#55 – How To Find The Best Clients for Your Child Care

This week I wanted to tell you about a strategy I teach that will help you to find the best clients for your child care. It’s called “Map It Out.”This method recently came back to my attention as I saw it produce great results for Kristen, one of the Gold Core Members from my Child Care Success Academy. I teach this strategy in my book, but I don’t see very many people take the time to go through the process, so I wanted to give you some inspiration with an actual case study to show you that it works and it’s worth it!

The underlying principle of “Map It Out” is to gain clarity on where your best customers live in order to find the neighborhoods to better invest your marketing efforts. This will help you to gain even more of, what I call, the A and B clients.

You can map it out in three easy steps – identify your best clients, map out where they live, and then determine the best neighborhoods that provide you with these clients.

1. Identify Your Best Clients

The first step is to print out your roster and identify who your best clients are.  These are the folks that refer other people to you, give you great testimonials, pay on time, and are generally wonderful to work with. These people are your A and B clients and you want to have a clear picture of who they are. Physically print out your roster and highlight all the A and B customers.

2. Geomapping

The next step is to look at the addresses of your best clients on a physical list and map them out. You can either manually put pushpins or markings onto a map, or, even easier, export them into an Excel spreadsheet and use geomapping online to map out the addresses for you.

One very easy site to use that will save you a lot of time is http://batchgeo.com/. You just copy and paste in an Excel spreadsheet and they will create a map for you with pushpins of your client’s locations in just a few seconds.

3. Identify your best neighborhoods

Determine what your best neighborhoods are by where your best clients are clustered. This will give you a better understanding of who your clients are, where they live, what they want, and where they work.

Even if you think you know where people may be coming from already don’t skip this strategy. You may be surprised by the results!

After going through this process my client, Kristen, said to me on a coaching call, “I really thought when I did this it would be a spread across the different neighborhoods but it wasn’t, it was in two core pocket neighborhoods.” So she really pinpointed where her best clients live and work by doing this exercise and now knows exactly how and where to market.

Action Step: So take a little bit of time this week to map it out and gain clarity to determine what your best neighborhoods are. You can then include in your marketing plan to go after the families in those pockets. You can work with homeowner associations, create door hangers, create direct mailing campaigns, and even more.  You can include a great message such as, “Your neighbors are coming to my school and I’d love for you to come too.” Give them an offer and a reason to take action and see even more great clients enroll!

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