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Portfolio
Sector Focus: Early Years
Early years marketing has to do two jobs at once. It has to reassure a parent choosing where to leave their child, and it has to attract the people who will look after them. We work across both.
Client: MiChild Group.
Fourteen nurseries across Blackpool and the Fylde Coast, Greater Manchester and Cheshire. Full-service marketing partner covering copy, brand voice, content, video and website. All assets built to MiChilds brand guidelines.
Supporting Brief (the strategic bit)
MiChild is a family-led group that had grown quickly. The marketing needed to catch up with the business and speak with one voice.
Three things shaped everything we produced:
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Speak as you would at the nursery door. Warm, plain-spoken and human, with none of the corporate padding.
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Lead with the curriculum. Their most distinctive asset was also their least visible. We brought it to the forefront.
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Two audiences, one identity. Reassurance for parents and ambition for staff, drawn from a single brand story.
Brochures
A full print and digital collateral set for both audiences.
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24 page group brochure, plus a seperate dedicated staff and recruitment brochure.
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Custom infographics translating policy and practice into something a parent can scan in seconds.
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Top ten USP sets written for each audience.
Turning what a nursery actually does into something a parent can understand at a glance.
Website Audit and Rewrite
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Over 55 pages of new website copy, covering nursery pages, learning, family information, careers and enquiry journeys.
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Full page-by-page audit of the staging build against the approved copy
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Detailed developer and amends brief prepared for the build team, covering navigation, mobile behaviour, broken journeys, placeholder content, compliance and accuracy.
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Navigation restructured from six flat links into a nine-item architecture with a nursery finder, Family Zone and News & Stories.
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Supporting microcopy: enquiry form fields, auto-responder sequence, open day invitations, booking banners and facility cards.
Copy is only half the job. We checked every page of the build before launch and gave the developers a fix list they could work straight from. View site here.
Content Marketing
A six-month evidence-led editorial programme across multiple channels.
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Fourteen articles written and approved, spanning progression and careers, nursery life, wellbeing, teamwork, settling-in and safeguarding, sustainability and sector policy.
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Split by channel: nursery life and team stories on the company Linkedin page. Leadership and sector opinion under the founder's name.
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Six month publishing schedule with posting guidance, engagement windows and a review point mid-campaign.
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Reactive thought leadership held ready to publish within 48 hours of a sector announcement.
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Every article doubled as a website blog post to build search presence around the new site
Consistent, credible content that builds a leadership voice as well as a brand. Read articles here.
Video Production
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The videos had to support the copy: let people feel who MiChild were, and why they existed, before they walked through the door.
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Ten videos, ten separate shoots. Each planned around numerous pillars, filmed on location across the group with real staff rather than actors, and held together by one brand system.
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Phase one was documentary in style, warm and unscripted, with written parental and staff consent on every shoot. Each film in phase one was delivered as a main edit to support the content stories, with the option for a thirty-second social cut and stills.
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The work split three ways. Videos for parents showed everyday nursery life and the people in it. Videos for recruitment followed apprentices, practitioners and leaders through their own progression. The group brand video carried the wider MiChild story.
Running fourteen nurseries across Blackpool & Fylde Coast, Greater Manchester and Cheshire, I needed marketing expertise to work in partnership with me and my business and a team who would take the time to understand us properly. Not just what we do, but why we do it and how we want families to feel.
David Birch and Betula Marketing Hub did exactly that. From the start, David asked the right questions and listened to the answers. He understood the pressures that come with running and growing a small business, and he picked up the nuances of the childcare sector remarkably quickly. Ours is an industry built on trust, on safeguarding, on the emotions of parents handing over their little ones every morning, and David got that immediately.
The work has been accurate, timely and consistently high in quality. I always believed it would be good. What I did not expect was for it to exceed what I had in mind quite so comfortably. That is a rare thing, and it does not go unnoticed.
If you run an SME and you are looking for a marketing partner who will genuinely understand your business and deliver work you are proud of, I would point you straight to David and the team at Betula Marketing Hub.
Frankie B.