Occupancy marketing for early learning groups
Marketing run at centre and room level, aimed at the vacancies that are actually costing you money.
Where the money moves.
Occupancy is the whole story and it is never one number. A group can sit near target across the portfolio while three centres carry empty rooms and a fourth turns families away from the nursery. Demand is local in a way that very little else is, because a parent chooses within a few kilometres of home or along the drive to work, and national brand work will not move a family past a closer centre. So the work is per centre, per room, per suburb, and it begins with agreeing which vacancies are worth filling.
January is the cliff. School starters leave in a block, the oldest room empties, and the year is largely decided by how much of that gap was pre-sold in the previous spring. Subsidy settings change how families use their days, and a shift in guaranteed subsidised hours or the activity test moves booking patterns across a whole portfolio inside a term. Campaigns are planned to land before the vacancy exists rather than after it appears in the occupancy report, which is the difference between filling a room and discounting it.
Families search, read reviews, then book a tour. A centre's Google Business Profile does more selling than any brochure, and a profile with old photos, missing hours and a handful of reviews loses to one three streets away. Directory listings, the national register entry and your rating under the National Quality Standard all sit in that same comparison. The tour is where the decision happens, so everything before it exists to produce a booked tour with a family you can actually enrol, and everything after it exists to turn that tour into a start date.
Reporting runs centre by centre: enquiries, tours booked, tours attended, enrolments, and cost against each. If a centre cannot staff a room, we say so and move the budget rather than spend it building a waitlist you cannot honour. Accounts, profiles, photography and review histories are held at group level in your name, which matters when a centre manager moves on or a site changes hands. The point of the whole exercise is occupancy, and the report should be readable by the person accountable for it.
What we run.
A profile and a page for every centre
Room ages, current vacancies, the educators by name, the funded preschool place, and photographs taken this year. Each centre gets its own page and its own claimed Business Profile, kept accurate rather than published once.
The tour booking as the conversion
A booking form with real available times, an SMS confirmation, a reminder the day before and a follow up when someone does not arrive. Enquiry volume means nothing if a third of tours never happen.
Reviews at centre level
Families are asked at the right moment, usually once a child has settled, and every review receives a reply from the centre. Ratings sit beside your listing in the exact comparison a parent is making.
Suburb radius media
Tight geographic targeting around the centres under target, following the commuter corridor rather than a neat circle. A centre at ninety per cent gets nothing, and the budget goes where the empty places are.
Pre-opening waitlists for new centres
A greenfield site needs enquiry before the fence comes down. Expressions of interest, a site page and local media well ahead of opening mean the first rooms open with children in them.
Questions we get asked.
No. Brand assets, the website, the review system and the tour booking flow are built once for the group, then active media runs only on the centres sitting below target. That keeps spend on the vacancies that cost you money, and it means a centre that fills can be switched off without dismantling anything.
Yes, and it is worth doing properly. Rooms, outdoor areas, resources and educators can be shot without children present, and where a family consents in writing we use it. Real photography of your actual centre outperforms stock, because parents are trying to picture the room their child will be in.
Directly. The rating is public on the national register, so hiding it only makes a parent find it somewhere less favourable. We lead with what has changed since the assessment, the people running the rooms now, and the improvement plan in plain language. Honesty converts better than silence with a parent who has already checked.
Quickly, because it is a targeting and budget change rather than a rebuild. Each centre is a separate campaign with its own geography, creative and reporting line, so a centre that fills is paused and the spend moves to the one that has just lost its school starters.
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