The industry has been around for more than 100+ years and is constantly growing. Qualified nannying leads are not easy to find for the same reason as more individuals decide to bet on joining them.
This blog post is for anyone who sees the potential in starting a childcare agency or if you are a manager and want to learn how to grow it in comparison with your competitors.
Babysitting can be a very lucrative business. Attracting quality leads is the hard part. There are many ways you can spread the word about nannying services and increase your chances of securing new clients. But, among all the options, which ones work better¿
You may feel the need to find new ways to help your nanny business thrive despite all the changes around you, and you probably feel like it is necessary to cover all possibilities.
This thought can lead you to big mistakes as you don’t need all strategies, not even what your competitors are doing all the time.
To keep your business running at its best, move faster to the most current lead generation strategies. Also, make sure to measure their efficiency based on your results, not others’ results.
It is good to know what competitors do, but it can be hard to make their strategies work even after adjusting them. Thus, work around your business and services.
Below, you will find a list that compromises the key ones, but they will need adjustments based on the lead gen plan you set.
Referrals and Word of Mouth
Word of mouth is a tangible marketing tool, especially for nannying services, as people will trust you based on what their family or close friends recommend.
Ask your clients if they would be willing to recommend your services to others. Young parents often know many people who have children of the same age as their children.
Your clients should be happy to recommend you to their friends and family if you do a great job. It’s also possible to ask your family and friends to help spread the word about your services at local kindergartens and schools.
Parents with infants are likely to be part of playgroups or have connections with other parents from the daycare. This is a great way to be referred to babysit other children in your age group.
It is easy to create business cards and give them to parents for a low cost. This can help you get more work and ensure they always have your contact info at hand.
A business card with your contact information and phone number doesn’t need to be too complicated; just make sure it has the essentials. If possible, ask families that you babysit to put your business card on the community boards of any daycares or schools they frequent.
Canvas allows you to make a business card in minutes, and you can then outsource the project when your business grows, and you have the budget for a designer.
Post-Ads Online
People use various websites to sell and buy things online, such as Craigslist, Kijiji, or Gumtree. You are likely familiar with the most popular classifieds site in your area.
These sites allow you to sell used products and offer a section for services where you can free advertise your babysitting services.
It sounds odd, but it can work as local offers are what truly matter and how you filter them.
You can post it, and you can make sure that only a few people will be able to respond. It’s best to have a parent help you create your online ad and answer any questions beforehand, so people contact you for specific queries.
In addition, it is an excellent idea to meet strangers about babysitting in public places for the first time you meet. This will allow you to get to know them better and ensure that everything goes smoothly.
Most families will require some form of interview or at least a meeting before they allow you to leave their children alone. Anyone who asks for babysitting work at their house should be suspicious of you after all.
Connect through Facebook
Facebook makes it easier to find nannies than using classified websites. You can meet and communicate with parents who might be interested in hiring you, but both sides should be careful in the process.
Look through the person’s profile to verify that they have children and are as natural as they claim.
You can ask your friends and family their opinions about the person and their children if you have mutual connections.
Facebook Marketplace is a good alternative inside the platform to advertise your services. There are many local parent groups and other opportunities to connect in it, and you can also search for related groups.
Ask your parents if they are members of any private Facebook groups that allow parents to connect with other parents. Be sure to read the rules before you post and make sure that you are allowed to advertise. You could be kicked out or your message deleted.
Create Nannying Flyers
Although we love the online lead generation tools for promoting businesses in this niche, physical promotions can be just as effective.
To promote, create and distribute flyers. To attract parents’ attention, use child-related graphics and words such as “reliable,” trustworthy,” experienced,” and “nurturing” on them.
Distribute flyers at community events. You can also do it at markets hosted by churches and schools.
Flyer creation and distribution take more work than just typing up an advertisement. The payoffs can be worthwhile, especially if other babysitters nearby neglect the “real world” advertising spaces.
Print out some flyers and business cards to hand out to local parents. You can include information such as how long you have been nannying, the places you are willing to travel to, whether you can care for children at your home, and your contact information.
Also, you should include information about any childcare or first aid courses you have attended. Send your flyers and cards to children’s clothing stores, toy shops, day childcare centers, and other places regularly frequented by potential customers.
It is also good to include the areas and ages your services serve. It can consist of streets and subdivisions.
Post the flyers on bulletin boards at grocery stores, libraries, community centers, and toy shops. Anything related to children works.
You should include tear-off tabs with contact information at the bottom of the flyer. Sometimes parents don’t have the time to write down all of the data. This is especially true if they have to shop or are with small children.
It’s more likely that they will follow through if you give them a quick way to tear off a tab with your contact info.
Join a Babysitting Blog & Make Your Website
It is easy to create your website. After all, you don’t have to be a programmer or know how to code.
For starters, make a website with one of the many builders, and then scale it once you start getting results. Make sure you optimize it and include articles and photos about the service.
Include keywords related to your area and babysitting, such as “nannying service,” in your content. Parents may find you more manageable if your articles contain similar keywords.
Your signature line in parenting or family-oriented message boards may also attract potential clients to your site.
You can create an essential website with a Wix or Weebly service. These platforms allow you to easily create a website by simply dragging and dropping information and filling in the rest of the details to make it look great.
Your website should contain all the information you would typically include on a flyer or any other form of advertisement. You should have your city and details about your services as the basics.
Although it will be available to everyone, it is only helpful for parents in your area and surrounding areas to view your babysitting site. By writing articles and pages that include keywords such as “nannies near me,” you can improve your local online visibility.
You can include a blog on this website, or if you find it too hard, you can always join a third-party one.
If you want to be famous, blogging should become your daily routine. Your nanny business blog should have quality content, or the one you take part in should have you providing value.
You can highlight childcare issues and the importance of nannies working with parents, and safety measures that parents should remember while at home.
The Internet offers many lead generation tools for emerging business owners to share their thoughts with large online audiences.
An online community group can be your opportunity to share your thoughts in a skilled manner that will capture the hearts of others. Talk to other parents visiting local blogs about child-related topics and combine it with the blog.
We would always recommend adding the blog to your own website as it helps you with SEO and general optimization. The more articles on your platform, the more accessible search engines like Google will find you and your business easier for prospects.
It would help if you embraced search engine optimization techniques to succeed with your blogs. You can start by posting one post per week.
After you feel comfortable with the process, add another post every week. Or ask a trusted colleague if they are interested in becoming a thought leader.
Use Newspaper Ads
Another place to advertise is the local newspaper. A basic advertisement in it will usually cost ten dollars. Although you can have more extensive or prominently featured ads in the paper, the price will increase quickly if you have more giant advertisements.
Advertising in newspapers can be cost-effective. But, people are reading fewer physical newspapers these days. You will need to look at who your potential clients are and if they would be interested in reading a newspaper.
It is not a good idea to run newspaper ads for your nannying service every week. This will result in spending a lot of money. You might be able to get some attention from parents by placing a few ads around back-to-school time or before the summer holidays.
Many towns and villages have complimentary newspapers that allow for free advertising. Check with local businesses to find out what periodicals or newspapers are available.
An ad can be paid for with your business earnings. Newspaper ads are usually small and do not include graphics or colors unless you have paid for them. You can be creative with the wording and make it sound funny, but you must include all necessary information for parents to reach you.
Establish Your Brand
Start building your brand with all the strategies you choose, and this is crucial to remember as your company needs to be consistent with it, so you build awareness.
While the business name or logo is not essential at this point, you will need the elements that represent your company to the outside world.
A website is often the foremost thing new business owners spend more time on than they should. Don’t expect perfection. Building a business is about adapting and learning as you go.
Online tools can help you build a website if this is something that you’ve never done before, as we mentioned earlier.
Just make sure you add the essentials that will actually include the company’s name and logo mentioned earlier.
Get To Know Your Audience and Make Alliances
It is essential to have a clear understanding of your target market before planning the lead generation strategy for your nanny business.
You should create a report that identifies the number of people who need your services. It will be much easier to execute your business plan once you have established your goals.
A business alliance is the best when starting in the long run as well. You can accomplish a lot in a shorter time, and the results can be very motivating.
A person who runs a business the same way as your nanny one can be your business companion. Consider partnering with shops selling baby products as well as they know many people.
Partner With a Local Daycare
Contact your local daycare to find out if they are willing to refer clients to you under a benefit option.
It’s best to know your daycare provider well or have worked with them before you do this. Otherwise, they may be reluctant to recommend you if they are unfamiliar with you and you cannot rely on them under a good argument.
It might be a good idea to volunteer to help the daycare provider if you’ve never met them and don’t have a way to do so. This will allow you to demonstrate your skills and make them feel confident while learning whether they are reliable or not.
Many daycares do not offer care on weekends or evenings, so that they won’t view your babysitting service as a competition. It might be a recommendation they can make to parents. Many people will ask if they know of anyone they could recommend.
Keep an Eye on the Competitors’ Arena to Be Prepared For Changes
You may face many opponents who will do whatever it takes to make your life difficult. You don’t have to behave the same way. You should approach the situation constructively and not destructively.
You can draw inspiration from your clients’ businesses and present them with different ideas. While clients should have the same goodwill, they should also feel that your nanny business is unique.
Nobody is perfect, and no one can learn from others’ mistakes. Your spirit should reflect the constant improvement you want to make in your business model. Gather feedback from clients and resolve any complaints.
Social Media Is Unique for Your Business
Social media is an essential part of your lead generation process. You can use Instagram and Facebook to recruit and get your job posted. Some agencies use LinkedIn for recruitment as well, and you could connect with them to access their contacts and who they are.
Social media is often criticized for being time-consuming. It does not have to be if you only take the time to build a strategy every week that can cover several days of content.
You can use automation and make it easier for yourself while also achieving the desired goals.
For example, Facebook offers a business management platform where you can schedule posts and set reminders.
Instagram and other platforms don’t have their unique ones, but you can still find more tools, usually for free, that help you with the process.
Social media channels can help you position your agency to a vertical audience. Consistency is the key and why we made sure to recommend a tool to automate the process. You want to provide relevant and exciting information on an ongoing basis.
You can be an expert in any industry by creating more broad-based content. This will make you a voice others will listen to.
Ask industry bloggers to review your business and help you get sales leads. This will give you credibility and help sales-qualified leads to find you.
What social media platforms work best for your company? Twitter and Facebook are great for sharing information in your lead generation campaign.
Pinterest and Instagram can also be a benefit for your business type as you can show what you do as long as you ask parents for consent. They provide instant gratification, after all.
Your Online Community Is Vital
Cyber-partnering with businesses talking to the same target market is another way to generate leads. This involves joining in on the discussions they have on their blogs and forums.
As a community participant, you can join discussions on child-rearing, the best nursery schools, and the best prices for baby food if there’s a mommy blog in your local area.
You can be kicked out of the blog if you are too salesy or if you offer services just once. However, they are still valuable if you know how to approach the process.
Your name and email and your agency name can be enough to secure you a spot as an objective advisor. This will help build trust in your perspective.
Re-post any mentions of your business by writers or other companies. This is a small gesture of appreciation, but it will help you build your reputation as an industry thought leader.
You should respond to the criticisms and problems your customers are bringing up and take comments from those who still don’t know you are a service provider so you can approach their concerns when offering your services indirectly or even directly in some communities.
Every business has issues. Addressing and rectifying these issues in a public forum builds trust and transparency.
Finding parents willing to hire you is the most challenging part of nannying, especially if you are starting since they want to make sure you are someone they can rely on.
Promote your service by showing yourself and letting them know what you do. Set your process and how you nanny their children, so they feel less concerned in the short and long run.
Now, remember you can reach thousands or hundreds of potential clients using Facebook groups and classified ad sites. You can also use sales teams to help you reach out to new clients, perform lead scoring for you, and ensure you have more than one strategy in place.
Do not overlook real-world advertising opportunities such as flyers and business cards. Bulletin boards are a massive way to get noticed by babysitters who tend to focus their efforts online.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Nannying Services
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Nannying Services Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Nannying Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.