Daycare & Childcare Digital Marketing
From a parent’s first search to their next school tour.
Paid media, conversion, and measurement connected to the way your business actually grows.
Metrics selected around your business model, not a generic reporting template.
Google
Meta
Bing
LinkedInDaycare & childcare marketing consulting
- Who is it for?
- Daycare and childcare operators looking to generate local enrollment inquiries.
- What does it cover?
- Location-focused paid media, tour inquiry journeys, follow-up alignment, and enrollment measurement.
- Who will I work with?
- Bradley Zeller leads the strategy and hands-on work. Meet your consultant ↗
- How do we start?
- Share your business, your current channels, and the challenge you want to solve. Talk with Bradley ↗
From the first move
to the next decision.
Each part of the journey gives the next one something useful to work with.
Help parents find the program
Make the location and fit clear
Create an easy tour inquiry
Connect the inquiry to enrollment
The approach, in detail.
Daycare Marketing Consulting
Paid Search, Paid Social, and hyper-targeted CTV built around the metric that actually matters: enrollments — not leads, not form fills, not vanity clicks.
Most agencies running ads for daycares and early learning centers report on leads. I report on enrollments — because that's the only number that pays your bills.
I build and rebuild lead generation systems that go beyond form fills — connecting ad data to CRM data so we can optimize for what really matters: qualified opportunities and closed deals.
Let’s Be Honest — Most “Lead Gen” Campaigns Stop at the Form Fill
Childcare has a funnel most marketers don't understand: Lead → Tour Booked → Tour Attended → Enrollment. A cheap lead that never books a tour is worthless. An expensive lead that walks in the door, tours, and enrolls is the whole business.
If your current agency (or your last one) can't tell you where your budget is breaking down inside that funnel, they're optimizing for the wrong thing — and you're paying for it.
Lead
Tour Scheduled
Tour Attended
Enrolled
Use a full funnel approach for digital marketing
This is our approach for daycare business media buying
Paid Search
Google Ads structured the way a multi-touchpoint enrollment funnel actually behaves — brand defense, non-brand prospecting, and competitor conquesting run as distinct campaigns, not a single blended budget. For multi-location brands, that means building around geography (urban vs. suburban, market by market) instead of a generic "new school vs. existing school" split that stops making sense as you grow.
Paid Social
Meta prospecting for childcare lives or dies on creative, not budget. Cold audiences don't book tours off a generic ad — they book tours off creative that speaks to the actual decision a parent is making. I build and test creative concepts systematically, and I structure remarketing separately from prospecting so warm, engaged parents aren't competing for the same budget as cold audience tests.
CTV
Connected TV done right for a local or regional childcare brand isn't a national streaming buy — it's household-level targeting into the ZIP codes and markets you actually serve, layered on top of Search and Social rather than run in isolation. It's a brand-familiarity play with a clear job: put your center in front of households before they start Googling "daycare near me," so when they do, they already recognize your name.
Who is this for
Single-location daycares and preschools trying to fill seats without wasting spend on a "spray and pray" agency setup
Multi-location childcare brands managing several markets under one budget, where geography-based structure matters
Specialty early learning programs that need messaging built around what makes them different — not generic daycare ad copy
The Problem With How Most Agencies Run Childcare Marketing
- They report on the wrong number.Cost-per-lead looks great when the leads never book a tour. A blended CPA across every platform hides which channel is actually filling your pipeline.
- They don't structure campaigns around locations.A single-location daycare and a five-location regional brand need completely different Google and Meta structures. Bolt-on "one campaign fits all" setups waste spend on markets that don't need it and starve the ones that do.
- They treat Meta and Google the same way.They're not. Search captures parents actively looking for careright now— that's usually your most efficient channel by a wide margin. Social has to earn cold attention first, which means creative quality (not just budget) determines whether it ever converts to a tour.
- They ignore the enrollment lag.Childcare has a long, slow-moving consideration window between first lead and enrolled student — often measured in months, not days. Agencies that only look at last-30-day numbers miss what's actually building (or breaking) in your pipeline.
- They call it a "test" forever.New channels like Connected TV get spun up and never properly evaluated against the metric that matters, because nobody set the funnel up to measure past the click.
Your Leads Are Talking. Let’s Find Out What They’re Saying.
Ready to stop paying for leads that never walk in the door? Get in touch or see how I approach lead generation more broadly across industries.
