Being a nanny, babysitter or professional caregiver in the digital age means staying on top of new online resources and coming up with innovative ways to market yourself to potential clients and families. You’re tasked not only with keeping your resume and job references up to date but also with building and maintaining an impressive online presence.
Having the right tools in your marketing toolbox—and knowing how to use them—can help you stand out from the crowd and land the job you want. From building a social media presence to creating a standout job profile, here’s what you need to know to build your brand as a professional caregiver.
Keep your online presence professional, or private
Your personal and professional lives should be separate entities. This is especially crucial when marketing yourself as a caregiver. Your online job profile, social media accounts and website should be polished and complete with your experience and skills that show you are a well-rounded and qualified candidate for any job.
When marketing yourself online, you need to have a cohesive brand. It’s also essential to keep in mind that everything you put on social media is visible to everybody if you haven’t enabled the right privacy settings. It’s also super important to be prompt and professional in your interactions with potential clients.
Beware of mixing too much of your personal life and information with your business persona. Remember your audience. Keep the photos and content on your social media profiles and website professional. If you have to think twice about it, you probably should not be posting it. If you want to post personal content for your friends and family on social media, set your account to private. You may also want to consider creating a public business profile so that clients can leave reviews and ratings for other potential families to evaluate you as a caregiver.
There is a balance to building trust, and it’s not always wise or professional to overshare things that your audience does not benefit from or care about. Just because you have a website and an online presence does not mean that people know who you are. Marketing yourself involves extending your reach and finding new potential customers—even in your local area—many of whom will not know your service or brand exists.
A job that requires high levels of security, trust and responsibility shouldn’t be taken lightly, and your digital presence should reflect that you understand that. Your digital presence in many ways can act as an extension of your professional resume. Treat everything you post and create as if it were a part of your portfolio of work so your integrity speaks for itself.
Polish your online job profiles
Creating a job profile for yourself on job sites like LinkedIn or Care.com can also extend your digital reach to potential clients. List your professional skills and experience here, as well as your website. Linking to these pages on your actual website only further strengthens your online identity and may help future families feel comfortable booking you.
Here are a few additional tips to keeping your professional profile and website up to date.
1. Have a high-quality profile photo or headshot.
Your website should include a high-quality headshot of yourself. Caregiving is a very personal profession, and potential clients want to see who they might be inviting into their homes. The headshot can be featured on your Contact or About page, as well as the main page of your website, so that clients can immediately see who you are. If you plan to feature any other photography on your website, make sure those photos are high-quality and tasteful, so people know you take your job seriously.
2. Make sure to complete each section with accurate information.
Include all relevant work history. Add a few sentences or several bullet points under each job that explain what your key responsibilities were, as well as any accomplishments you achieved. If you spent several years as a babysitter or family caregiver, this counts towards your overall experience even if you didn’t have the specific title of ‘nanny’ or ‘senior caregiver’.
3. Include your relevant skills.
You will likely have several areas of expertise, such as newborn care, meal planning, homework help for elementary age students and other specific skills. Potential families may be looking for someone with a special skill, class or certification. Listing your talents, qualifications and abilities could be the deciding factor between you and someone else who does not have your same skill set.
4. Add your contact information.
Include a phone number or email address where you can quickly be reached. Sites like LinkedIn and Care.com will not display your personal contact information online, but they will allow potential families to reach you using your preferred contact method.
5. Ask for recommendations.
Job profile sites often give you the opportunity to have others recommend you. If you’ve worked for a family before, ask one of the parents to leave a public review on your profile for prospective families to read. Just as you might look up restaurant reviews and base your decision about which one to visit on them, some families may do the same when looking for a caregiver. A good review can be the deciding factor.
6. Check for typos.
As with anything online, give your profile a second look and ask a friend to review it for you. Be on the lookout for spelling and grammatical errors or any information that may be incorrect or outdated.
Create your own website
Create a website using a basic template from a site like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly or Wix. These sites allow you to build a website without having any specific digital skills, at a very reasonable cost.
When you have a website, you have a piece of digital real estate, which you can control and manipulate in any way you find necessary to market yourself. Make sure to buy the domain of your business name even if you aren’t ready to build a site so that you have it. Once you’ve built it, driving traffic to that website is key, and that is where having additional platforms like social media accounts can be beneficial.
Having your own website is the easiest way to have all your credentials in one place. You can include your CV, services offered and rates, recommendations from clients as well as a way to contact you. Your website can demonstrate that you’re a serious career nanny, as opposed to a caregiver who is working on an occasional or more casual basis. By having a professional website, you can convey to families that you’re really passionate about your career and that you’re always willing to go the extra mile.
A website can be the determining factor between landing the job or not. Even when someone gets a recommendation through word of mouth, they cross-reference that information with what they can find online. You need to have a presence in multiple places so you can attract people through whichever mediums they use to search.