Marketing for daycares
and private schools

Marketing for daycares and private schools: trust before everything

Parents choosing child care or a school are making one of their biggest decisions. Marketing for daycares and private schools is therefore slow, careful and practical. Parents want to see the rooms, understand the daily routine, know who the educators are, and understand fees, hours and how the waitlist works. A website that answers those questions plainly does more than any campaign.

The Canadian context changed a lot with the federal and provincial agreements that brought reduced-fee child care, often called $10-a-day child care, to many licensed centres. In many cities demand now exceeds spaces. For those centres, marketing is less about finding families and more about managing a waitlist fairly and hiring enough educators to open every room.

The waitlist as a service

A waitlist that feels like a black hole damages reputation. Parents who hear nothing for months call repeatedly or post complaints. A simple CRM setup can make it transparent:

• Parents receive confirmation and a reference number.
• They can update details like start date or sibling status.
• Automatic messages tell them when something changes.
• Your team sees priorities, ages and expected openings at a glance.

Some provinces and cities run centralized waitlists for licensed child care. If yours does, the site should explain how it connects to your own process.

Private school admissions

Independent schools work on an annual cycle. Families research in the fall, attend open houses through the winter and apply before deadlines that often fall early in the year. Each step can be measured: page visits, open house sign-ups, attendance, applications, enrolments. Paid ads on Meta and Google, aimed at parents within a reasonable commute, fill the open house; email follow-up turns visits into applications.

Rules that apply to schools and child care

Quebec bans commercial advertising directed at children under 13, and across Canada the safe practice is to speak only to parents. Privacy matters even more: children's information is sensitive under PIPEDA and provincial laws, and Quebec's Law 25 adds consent requirements for tracking. Photos of children need written parental consent. Emails to parents about promotions or events need consent under CASL, while operational messages to enrolled families are treated differently.

In Quebec, all of this must be available in French at least as prominently as in English. My work is in English, so if your centre is in Quebec, the French text comes from your own team or translator. Outside Quebec, French is optional; for English-language enrolment pages in cities such as Ottawa, the same approach applies.

Hiring educators

For many centres the real limit is staff. A careers page with pay range, benefits, schedule, professional development and a short application form, plus local Facebook ads during hiring periods, often does more for the business than any parent campaign. Job ads fall into Meta's employment category, so targeting is limited and the message must do the work.

If you run language programs for kids or adults, see marketing for language schools. For the site itself, a business website on a custom CMS lets you update menus, news and openings without a developer.