Boosting Occupancy and Solving Staff Shortages for Sparrow Through a Targeted Paid Strategy

The Challenge

Sparrow Early Learning faced multiple challenges across their network of childcare centres. The pandemic had drastically reduced occupancy levels as parents shifted to working from home, resulting in decreased demand for childcare services. 

Additionally, Sparrow struggled with high staff turnover and low recruitment numbers, as many early learning professionals were forced to transition to other careers between 2020 and 2022. They needed a comprehensive strategy to boost both occupancy and recruitment across centres in Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia.

Digital Strategy

• Focused hyper-localised campaigns on low-occupancy centres, targeting a 5-15km radius to increase impression share in specific areas, increase leads and allocate budgets effectively.
• Developed tailored recruitment campaigns with benefit-driven messaging to attract early learning educators.
• Shifted from organic-style content to performance-optimised creative, ensuring ads resonated with prospective parents and educators.
• Tested a ‘2024 Enrolments’ campaign during peak enrolment times, achieving high performance with the lowest CPA in December and generating key learnings to apply during enrollment periods in the future.

Platform Tactics

• Focused on high-priority centres in Google ads and deployed a portfolio bidding strategy to optimise across multiple non-brand campaigns.
• Led successful recruitment campaigns using a combination of audience targeting and regular creative testing. 
• Used narrow geographical targeting to ensure each high-priority centre received appropriate attention, while testing various ad angles and formats to improve recruitment results.
• A top-performing creative asset focused on the authentic relationship between educators and children. Consistent success led to iterative testing with similar styles, showing strong results in connecting with prospective parents.