My Business
Baby Sensory Loughborough
Franchisee
Baby Sensory is a baby development class designed for babies from birth-13 months with instruments, baby signing, massage and exercise, sleep techniques, social playtime, action rhymes and songs. Each session is filled with wonderful sensory experiences for the babies and adults to enjoy! From fibre optic lights shows to glowing bouncy balls, bubbles, bells, rainbows, tickly feathers, puppets, silky scarves and water play; the possibilities for learning are endless!
Baby Sensory Loughborough
Project background
Owning my own franchise was exciting, being able to develop my business under the guidance of HO and other more experienced franchisees was amazing.
1) The goal was to use social media to recruit new mums and babies to the classes and grow the territory from a brand new franchise to a business which would give me a great income whilst being able to do the school and nursery run and work for myself.
2. Social media was used within the franchise, but after going on a social media course in 2016 I started to pave the way for a new era for Baby Sensory. With the help of professional photos, I used Canva to design professional artwork and adverts.
3. Paid adverts were used to drive sales, targeted at parents directing them to the Baby Sensory Loughborough bookings page. The bookings page encouraged them to book and pay online, reserving their baby's place. A sense of urgency was created as spaces were genuinely limited.
Baby Sensory Loughborough
Creative process
The challenge was to create beautiful Instagram worthy content from; stock images, images from HO and from the classes. Facebook and Instagram were the main channels from 2014 to 2018 to attract parents.
With the 'paid adverts' I used different images to test the Facebook adverts effectiveness, then focused on the most successful images.
I had access to beautiful stock images from HO to use in the adverts with persuasive headers and added text to get new parents to book a three week trial where one week would be free. We preferred parents to come for a minimum of three weeks to get a feel for the classes as every week was different for the whole year baby attended the classes.
The images to the right were produced along with many others, twenty-three 'Did you know?' posts, 'Count down' posts until the term started, testimonials, pictures from the class that week, what to expect next week. Term calendar including which classes were full on the Facebook header.
My Business
Final results
Social media, word of mouth marketing, posters on village noticeboards along with biannual National Childbirth Trust (NCT) events locally were the main marketing methods. Social media provided direct results and built the business up to 9 classes with 220 parents and babies each week.
Facebook
Instagram
The pages grew organically and through paid adverts.
I eventually sold the business for £37,500 the most a Baby Sensory Franchise had been sold for and invested that in being a Regional Franchisor and Programme Franchisor.