Your day care marketing plan is a section of your business plan which offers readers with a description of how you will communicate your services to prospects and convert them into real customers, as well as what you will be communicating. A marketing plan includes the 4 Ps (Product / Services, Promotion, Place, and Price) as well as key partnerships and a customer retention plan. Use this outline to provide needed structure to your marketing plan.
1) Product / Services
Give readers a clear and complete understanding of what services your day care center will provide through a short description and a chart or menu of options, if appropriate. Be clear as to what the basic services and what are considered add-ons.
2) Promotion
Spend the most time on the promotion section, which should detail your choice of marketing tactics based on the implicit rule that each must be useful at reaching your customer target market. List each marketing tactic (such as advertising, public relations, direct mail, etc) along with at least a few sentence explanation of how the tactic will be used.
3) Place
"Place" in the marketing plan means how services will be delivered to customers and is not just a description of the location. Include an understanding of how you will sell to parents, whether online, on the phone, through in person appointments, or through a combination of these.
4) Price
It is more important to give an overall explanation of how pricing decisions will be made than to list all of the prices in detail. Individual prices mean little to readers without an understanding of the value to the customer and the prices charged by competitors. Show your understanding of where your pricing will fit in the range of other options parents have in your community.
5) Partnerships
Focus on quality rather than quantity here, describing one or two key partnerships that you will build with existing area businesses or services. Partnerships should only be included if they will lead to significant benefit for your company. To be believable to readers, it must also be clear what kind of significant benefit the parter receives. For example, a viable partnership deal could be offering discounted pricing to a large area business who, in turn, handles the legwork of selling to their employees. The business would have the benefit of being able to say they offer discounted childcare to attract the best employees.
6) Customer Retention
In a perfect world, your customers would only leave when families move away or children age out of day care. Of course, this will not always be the case. Nonetheless, pay attention in this section to what you will do to keep your customers. For example, seek to build customer identification with your day care center through long-term projects and parental involvement. Customers may be uneasy about switching to a new day care provider when they feel personally invested in yours.
Source by PR Kennedy
