KoolKidz Childcare

Client:

Kool Kidz Childcare
Kool Kidz Website

Partners

Sunday Insights
Sunday Insights Website 

Platform

Wordpress & HubSpot
HubSpot Services 

Duration

3 Month Project
12 month engagement

The management team at Kool Kidz was looking for a digital agency to help redevelop their website and establish a CRM and tour booking system. They needed a vendor that would work alongside their in-house team, supporting them and delivering a site that repositioned the brand.

The Story of Kool Kidz Child Care

Phillip and Sylvia Hortis established the very first Kool Kidz Early Learning Service in Rowville, Victoria, in 1994. Since then, the community has grown to include 16 centres across Victoria. Of these 16 centres, 4 are owned and operated by Kool Kidz and 11 are owned and operated by franchisees.

“Caring for young children in their early years is such a privilege. We’re dedicated to helping children become independent and inspired learners through our quality childcare and educational programs.”

Parents are highly engaged in the selection process for a childcare centre and they focus on the staff, the quality of education provided at the centre and the facility itself. The main way parents select is word-of-mouth recommendations, the next way is by conducting a tour of the centre, to meet the staff, see the facility and observe the day-to-day operation of the centre.

We tackled not just the website, but the whole customer journey of researching, assessing and selecting a child care centre!

The Problem to be solved

The Kool Kidz website wasn’t designed to support parents' intellectual and emotional needs, it lacked a streamlined way to manage leads, and parents found it difficult to find what they required to decide on booking a tour.

The previous marketing and operations team had tried several times to update the website but with limited success. When Stephanie Weston joined the team at the end of 2023, her goal was to turn the website into a high-performing marketing asset by making it useful for prospective parents.

“We wanted to take a fresh look at the entire customer journey from parent motivation, to how they research childcare options, exploring their feeling and customer needs, through to the end-point of deciding on a home away from home for their kids” – Stephanie Weston, Marketing Manager

 To assist with this, Steph engaged a market research company, Sunday Insights, to review the whole Kool Kidz customer journey from start to finish. Several crucial insights emerged from this research, which formed the focus of the digital project.

Why Kool Kidz Childcare Chose FrontStage Digital

Stephanie contacted a number of digital agencies and asked them to present their vision for the website to the leadership team.

“Frontstage was shortlisted because they had proven experience in a parallel market ‘Aged Care’. They had successfully run workshops undertaking customer journey mapping and content development, which resulted in a more customer-centric website for home care services. “ – Stephanie Weston

Frontstage also brought considerable experience with WordPress websites and HubSpot Marketing Hub.

Ultimately, we were selected based on our approach to solving the end customers’ challenges (for parents). We were focused on creating a seamless end-to-end customer experience that went beyond the website pages into the CRM and the tour booking system.

FrontStage was noticeably less “technical” and more customer and data focused in their approach to the pitch, a more wholistic “marketing focused” that made them stand out from other vendors. “ – Stephanie Weston

FrontStage were very excited to work alongside the Kool Kidz leadership team and align with their vision and values.

“A huge shoutout to FrontStage Digital for teaming up with us to make this happen. They helped us give our website a fresh look, and now everything's running smoothly – making parents' experience as seamless as possible.” – Stephanie Weston

How Front Stage Digital Responded

As soon as we were engaged to build the website, we discovered that the website had been through about 3 other agencies' hands, there was a lack of control and governance over the platform, hosting, analytics, plugins and integrations, business listings, data, emails all needed to be audited and organised before we started work.

Initially, there was a lot to do and starting with the hosting, we immediately made this more stable and set up the right environments for backups and development. 

We started the process of design, which included mapping out the customer experience and how the website would interact with the CRM. We were very focused on the mobile experience as over 50% of visitors to the website use mobile devices, and the current experience was quite poor.

The Kool Kidz marketing and leadership team were very engaged and hands-on in this process and it felt like we were uncovering things that had been waiting to be addressed for many years, so there was a lot of excitement and support for the changes that needed to be made on the website. 

We went through a very detailed process of mapping out the project, sharing tasks with Steph and the Kool Kidz team, and taking on the more daily focused tasks of writing new content, revising the Information Architecture (IA) and producing a new and fresh design. After this was all approved and we validated that against the research goals we went ahead and built the website.

The Results

This project has been a major digital transformation for the Kool Kidz Franchise. Together we’ve changed the way web and CRM are seen within the organisation. We’ve set up a framework for SEO optimisation that we’ll continue to work on over the coming months. We’ve taken the stress out of booking tours for centres and made the job of tracking marketing qualified leads from Facebook, Google and the website, through to conversion easy.

• A new and fresh home page with clear pathways to the rest of the website content
• A new Information Architecture (IA) and navigation that was easier to use on mobile devices and desktop
• A vastly improved finder for locations (child care centres) that allows for simple methods of contact, phone, email, address and booking forms

• An integrated ‘book a tour’ form to HubSpot with automated calendar bookings, emails and notifications, personalised for each centre
• A new layout for location pages (with all the key information from the research)
• A new section explaining the Kool Kidz offering for each age group, infants, toddlers and kindergarten
• New photography across the website (provided by Steph and her team)
• SEO optimised images using keywords for file names and optimised for speed
• Set up workflows for automated emails for form submissions and tour bookings
• Set up HubSpot dashboards and reports for monitoring how leads move through the funnel to prove ROI in Marketing and support child care centres in their marketing efforts.