Hiring a marketing agency for your child care center, or doing it yourself
What child care marketing should cost, the red flags in a daycare pitch, which work to keep in house, the questions to ask, and why trial-first is fair.
Child care owners get pitched constantly. Enrollment software with a marketing module bolted on, local SEO shops, franchise-adjacent consultants, and a steady rotation of people who found your license record in a public database and now want $2,500 a month.
Some of them are good. Most are selling a plumbing playbook with the word daycare pasted over it. This guide is about telling the difference and about deciding what you should just do yourself.
Do this yourself, always
Some of it should never leave your building.
The review ask. No vendor can hand a parent an art project at pickup and say the sentence. Reviews come from the director. Software can send the text after the ask, but the ask is yours. The reviews guide is a fifteen-minute read and it is the highest return work in this whole niche.
The tour. Nobody sells your center like you do. Pay for tours to arrive, run them yourself.
Photos. Your rooms, your staff, your playground, taken on a phone by someone who works there. An agency's stock library is worse than your iPhone. It also keeps the consent question inside your building, where it belongs, since no identifiable child should appear in marketing without written parental consent on file.
Answering the phone. You can outsource the overflow. You cannot outsource the impression the first thirty seconds makes.
Google profile posts and Q&A. Ten minutes a week. Nobody knows your September openings better than you.
Worth paying for
Google Ads. The account structure, the negative keyword list, the conversion tracking and the weekly search-term pruning are where the money is won or lost, and they are genuinely fiddly. A center running its own ads without negatives will pay for job seekers and dog daycare clicks for months.
The website. Building it once, properly, is worth $1,500 to $5,000. Ongoing site management is worth $75 to $250 a month.
Meta ads. Worth outsourcing if you are spending more than $400 a month. Below that, boost nothing and run one simple lead campaign yourself.
Follow-up automation. Missed-call text-back, tour reminders, waitlist nurture. Set up once by someone competent, then it runs.
What fair pricing looks like
For a single-location center, in 2026 dollars:
- Google Ads management: $300 to $800 a month, plus your ad spend paid directly to Google.
- Meta ads management: $250 to $600 a month, plus spend.
- Local SEO and Google profile management: $250 to $600 a month.
- Website build: $1,500 to $5,000 once, or $75 to $250 a month managed.
- Full stack, everything above: $1,000 to $2,000 a month for one location.
Anything under $300 a month total is an automated tool with a human name on the invoice. Anything over $3,000 a month for one center needs to be justified with enrollment numbers, not impressions.
Compare it against value, not against cost. If your average enrollment is worth $14,000 in lifetime tuition, one extra enrollment a quarter covers most of that list.
Red flags
A twelve-month contract before any results. Common in this industry and indefensible. Month to month after a short setup period is reasonable. A year up front is a financing arrangement, not a service.
They will not name what they do weekly. Ask exactly what happens in a week. If the answer is vague, there is no week.
They own your accounts. Your Google Ads account, your Google Business Profile, your domain, your website, your Meta pixel, and your phone number must be in your name with you as owner. If an agency creates these under their own account, leaving costs you everything you built. This is the single most common way centers get trapped.
Guaranteed enrollments or guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google's ranking and nobody can guarantee a parent will enroll after a tour they did not run. A guarantee is a sign that either the numbers are inflated or the leads are garbage.
Reporting in impressions and reach. You need tour requests, calls over sixty seconds, tours booked, and enrollments. If a report leads with impressions, it is hiding the rest.
Shared or recycled leads. Some lead vendors sell the same parent inquiry to four centers. Ask directly whether leads are exclusive.
No familiarity with the child photo rule. If a pitch includes a mockup with photos of children, ask where those came from. If the answer is a stock library, that is defensible. If they intend to use photos of your enrolled children without asking about consent, walk away.
They have never asked about your capacity. Any competent partner asks how many spots you have open by age group before proposing a budget. Filling a waitlist for a room you cannot staff is a waste of your money, and it is the most common failure in this category.
The questions to ask on the first call
- Who owns the ad account, the website and the domain if we part ways?
- What are you doing in week one, week two, and every week after?
- What do you report, and can I see a sample report from another child care client with the identifying details removed?
- What is your negative keyword approach for a daycare account?
- How do you handle photos of children in creative?
- What happens if we fill and need to pause?
- What is the exit process and how much notice do you need?
If the answers to one, three and five are strong, the rest usually follows.
Doing it yourself, honestly assessed
A determined director can run about seventy percent of this alone. The realistic time cost is four to six hours in the first month and then two to three hours a month. The parts that break down are conversion tracking, ad account hygiene, and consistency in month six when enrollment is fine and nobody feels the urgency.
If you go this route, do it in this order: reviews, then the Google profile, then the website pages, then the phone, then ads. That order is deliberate. Ads pointed at a profile with 6 reviews, which is the national median, and no website, which describes 33.2% of centers, mostly funds your competitor's education.
Why trial-first is the fair structure
An owner should see tour requests arrive before paying anyone. That is why every service here is offered as a free 14-day trial with no card and nothing that renews. Everything gets built in your own accounts, so if you stop after two weeks you keep the account, the pixel, the profile work and the pages.
That is not generosity. It is the only structure that puts the risk on the person making the claims.
Frequently asked
Should I use the marketing add-on in my enrollment software? For parent communication, yes. For acquisition, they are usually thin. Check whether it can actually run ads or just send emails.
Is a franchise's national marketing enough? No. National brand spend does not fill a specific classroom in a specific zip code, and most franchise agreements still expect local marketing from you.
How long before I judge a partner? Sixty days minimum, because a tour-to-enrollment cycle in child care can run forty-five days. Judge them on tours booked in month one and enrollments in month three.
Any single service, free for fourteen days, no card: free trial. Text or call (385) 832-6175. Before you talk to anyone, read the benchmark report and the FAQ so you know what your own numbers are.