we can drive greater exposure to their brands with value-add campaign partnerships, editorial or content opportunities.

5. Partner with an expert team:

“The Care for Kids team has been very responsive to us. My experience is everyone in the team is very good at what they do” Angela Hunt, Sentia Early Learning. 

Care for Kids’ expertise in the sector and knowing what families want when looking for childcare, is what has allowed Sentia Early Learning to achieve their goal of scaling occupancy, with strategies focused on securing enrolments quickly.

Understanding what our customers need to manage their businesses drives our product development. Our dedicated customer portal focuses on helping your service accelerate growth, increase occupancy, decrease management costs, while providing transparency and relevant information at a moment's notice.

Our interactive and customisable reports will allow you to deep dive into your service’s performance and make data-driven decisions to enhance your listing and drive occupancy. Live data and key insights will help to optimise your listing and stay ahead of the competition in your suburb.

By implementing these strategies, and becoming a Care for Kids customer you can effectively scale up your childcare service’s occupancy and see results like Sentia Early Learning have.

If you’d like to have a 10 minute discovery call with one of our dedicated and knowledgeable team members who can suggest a strategy to suit your needs, book a time today.

Watch the video with Angela Hunt, Centre Director, Sentia Early Learning: