Website is an essential marketing tool for your nursery

Before the internet age parents did all their childcare research at local authority to get telephone lists. Now websites are the first source of information for interested parents. "Most people look for anything from a plumber to a nursery on the internet now – I can't remember the last time I used the Yellow Pages," says Kids Inc Nurseries financial director Balvinder Kalsi. "Almost three-quarters of our new parents say that they looked up the nursery on the internet. Finding the nursery group website is second only being recommended by parents."

Toad Hall Nursery Group has had a website for less than a year and it already generates approximately 22 per cent of the chain's requests for information. Leapfrog Day Nurseries aims to achieve an average of 5,000 individual visits to its website from different people each week. Director Nigel Moon says, "It is a really important part of our marketing armoury and delivers a lot of enquiries."

Through monitoring traffic on nursery websites, NurseryCam has found that a lot of parents do their childcare research at night. "Ten o'clock at night is the peak hour," says Melissa Kao. "Of course, nursery managers are not on call through the evening so the site makes it possible for the nursery to do the marketing out of hours. Parents have a lot of time to browse during the evening and go to a lot of pages such as the facilities, fees, philosophy, curriculum and link through to the Ofsted report. They also like to request or download a prospectus online. Parents also like to use the websites to arrange a visit to the nursery."