Promote your Home Daycare with a Car Sign

What I’m referring to here is those signs you see all the time on the sides of cars or trucks. A lot of small business such as construction companies, landscapers etc use them. I used a magnetic sign. You could also have sign stenciled onto your car for a little bit more money, but regardless, this was one of my best marketing tools to promote my home daycare. For $40 we got years of advertisements out of this simple sign and signed up several kids. Parents would mention the car sign all the time and that recognition made them feel good about my home daycare.

Think about it. Every time you go to the store, every time you go to diner, every time you leave the house you are advertizing your business in the exact community you want to be recognized. Parents see your name constantly and over time it builds a lot of awareness and trust.

It terms of the sign it was very simple, yet professional in appearance. The sign said our name, city and phone number. My name was “Daycare By Tania” so people automatically knew what I did. And by the way, I highly suggest you create a simple, short name with daycare or child care in it. I’ve heard a lot of people use long confusing names like “Julie’s Cuddle Bear Factory” or something similar and it creates confusion and takes up a lot of text on advertisements.

In addition, you can get really creative and maybe a little aggressive with it. For example, about two years into our daycare we suddenly lost half our enrollment, which was a little nerve wracking to say the least. (For complete random reasons too). We needed to bring our enrollment back up fast. We keep thinking about what the best way was to get the phone to ring. How were we going to reach as many parents in our community immediately – the car sign was the trick.

Our local elementary school has a single entrance and a single exit. During drop-offs and pickups all of the parents have to exit the school by using one single location. They have no other way to leave the school other than the one exit. So we put our brains to work and decided to just park our car (with the car sign on it) across the street from the exit so the sign was as clear as day. The parents pulling out of the parking lot couldn’t help but see the sign. The first time we did this the phone rang within minutes! To this day I laugh at how simple yet effective this was.

Parking the car in front of the exit worked on several levels. First of all moms would call right then and there as they were pulling out. Secondly, it built that name awareness in the exact community we got 99% of our kids. This is a no brainer for you to do. Go to your local sign store to get this done.

Had I wanted to take this to the next level I could have put on the side of the car something like “current vacancy for 12-24 month old” and that would have really caught their attention. It would have let them know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I parked the car there on purpose. And it would have built that urgency and legitimacy I’ve mentioned.

Stay tuned for part 4 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