(Cover photo by Carlos Magno on Unsplash)
Here at the Will Marlow Agency, we’ve had the opportunity and privilege to help our small local business clients (many of which are child-oriented brands) build their name and digital presence across the country.
We wanted to share knowledge, tips, and tricks we’ve learned over the years in setting up marketing campaigns with child-focused brands and small local businesses hoping this can help you as well.
(1) Poaching keywords is a real thing. Your competitors will target your brand name if they can see value in it. They will target your brand name alongside the industry keywords and in that way try to direct traffic to their site. So people who are searching for your brand can unintentionally end up on your competitors’ websites instead, who are child-oriented brands as well.
(2) Geo-targeting is extraordinarily important in order to avoid self-competing for keywords with other members of your ecosystem. This, of course, applies to you in case you have various subdivisions, shops, centers, or any location-specific representation.
(3) Measuring Bottom of funnel (BOFU) conversion rates and optimizing here is more important than generating a lot of superficial interest (since most franchises focus on vanity metrics, such as the number of likes).
(4) Tap into local holidays or state-wide holidays. Offer discounts or gifts that align with your child-oriented brands and offer. Offer a promotional discount code for all purchases one week before Easter or Christmas, and use the holiday cheer to your advantage.
(5) Targeting parents passively on the platforms they live on is highly valuable for generating brand recognition and new interest. Think whether Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or any other social media platform is your golden ticket. Depending on the children’s age your product is meant for, figure out which parents’ age bracket you are targeting.
(6) Continually updated, seasonally relevant images/videos showing kids having fun/learning are highly important. For example, you wouldn’t promote your products or services with images of children having fun in the snow in the middle of July.
(7) Seasonally appropriate ad messaging is also a key way to convey freshness since many landing pages are not updated with the season. You can keep the landing pages in a more general tone of voice and rich in evergreen content, while your promotional content can be in tune with the current season.
(8) What better way to lure new clients than with a free sample or a free service? Offering a trial visit (free or even low cost) is a highly effective CTA and gets new families in the door.
(9) Ad messaging should focus on benefits parents are critically concerned about and should be highly tailored to the age group depending on your brand or product, e.g., 0-2: milestone development, socialization; 3-5: school readiness, socialization, energy-burning; 6-12: progressive skill growth, certified instructors, confidence building, etc.
(10) Specific knowledge about the local target audience should be mined to identify parents’ pain points and corresponding benefits for their kids. For example, some communities are very concerned about germ/illness prevention measures, while others find any such discussion alienating. This could vary significantly by business location (e.g. Silicon Valley parents were way more concerned about COVID precautions than parents in some other areas of the country).
(11) Budgets should be redistributed monthly (or possibly even more frequently) based on individual product or service availability. Saving spend during low-interest times is a great way to conserve budget for times when there is higher-than-average demand. This should also be applied seasonally–e.g. if your products/services are summer-related, save your money by ceasing campaigns during the colder months.
(12) It is critical to drop users to the landing page most relevant to the ad they saw (this is rarely the home page). It is also important to provide information in a simple-to-navigate format, with a clear, easy-to-find CTA so they can convert on the same page. With every added step (click) potential clients will drop off. If they can’t quickly find what they are looking for, they are bound to leave your website.
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