Three options. Only one actually works for your business.
Every centre is 'full'. Almost no centre actually converts the waitlist.
Childcare centres live with a strange contradiction: the waitlist has 60 to 200 names on it, and the babies room is at 65 percent occupancy. The director knows the waitlist is full of parents who signed up two years ago and have since gone elsewhere, parents who only want a Tuesday-Thursday combination you cannot offer, parents whose children have aged out of the room with vacancies. Nobody has the time to sit down on a Tuesday afternoon, call through it, work out who is actually live, and run a proper enrolment campaign for the rooms with space. So the centre runs at 80 percent occupancy when it could run at 95, the waitlist gets stale, the financial case for the educators-per-room ratio gets harder every quarter, and the centre next door (newer building, slicker website, same Meeting NQS rating) starts winning the toddler room enquiries even though your Exceeding rating is the better outcome for the child.
Good childcare marketing is three things, in this order: a website with one page per age-group room AND per suburb you serve so you rank for 'babies room [suburb]', 'toddler room [suburb]' and 'kindergarten program [suburb]', a Google Business Profile that leads with your ACECQA NQS rating and your educator-to-child ratios because that is the trust signal parents actually compare, and a proper waitlist-conversion engine that calls or emails every name on the list every 8 weeks with current vacancies by age group. The centres that run at 95 percent occupancy are doing exactly this, every week. The ones at 80 percent are still sending the same 'we have a few spots' newsletter to a list that hasn't been cleaned since 2024.
Six agents, working in your accounts.
Account Lead, Web, SEO, Advertising, Social Media, and Content. One platform, one bill, you approve the work.
Sets the plan around occupancy by room, not total enrolments: a babies-room push in summer when new parents return from leave, a toddler-room push in autumn when the kindy graduates move on, and a permanent CCS education layer for every new enquiry. Briefs the other agents so the room pages, the suburb ads, the yard photos and the waitlist emails all push toward filling the rooms that are actually under-enrolled.
Imports your existing site so you stop paying Squarespace plus the parent-portal hosting fee, and ships a page for every room in every suburb you draw from. Adds a proper CCS estimate widget on the fees page, embeds your centre-tour booking link prominently, and updates the room pages every time vacancies change so 'currently enrolling' is never out of date.
Owns whether your Exceeding NQS rating actually shows up in search. Adds the rating to the Google Business Profile, structures the services list around ACECQA categories, ships LocalBusiness and ChildCare schema on every page, and earns review prompts from every parent after enrolment. Auto-applies the low-risk fixes; flags anything bigger.
Runs a permanent enrolment campaign on Google for 'long day care [suburb]' and CCS-question searches, with a 7km radius and a 'currently enrolling' message that updates as your vacancy numbers change. Adds a separate Meta layer targeting new mums in the area three months before parental leave ends. Drops the ad spend on rooms that fill, lifts it on rooms that don't.
Turns every consented yard photo into a post in your real accounts: a toddler-room mud-kitchen carousel, a kindy school-readiness milestone, a story from the babies room's first solid-food morning, an educator profile with the qualification listed. Builds the visual trust that converts the parent who has been quietly stalking your grid for three months before they book the tour.
Drafts the guides parents Google before they book: 'how does CCS actually work for two-day-a-week care', 'how do I prepare my 18-month-old for daycare', 'EYLF vs Montessori vs Reggio Emilia: what's the difference for my 3-year-old'. Two drafts a month, in your voice, that catch the parent four months before they enrol.
Your first 30 days.
- Vacancies-by-age-group page indexed and updating weekly, with babies, toddler and kindergarten rooms split per suburb
- Annual plan focused on shifting room-level occupancy from 78% to full, delivered by Sam
- ACECQA NQS Exceeding rating wired into the Google Business Profile, search snippets, homepage hero and the Facebook cover
- CCS estimate widget plus CCS-eligibility explainer live on the fees page, in plain English
- Google Ads enrolment campaign live with CCS-question keyword targeting and suburb-specific copy
- Stale waitlist segmented and the first re-engagement email shipped, with two more in the queue
- EYLF documentation gallery published, showing the programme without buried PDFs
- ChildCare and EducationalOrganization schema deployed sitewide with weekly photo refresh wired in
Every centre says it is full. Almost no centre is actually full. The babies room runs at 65 percent, the waitlist has 120 names you have not called this year, and the parent two suburbs away who would have loved your Exceeding rating is enrolling at the new Goodstart that opened in March because their website mentioned CCS and yours did not. The marketing work is not glamorous: it is the room-by-room page library, the suburb ads, the waitlist re-engagement, and the relentless surfacing of your NQS rating in every channel a parent looks.
Agencies are too dear to actually do this work for $3.5k a month. Tools are cheap but the waitlist re-engagement campaign you mean to run in February is still in your notes app in October. In-House is the third option: for $299 a month the agents ship the room pages, run the enrolment ads, post the yard photos and re-engage the waitlist. You stay in the driver's seat, two taps to approve, minutes a day between transitions. Fill the rooms, not the spreadsheet.