Home Guide
Australia's largest operator is running at 57% occupancy. If G8 cannot fill its centres, the answer is not going to be "post more on Facebook". This is what the evidence actually says about childcare marketing, in order: be findable locally, answer enquiries fast, and put out photos you are allowed to put out. Every number below is sourced, dated, and labelled Australian or overseas, because most of the ones you have read are American.
Written 2 September 2026 by Clayton Hackett, who has worked in marketing and sales for over fifteen years and runs marketing for Australian childcare centres. We also make software for them, and we have put its limits in the same table as everything else.
Short version, and then the table. Be findable when a parent searches your suburb, because location is what they filter on first. Answer the enquiry faster than the centre down the road. Give them something honest to look at, which means photographs you are allowed to publish. Everything else on the usual list is downstream of those three.
| Channel | Cost | Hours a week | First enquiry | Where it is weak | Needs cleared photos |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profile | Free | About 1 | Days | Only reaches people already searching. Will not create demand where there is none. | Yes, for the photo set |
| Answering enquiries fast | Free | Nil, it is a habit | Immediate | Needs someone rostered to it. Falls apart on a bad staffing day, which is when it matters most. | No |
| Google reviews | Free | Under 1 | Weeks | Slow to build, and you cannot control what arrives. One bad month is visible for a year. | No |
| Your own website | Varies | Setup, then under 1 | Weeks | Table stakes rather than a differentiator. A beautiful site with a slow phone still loses. | Yes |
| Facebook and Instagram, organic | Free | 2 to 3 | Months | Mostly reaches families you already have. Good for retention and staff, slow for enrolment. | Yes, constantly |
| Meta ads, local radius | Budget plus fees | 1 to 2 | Days | Stops the moment you stop paying. Wasted entirely if enquiries are answered slowly. | Yes |
| Tours and open days | Low | Bursty | Weeks | Labour intensive, and attendance is hostage to weather and school holidays. | No |
| Government and comparison listings | Free | One off | Weeks | Parents arrive already comparing on price and availability, so you compete on those terms. | No |
| Educator recruitment posts | Free to low | 1 | Weeks | A different audience to families, and wages beat culture posts. Still necessary. | Yes |
Six of the nine need photographs you are allowed to publish. That is not a marketing problem, it is the constraint the marketing runs into, and it is dealt with further down.
You will see a "$5,000 a place" figure quoted around the sector. We could not trace it to any original report, and it contradicts the rent and valuation numbers published alongside it, so we are not repeating it. Here is arithmetic you can check instead, from two Australian government figures.
$14.35
average hourly fee, centre based day care
Department of Education, Child Care Subsidy data report, September quarter 2025
34.1
average hours attended per child, per week
Productivity Commission, Report on Government Services 2026
$489
a week, about $25,400 a year, in gross fees for one filled place
Our calculation from the two figures on the left
Gross fees, not profit. It ignores subsidy flow through, part time patterns, and the costs a centre avoids when a place sits empty. We are showing the working rather than dressing it up as a statistic, because you can check arithmetic and you cannot check somebody else's benchmark.
57%
Group occupancy at G8 Education, the country's largest operator, in the first half of 2026. Down 7.5 percentage points, with a $38.8 million statutory net loss and operations suspended at 40 centres.
G8 Education H1 2026 results, ASX disclosure, August 2026
76%
National centre based day care occupancy at December 2025, down from about 82% two years earlier. Supply grew while demand did not.
The Sector, drawing on Child Care Subsidy and ACECQA data. Secondary source
Under 20%
Share of NSW centres offering flexible hours, against more than half in Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia. Parents rate flexibility above lower fees.
NSW Productivity Commission, Childcare choices: what parents want, survey of 2,000+ parents and carers
Nobody publishes Australian numbers for this, so here are ours. Read the caveat first, because it matters more than the figures.
This is not a benchmark and we are not going to call it one. It is what we have seen across a small number of Australian childcare centres we have run marketing for. A handful of accounts is not a sample you should plan a business on. We are publishing it because the alternative on offer is an American figure from a software vendor's own customers, and because a real number with its limits stated beats a borrowed one with none.
$50 to $80
cost per enquiry
Averaged across Meta and Google, per centre. It moves with how competitive the suburb is and how tight the radius is. For context, the closest published figures are American: about US$77 per lead on Google search for education, and roughly US$21 to $27 on Meta.
About 1 in 3
enquiries that become enrolments
With post enquiry follow up actually running. The comparable American numbers work out closer to one in four once you multiply enquiry to tour by tour to enrolment. The gap is not clever advertising, it is that somebody answers and follows up.
Booked, not chased
the unglamorous bit that matters
Tour booking automated straight off the enquiry form, so a parent picks a time themselves instead of waiting for a callback. It saves the admin hours and it removes the gap where enquiries go cold. Calendly and a form will do it. This is the least exciting thing on the page and the one we would keep if we could only keep one.
Method, so you can weigh it: figures are from live Meta and Google accounts we manage for Australian childcare centres, averaged per centre rather than pooled, over a period covering 2025 and 2026. We have not stated a client count because it is small and quoting an N that low would dress this up as research. It is practitioner experience, published because nothing better exists.
Six of the nine channels above need photographs. That is the ordinary answer, and it is about permission: a family ticked no, so the best shot of the day cannot be used, so the feed goes quiet.
There is a harder answer now, and it comes from the regulator rather than from us.
Between January and March 2026 the eSafety Commissioner received more than 100 reports about anonymous accounts targeting schools and school staff. Almost all of them involved imagery harvested from school social media accounts or websites.
eSafety Commissioner, 2026
In the same body of work: reports of digitally altered intimate images involving people under 18 more than doubled in eighteen months, against the total for the seven years before. Deepfake image based abuse is now happening at least once a week in Australian schools, and four in five reports target females.
So the photographs a centre publishes to market itself are the raw material. That is an uncomfortable thing for a company that sells marketing software to write down, and it is the reason this one exists. You cannot answer it by posting less, because a centre that posts nothing looks closed. You answer it by clearing the photo before it goes out.
Almost never at awareness. Nearly always after the enquiry arrives, at the phone that rang out, the email answered on Thursday, or the tour nobody followed up. This is the cheapest thing on the whole page to fix and the least glamorous, which is why it stays broken.
The classic study found contacting a web lead within five minutes rather than thirty made you around 21 times more likely to qualify it. Nearly every blog credits that to Harvard Business Review. It is not theirs, it is a 2007 MarketingSherpa study, and it is old. It is also still the best evidence anyone has, and no centre that has watched an enquiry go cold will argue with the direction.
A parent who messaged you on Facebook at 9pm is not waiting by a landline. Answer where the message came from, and put the tour booking link in that first reply rather than three messages later.
They looked at four or five centres. Most never hear from any of them again. One honest message a week later, naming what you actually have available, is the highest return five minutes in this entire guide.
Read this bit knowing who wrote it. Tickaboo is built by Goober Marketing, which is a marketing agency that works with Australian childcare centres. We are the people being described here, so we have every reason to tell you to hire one. Here is when you should not.
Sized for the week you actually have, not the week a marketing plan assumes. Nothing here needs a budget. If a week goes wrong, skip it and carry on, the order matters more than the timing.
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
The whole thing as a document you can print and hand to someone. Free, no email, no sign up, same as everything else we give away.
Get it from the free resourcesClayton Hackett has worked in marketing and sales for over fifteen years, and runs Goober Marketing Pty Ltd on the Gold Coast, which handles the websites, the ads and the posts for Australian childcare centres.
The same problem turned up on the childcare accounts. Photos were the most time consuming job on the list. Staff lost hours a week to editing, the best photos of the day could not be used because the permissions were not there, and the ones that were safe to post were the dull ones. It came up again and again.
Nothing on the market fixed the whole thing, so we built Tickaboo. It is the tool we kept wishing our clients had. That is also why this guide gives the playbook away rather than selling you an agency retainer: we would rather you fixed the photo problem, with us or without us.
Written 2 September 2026. We re-check the figures quarterly and will date the change when one moves.
In order: a complete Google Business Profile so you turn up when a parent searches your suburb, a habit of answering enquiries within the hour, and a steady supply of photographs you are allowed to publish. Those three are free and they beat anything you can buy. Paid ads work, but only once enquiries are being answered properly, otherwise you are paying to lose them faster.
Nobody can give you an honest Australian number, because none is published. What we can say is what one place is worth: about $489 a week in gross fees, using the Department of Education's average hourly fee and the Productivity Commission's average attendance. Whatever you spend, measure it against filling places, and start with the free work before you buy anything.
Only with the family's agreement for that specific use, and with more care than a year ago. The eSafety Commissioner received over 100 reports between January and March 2026 about accounts targeting schools and staff, and almost all involved imagery harvested from school social accounts and websites. The practical answer is not to stop posting, because a quiet centre looks closed. It is to clear the photo first, and to keep names, uniforms and routines out of the caption.
If you are a single centre with a local occupancy problem, probably not yet. Nearly everything that works is free, and an agency will do those same things with a margin on top. Hire one when you run several centres, when you are opening from a standing start against a deadline, or when you want paid ads run properly. We say this as people who own a childcare marketing agency.
Start with the enquiries you already had. Most centres have a month of enquiries that were answered once and never followed up, and those people are still looking. After that, a local radius Meta campaign is the fastest paid lever, but only if someone is rostered to answer within the hour. There is no fast lever that survives slow answering.
It may not be you. National centre based occupancy fell from roughly 82% at the end of 2023 to about 76% at the end of 2025, and G8, the largest operator in the country, reported 57% and suspended 40 centres. Supply grew faster than demand in a lot of areas. That does not make marketing pointless, it makes being findable and answering fast matter more than they did when everyone had a waitlist.
No account, no upload. The consent register and the 30 day plan are free too.
