Marketing for nurseries & childcare

The economics that should drive the budget

A full-time place typically runs from around £55 to £90 a day depending on region and age group, which is £12,000 to £20,000 a year. A child joining at nine months and leaving for reception stays three years or more, so the relationship is worth £30,000 to £60,000, and a sibling behind them doubles it. Even a funded fifteen or thirty hour place, at the rate your local authority pays, is worth thousands a year.

Against numbers like that, a cost per enquiry of £20 to £80 and a cost per enrolled child in the low hundreds is almost incidental. Which is why occupancy, not cost per lead, is the metric that should govern the budget.

A nursery running at 78% occupancy and one running at 94% have nearly identical staffing, rent and insurance. The difference between them is the entire margin. Filling four extra places in a sixty-place setting can be the difference between a loss and a reasonable year, and those four places are the only thing marketing needs to deliver. That reframes the whole exercise: you are not running a lead generation campaign, you are managing a waiting list against a known set of vacancies by room, by day, and by age band, several months ahead of when the money arrives.

Seasonality

The dominant cycle is the school year, not the calendar year. Every August a block of children leaves for reception, so September is simultaneously the largest vacancy month and the largest occupancy risk in the year. The enquiries that fill those places are made between January and April, which means a campaign started in July for September places has already missed the market.

There is a second, smaller intake in January, and a third around April. Funded entitlement changes take effect at term boundaries, so search around funding language spikes in the weeks before September, January and April. The practical consequence is that marketing runs roughly six months ahead of revenue: you are advertising in February for money that arrives in September, and the waiting list is the campaign’s real output.

What the buyer is actually checking

The researcher is usually a mother, frequently still pregnant or on maternity leave, and often doing the research months before she needs anything. She is not comparing ten settings. She has two or three that are geographically possible and is deciding between them.

Geography is the hardest filter in this sector and it is unforgiving. The catchment for a nursery is often a mile or less from home, or directly on the commute to work. A setting four miles in the wrong direction is not considered at any price or quality, because the run happens twice a day, every working day, in the rain. This is why national campaigns and wide radii fail here.

Within that radius, the Ofsted rating is checked first and carries enormous weight. Then photographs of the actual rooms and outdoor space. Then, critically, whether you have a place in the right room on the right days, which is a question most nursery websites cannot answer. Then fees and how funded hours are handled. But the decision itself is made during the show-round, on how the room smelled, whether the children looked happy and whether a member of staff knew a child’s name. Marketing’s entire job is to get the right parent through the door and to make sure the visit is booked while she is still interested.

Which channel wins here

Google search and Google Business Profile do the heavy lifting, because parents look deliberately and locally and the map pack takes most of the attention for nursery searches. A profile with current photographs, correct opening hours and recent parent reviews will often out-earn the ad budget outright.

The genuinely important channel in this sector is one you cannot buy. Local parent groups, WhatsApp threads and community Facebook groups drive a very large share of nursery choice, and a recommendation there carries more weight than any advertising. Paid Meta works, but weakly and briefly: the audience is parents of under-fives within about two miles, which in most towns is a few thousand people, and you exhaust it quickly.

Here is the honest limit. A single setting with a mile-and-a-half catchment often does not have enough local search volume to spend meaningfully on Google, and pushing budget past that point buys clicks from parents who will never travel to you. In those cases we would say so, and put the money into the website, the show-round booking process, the Ofsted-facing reputation and review generation, rather than take a monthly fee to manage a campaign that has nowhere to go.