What Are Strategic Alliances And Why Are They Important for Your Growing Child Care Center?
Exploring different marketing approaches can sometimes be challenging. Let’s face it; we’re not in the days where soliciting door-to-door is acceptable anymore, especially when advertising for a child care center. How receptive would you be to someone knocking on your door offering to take care of your children? For most, their first thought would probably be to get that person off their property as soon as possible! Unfortunately, today’s expectations and standards limit many in-person marketing strategies similar to this approach. The good news is, there are some places in your area where local families with young children are likely to visit frequently. While you may not be able to approach them at home, forming a strategic alliance with the locations your ideal families frequently go to can be the next best thing.
Why Put Effort Into A Strategic Alliance?
Once you’ve fixed up your website, given it the best chance to rank well on Google, and made the most of your Google Business Profile, a great way to grow your center further and communicate with prospective families effectively is to form strategic alliances. Strategic alliances are partnerships with businesses, organizations, and communities in the area that can mutually benefit their organization and your center. If executed correctly, creating such partnerships can be highly beneficial for your business and the business or organization you are pairing with, allowing both parties to achieve more together than they would have individually.
Forming effective strategic alliances will allow you to reach families that have a higher probability of being a positive match with your center because you, as a business, are identifying and pairing with organizations that appeal to your ideal prospective families. As an early childcare center, you want to be reaching out to businesses or organizations that children or prospective parents would be utilizing such as children’s dance or music centers, pediatric dentists, or parenting groups.
How To Connect With Potential Strategic Alliance Candidates
There are multiple ways to connect with these businesses or others in your center’s community. For example, you can perform a Google search for various businesses in your area, sign up for Google Alerts, join or participate in local parenting Facebook groups, and connect with the Chamber of Commerce, among many others.
So now that you have an idea of what organizations your center would like to develop a partnership with, how do you start and maintain a successful strategic alliance with them?
There are five steps to developing and maintaining a successful strategic alliance.
- INITIATE the conversation. You want to put your center out there but subtly. Remember, this step is about them, not you. Find a way to authentically engage with the leader of the business or organization.
- INTRODUCE yourself and your center. The goal is to set up a quick 15-minute conversation to assess the potential partnership via email, social media messaging, or a letter. Remember, keep the message primarily focused on them. After you complete the email, we suggest making a template and saving it for future correspondence.
- DISCUSS the potential for a strategic partnership with them during a scheduled call. This should be their first live interaction with you, so be prepared by outlining the desired structure of the conversation beforehand. If, after having this conversation, you find your companies will mutually benefit from this alliance, take a minute or two to set up a meeting to collaborate on ideas to boost your businesses.
- PRIORITIZE your strategic alliance options. This is where you will create a spreadsheet or other record to track your results. Using a spreadsheet can provide you with essential insights to prioritize relationships appropriately. Keeping your alliances ranked can help you manage the time and effort you put into each relationship.
- FORTIFY your new alliance. You want to be certain that any beneficial relationship you’ve created is properly maintained. To know if the business has been beneficial, create a system of categories in which to organize your alliances based on factors such as enrollment, inquiries, and tours you have received since aligning with them.
In these uncertain and ever-changing times, marketing your center can be difficult, but only if you let it. If these steps are followed and maintained, we have great confidence that forming these strategic alliances will add a significant boost to your overall marketing efforts.
