Door Hangers to Promote your Home Daycare

In part one I discussed how I used print ads and mailers to promote my home daycare. These activities where marginal, though the mailers showed much more promise than print ads.

In this section I talk about marketing your home daycare specifically with door hangers. Door hangers are those annoying little flyers that are shaped specifically so that they fit around door handles. You’ve probably had pizza companies or painters etc. put these on your front door and there’s a reason – it works.

They are similar to mailers in that you control the area where the mailers go (i.e. the neighborhood), but due to their odd shape and that they are hung on doors and not just another marketing piece in the mail box, people actually look at them.

The wording/layout on the door hanger is important. First and foremost, you want to show where you are located. You need to have the parent recognize immediately that you are close by. Convenience is a major component in the parent’s decision process to sign up with you home daycare. I think as well, somehow that it feels safer knowing that the child is nearby. I don’t know, can’t really explain it but it seems to be true.

And it terms of the wording it helps a lot to put some urgency into the writing. The best way to do this is to advertise a single vacancy on the door hanger. Don’t just advertise your daycare service, it’s too general. I tried that especially in the beginning when we had a lot of openings and not a lot of references and when all of my slots where open. What we found that really worked was wording like “One Opening for 12-24 Month Old.” It’s odd but I used to get calls from moms all the time that would ask if we still had a vacancy for an opening that I had advertised months before. It meant that they had saved the door hangers… And the fact that they asked that specific question meant that they had some concern or a sense of urgency that they may not be able to get the spot.

In addition, wording like that implies a few things – you have a full roster and that you must be good, maybe a bit of a stretch here but, trustworthy. It also creates the needed oomph for the parents to pick up the phone and call. Urgency and legitimacy… That’s what I found worked best.

Bottom-line the door hangers worked. I highly suggest that you look into this one marketing technique to promote your home daycare. We signed up several kids from this and the costs were minimal at approximately $100 for 2500 to have them printed out. One of the negatives of the door hangers is that you have to have them printed out due to their odd shape and thickness of the paper. We tried a couple of different companies like Kinko’s but they really didn’t have the right equipment. You’ll probably have to go to a traditional printer to get it done.

Last thought, although cheap and effective, door hangers are a pain to distribute. I sent my husband on this chore. He would walk through our neighborhood and hanged these on two hundred or so doors at a time on Saturday’s, taking four to five hours… I even got him to do this one Saturday during the winter – it was twelve degrees out!!! Perhaps you have a trustworthy neighborhood teenager to do this or like me you can engage your slave labor (husband) to get these out.

Stay tuned for part 3 of 4 on Starting a Home Daycare – Marketing

Tania Rauth wrote a book on how to start and run a home daycare. More info at starting a daycare or how to run a daycare