How To Become The Nursery Everyone Recommends
There’s a brilliant position for any nursery to occupy in its local area. It happens when a parent says to another parent:
“We’re starting to look at nurseries. Which one would you recommend?”
And your nursery’s name comes up. Not occasionally… Not because the person they happened to ask works for you…
Being the nursery that local parents recommend is an enormous competitive advantage because, by the time that parent eventually contacts you, some of the selling has already been done.
They’ve heard your name from someone they trust.
They might have seen your reviews.
They may recognise your nursery from Facebook, a local event or conversations in a parent group.
Perhaps they’ve driven past you dozens of times.
Your reputation has arrived before you have!
The good news is that this doesn’t have to happen purely by luck. A strong local reputation can be built deliberately; by providing an experience parents genuinely value, giving them reasons to talk about it and making the evidence visible when the next family starts searching.
Reputation Is Built Before A Parent Ever Contacts You
A parent’s opinion of your nursery rarely begins with their first phone call or showround.
It can start weeks, months or even years earlier.
Perhaps they search Google for nurseries nearby and see which names appear.
Maybe they notice one nursery has dozens of recent, positive reviews while another has three from 2019.
They ask for recommendations in a local Facebook group…
They talk to parents at toddler groups, swimming lessons, birthday parties or the school gates…
They hear a colleague talking about how good their child’s nursery has been…
All those small moments build a picture.
And all this means your reputation exists whether you actively manage it or not.
Make sure your Google Business Profile lives up to your reputation
Throw a great Google Business Profile into the mix and you can elevate your reputation further.
Your business profile sits somewhere between word of mouth and an enquiry. Somebody recommends you, the parent searches your name and immediately looks for evidence that the recommendation was justified.
So your information should be accurate, your photographs current, your opening hours correct and your reviews responded to.
Your online presence shouldn’t create doubt about the positive things somebody has just said about you… It should reinforce them!
Deliver Something Worth Recommending
When it comes to building your nursery’s reputation, before you start worrying about referral campaigns, review requests or local PR, there’s a more important question:
Are you giving parents an experience they actually want to recommend?
Because marketing can amplify a strong reputation, but it can’t indefinitely compensate for a poor experience.
And for a nursery, that experience consists of far more than the childcare itself.
Parents notice whether communication is clear, and when somebody responds quickly when they have a question.
They notice whether members of the team know their child, or whether information arrives when you said it would.
They notice how you react when something hasn’t gone perfectly too!
Turn Happy Parents Into Advocates
Plenty of happy parents will recommend you naturally, but that doesn’t mean you have to sit back and hope they remember. You can make advocacy way easier than that.
Start with reviews.
When a parent gives you particularly positive feedback, it’s a natural opportunity to say:
“Thank you, that means a lot to us. If you’d be happy to put something similar into a Google review, it would really help other local parents who are choosing a nursery.” Simple!
You can also actively collect parent stories and testimonials. Rather than relying only on generic comments such as “Lovely nursery, highly recommended”, ask parents about their actual experience and ask them to put it in writing (or even on camera). Ask:
- Why did they choose you?
- What were they worried about beforehand?
- What has impressed them?
- What difference have your team made to their child or family?
Specific stories are considerably more useful to another parent trying to make the same decision.
Build A Review Engine
The problem with saying “we should get more reviews” is that everybody agrees with it and then nobody does anything.
Instead, make reviews part of a repeatable process.
Decide:
- When you will ask.
- Who will ask.
- How the parent will receive the review link.
- Who will monitor new reviews.
- Who will respond to them.
- How often you will check that the process is actually happening.
You might choose natural moments like after positive feedback, following a successful settling-in period or when a child is leaving the nursery and the family has had a great experience.
The objective isn’t to suddenly get 30 reviews this Friday.
It’s to create a system that steadily generates genuine feedback from happy families over time.
Be Visible In Your Local Community
If you want to become the nursery everybody locally knows, you need to participate in the community you serve.
That doesn’t mean plastering the town with your logo… But it does mean thinking about where local parents already spend their time. Could you build relationships with:
- Local toddler and baby groups?
- Primary schools?
- Libraries?
- Family events?
- Community organisations?
- Children’s activity providers?
- Local charities?
- Large employers with lots of working parents?
- Local newspapers and community publications?
The strongest ideas create genuine value rather than simply creating advertising.
So, perhaps your team could run a free story session at the library – or you could support a family fun day.
Maybe one of your practitioners might provide a useful session for new parents.
You could partner with another local family-focused organisation on an event.
Or you might support a local charity campaign that genuinely means something to your team and families.
The aim is familiarity.
When somebody eventually asks, “What nurseries should we look at?”, you want your name to feel known.
Give Parents Stories Worth Sharing
Word of mouth becomes much easier when people have something specific to talk about.
“ABC Nursery is nice” is forgettable.
But parents tell stories.
“My daughter was really nervous when she started, and her key person did this…”
“They sent us this lovely thing when…”
“The nursery organised an amazing…”
“I mentioned that he was struggling with something and the next day they…”
Those moments travel.
Look at the experiences you already create and ask: What happens here that a parent might tell another parent about tonight?
It might be how you celebrate a child’s achievement or the thought that goes into transitions.
It might be a surprisingly personal piece of communication, or perhaps it’s an event families love attending every year.
You don’t want gimmicks engineered purely for social media. You want genuinely good experiences that happen to be worth talking about.
What Happens When Something Goes Wrong?
Reputation isn’t built by pretending nothing ever goes wrong.
Things will go wrong. A parent will be unhappy at some point. There will be misunderstandings, mistakes will be made – but the important part is what happens next.
- Listen properly before jumping into a defence.
- Respond promptly rather than allowing frustration to grow.
- Take ownership where ownership is appropriate.
- Explain what you are going to do.
- Do it.
- Then follow up afterwards.
Handled badly, a relatively minor problem can become the story a parent repeats whenever your nursery is mentioned. Handled well, that same situation can demonstrate how seriously you take your families!
Make Your Reputation Visible Online
You might already have an excellent offline reputation, so make sure a prospective parent can see it.
Your website and Google presence should contain evidence. That could include:
- Google reviews.
- Parent testimonials.
- Short parent stories.
- Photographs showing nursery life.
- Quotes from families.
- Longer case-study-style stories.
- News about community activity.
- Examples of events and experiences.
If a parent has been told three times that your nursery is fantastic and then visits a website that looks abandoned, has no recent photographs and contains no evidence from other families, you’re creating unnecessary uncertainty.
Your online marketing should make your reputation tangible.
Reputation Compounds
This is where reputation becomes particularly powerful.
One family has a great experience.
They recommend you to somebody else.
That parent searches for you and finds strong Google reviews.
They enquire.
Their child eventually joins.
They have a brilliant experience too.
They leave another review and recommend you to another family.
Meanwhile, the growing quantity of relevant local signals around your nursery can strengthen your overall presence when parents search online.
So the circle continues:
Great experience → recommendations → more enquiries → more reviews → stronger local visibility → more enquiries.
None of it is an overnight marketing trick, and that’s precisely the point.
Strong reputations are built through consistent activity over time.
Your 30-Day Nursery Reputation-Building Plan
You don’t need to redesign your entire nursery marketing strategy tomorrow.
Start with 30 days of focused action.
Week 1: Find Out What Parents Currently See
- Search for your nursery on Google.
- Review your Google Business Profile as if you were a prospective parent.
- Check your opening hours, contact details, nursery description and photographs.
- Read your recent reviews.
- Look at your website.
Then ask yourself:
Does what somebody sees online accurately reflect the quality of the nursery we run? And make a list of anything that needs updating.
- Week 2: Start Collecting Evidence
- Choose five families who have recently given you positive feedback and, where appropriate, ask them for a Google review.
- Create a simple direct review link your team can easily send.
- Identify two or three particularly strong parent stories that could become testimonials or website content, subject to the necessary permissions.
- Add new, high-quality photographs to your Google profile.
- Respond properly to any reviews you haven’t acknowledged.
Week 3: Strengthen Your Local Presence
Make a list of ten local organisations that already have relationships with the families you want to reach. They could be:
- Schools.
- Libraries.
- Toddler groups.
- Activity providers.
- Community organisations.
- Large local employers.
Then contact three.
Not with: “Can you advertise our nursery?”
Instead ask: “Is there something useful we could do together for local families?”
That conversation tends to lead somewhere much more interesting!
Week 4: Create The Ongoing System
Decide who owns reputation-building inside the nursery.
Create a monthly checklist covering:
- Google profile updates.
- New photographs.
- Review requests.
- Review responses.
- Testimonials collected.
- Community opportunities.
- Parent stories worth sharing.
- Website updates.
Crucially, put the next three monthly reputation checks into the diary. (The objective isn’t a one-month burst of enthusiasm; it’s consistency.)
Become The Nursery People Mention First
You can’t completely control what people say about your nursery, but you can influence it.
- Run a nursery parents trust.
- Communicate brilliantly.
- Handle problems properly.
- Create experiences families remember.
- Ask happy parents to share what they think.
- Become visible in your community.
- And make sure that when somebody searches for you online, they find plenty of evidence supporting everything they’ve already heard.
Do that consistently and, over time, you put yourself in a very valuable position:
The nursery everybody seems to recommend.
And when that happens, reputation stops simply being something nice to have.
It becomes one of your most powerful sources of new enquiries.
If your nursery already has a good reputation but you want to turn that reputation into a more consistent flow of enquiries, book a free Nursery Growth Call with 3XM Marketing.
We’ll spend the call looking at where you are now, the marketing opportunities available to you and some straightforward, actionable things you can do next. No marketing BS, no pressure; just useful ideas to help you move forward.
Get help to grow your business, for FREE
Book a free 3XM Business Growth Call, and spend 30 minutes with a member of the 3XM team, where we’ll help you outline some straightforward actionable things you can do to improve your marketing and grow your business, no strings, no tie ins, and no purchase necessary.
During your Business Growth Call, we’ll:
- Take a look at the marketing you’re doing, and give you our two cents on how to improve it
- Tell you what we’d be doing if we were in your shoes
- Give you actionable tactics and strategies we’re using right now to get leads and customers for our clients
- Make sure you walk away with something you can take away and use straight away
Click the button below to book a slot, and we’ll see you on the call:
Nursery Growth FAQs
How can a nursery improve its local reputation?
Start with the parent experience itself, then systematically collect reviews, share parent stories, maintain an accurate Google Business Profile and become more visible in your local community.
How can a nursery get more Google reviews?
Create a repeatable process for asking happy parents at appropriate moments, give them a direct review link and make somebody responsible for monitoring and responding to new reviews.
Does word of mouth help nurseries get more enquiries?
Recommendations can play an important role because parents frequently seek reassurance from people they trust when making a significant childcare decision. Your online reputation should then reinforce those personal recommendations.
How can I promote my nursery locally?
Look beyond straightforward advertising. Build useful relationships with schools, toddler groups, libraries, community organisations, family events, local employers and other organisations already connected to parents in your area.
