The how and why of summer camp marketing
STOP!
There are a few steps I’m going to need you to take before bothering to dig through any particular marketing techniques.
Step 1 is to put the why of your camp down in plain writing. Until you crystalize why a kid should come to your camp, there’s no way you can communicate that to her or her parents.
Step 2 is a little less fun, but equally important. You need to figure out what each camper is worth to your camp, monetarily, so you can use data to drive your marketing campaigns instead of guesswork. Go check out the summer camp retention analysis tool for a quick and easy way to calculate these numbers for yourself. You see, we can’t even talk about making good marketing decisions until you know what each camper is worth to you monetarily in the long run. A camp that profits an average of $144 over a camper’s tenure is going to be making much different marketing decisions than a camp that makes $1,444, or $14,444 per camper. Now we can talk marketing strategy, and online presence, and all that good stuff – but none of it means anything if you won’t be able to forecast, roughly, how many campers you’ll need to bring in to make a given marketing effort worth it.
On to the recent posts I’ve made about marketing! For an important marketing 101 post, (you’ll need to have done your homework in the above steps!), click here.
Posted by James Davis on 2:35 am in featured, Summer Camp Marketing Ideas | 2 comments
Bring more kids to summer camp, but only if you don’t screw it up the way I have! The world of online advertising is downright scary. Purchasing nebulous “clicks” and “views” was enough to give this traditional marketer fits when I first threw my hat into the ring of online advertising. While we had some nice successes along the way, we had some fairly epic failures as well. I’m here to share with you the good, the bad, and the ugly. I’m going to break down the three ways we’ve attempted to pay for advertising online, and our various successes and failures with each. I’m here to take the mystery away from online paid advertising – this stuff really works if you know which choppy waters to avoid, and which low hanging fruit to pick. Luckily I’ve gotten chopped up quite a bit on my way to picking some delicious advertising fruit, and I’ll share the details of my experiences with you for free 🙂 The 3 ways we’ve paid for advertising online are Facebook advertisements, Google Adwords, and standard banner ads with a local newspaper’s website (syracuse dot com). If you want to skip ahead to either of those sections, go for it. No? Let’s start with some serious failures, then, shall we? The keys to using Google Adwords effectively Google Adwords are some of the most powerful forms of advertising to have ever been available to online marketers. They have also been some of the most dangerous money sinks known to online marketers. I’d describe my experience with them as the latter. If you are unfamiliar with Google Adwords advertisements, they are the terms that appear with the word “ad” next to them above what are known as “organic” search results – or the pages that rank highly because they are the ones people are actually looking for 🙂 I could go pretty geeky on you here, but I’ll spare you the novel, and give you brass tax. Google Adwords are awesome for one reason – intent to buy. When people type a term into a search engine like “summer camps new york city,” there’s a great chance they intend to find a summer camp website to buy a session for their children. This gives them a huge advantage that simply doesn’t exist on the other platforms I’ve used. It’s been shown time and time again that for sales conversions, Google Adwords are king. Since you can pay for clicks (i.e., you only pay if someone actually clicks your ad), you know that you are only paying a dime any time someone has actually come across your website. This is a terrific deal, and one I think anyone who has tried “print and pray” forms of print advertising would kill for. A quick pro tip – if you do go the route of Google Adwords, make sure you link to a page where someone can actually make a purchase. People who click advertisements are notoriously fickle – if they can’t take action in any obvious way, they are quite likely to simply disappear on you. It all sounds pretty amazing, right? You just pick some search terms that you think people would type in who’d want to go to your summer camp, and you go from there,...
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Posted by James Davis on 6:51 pm in featured, Summer Camp Marketing Ideas | 0 comments
Deciding what print ads (if any) are right for you I have to be honest with you: sometimes, print marketing vexes me. Let me explain. With all of the “modern” ways of marketing, like creating an awesome website, or powerful and targeted online ads (more on that coming soon), print marketing feels a little… scary. The reasons for this are two fold. 1) It’s very hard to know if someone found you via a print advertisement, whereas our websites will tell us exactly where people have come to us from. 2) Print ads are, per capita, simply more expensive. Now, you might be ready to hit your “back” button and go read about some other opportunities. But it isn’t so simple. While it’s true that our marketing dollars are scarce, and their are a LOT of low hanging fruit opportunities out there, it doesn’t have to be a question of “should we take advantage of these marketing opportunities while ignoring these others?” That’s what I like to call “narrow framing, or a decision making approach that thinks of things in terms of “do I do this, or do I do that?” while ignoring the fact that for every single dollar you have, there are infinite possibilities. You don’t need to decide between print OR online marketing, you can certainly decide for both. The important question is: should you? Deciding if Print Marketing is Right for Your Camp As always – we need to return to our “What each camper is worth” figure, which can be derived from the retention tool. Once you have a figure as to what you estimate each camper is worth to you monetarily, you will have a better springboard with which to make these decisions. So, let’s try a case study. Your “What each camper is worth” (weciw) figure is $1,000. So, over the course of his lifetime, 1 camper nets you about $1,000 in profits before considering other benefits, like referrals, etc. A local magazine calls you with an offer – a 1” x 3” column in their April and May periodicals. It costs $375 per month if you buy 2 months worth. They claim around 30,000 households in circulation, and say they are right in your target demographic (they are a family magazine, let’s say). So, that’s $750 to hit the same 30,000 households twice in two months during peak summer camp decision making time. Do you think you can get 1 camper from the investment? If the answer is yes, and money is no object, you buy it. Seems pretty simple, right? Now, if you have to choose between spending $750 on an advertisement in this magazine and $750 on a Ga ga court… I’m going to steer you in the direction of the Ga Ga court. Keeping a camper is FAR easier than getting a brand new camper, and I’m here to tell you that getting a Ga Ga court will be worth at least 2 campers for you next summer. Now, if you can spend $750 and get 1,500 clicks from a Google adwords campaign? People who have searched a term, and have intent to look for specifically a summer camp for the upcoming season? We have a much closer decision. Before we move on – here’s a quick check-list...
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Posted by James Davis on 6:22 pm in Summer Camp Marketing Ideas | 0 comments
Mobilizing your camp website for maximum marketing impact Let me bring you back to my own brain in 2011, when I sat down to design a website for the first time. Our camp was broke, but our website was both outdated and difficult to update (since I had to work with someone else to do it). I was overwhelmed, plain and simple. The idea of creating a website sounded like something that had to be either A) incredibly expensive, or B) done by people much more technical than I was. But, we didn’t have options. So I had to learn. Thankfully, there was someone to hold my hand through the first few steps. And he was wise enough to get me set up with something that was decidedly NOT technical. So, while this post could be 100,000 words (and I might do follow-ups on this at some point, if people are interested), I am going to try and pare it down as simply as possible – and walk you through how you can set up a new camp website for yourself in a week of hard work. And first, I just want to say – a new website changed the directory of our camp more than the rest of the things we have done, combined. That’s not hyperbole. We get more leads and conversions on summer camp sales through our new and improved website (replete with Search Engine Optimization techniques, which we’ll get to), than any other form of referrals, including word of mouth. The very first steps toward your new website Okay, you’re feeling scared and skeptical. If you’re feeling REALLY scared and skeptical, and you don’t think you’ll ever do this, no problem. You can hire me to do it for a heck of a lot less than you pay a traditional developer, and you can rest assured that you have someone who really knows camp. I only make websites for folks that they can fully run themselves after the fact, recognizing that occasional customer support will be necessary to get them out of a pickle here or there. Here are a few websites I’ve built: Vanderkamp Center, A Daily Fantasy Sports Website, and of course, this website right here. You can contact me if you have any interest. But for the bold? You’re ready to get cracking. Awesome! Let’s do it. The first thing I’d do if I were starting a new website from scratch is decide on a VERY easy to use content management platform. A content management platform is a fancy way of saying “something like WordPress.” A user-friendly interface that allows you to make posts, add images, update calendars, and so on, so you don’t have to pay someone every time you change the littlest thing on your website. An easy to use content management platform is essential to continued success online. If your website is hard to use, you won’t update it as frequently as you should, and you’ll miss out on precious campers that could go to your camp this summer, but wind up doing something else. I personally use WordPress on all the websites I make because it’s both powerful and easy to use. You can also use Squarespace, which has a really user-friendly interface and some gorgeous themes. The...
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Posted by James Davis on 5:04 pm in featured, Summer Camp Activities Ideas, Summer Camp Marketing Ideas | 0 comments
Getting your Campers and their Families to do (some of) Your Marketing for You If you are in a position to make summer camp marketing decisions, you’ve heard the term “word of mouth marketing” more times than you can remember. If you were playing camp marketing bingo, “word of mouth marketing” would be the center square. The big mistake I made when I took on the responsibility of making marketing decisions for a summer camp? I assumed this whole “word of mouth” thing would take care of itself. And it does, to some degree… but relying on it taking care of itself was causing us to miss out on a ton of word of mouth good will. I’ll explain where I was, and what I discovered. By the way – if you want to take a break and check out Travis Allison’s definitive slide-show on word of mouth marketing from his 2014 Tristate ACA conference, I couldn’t blame you. I learned a ton there, and much of what he covers is NOT covered below. The first step in developing a word of mouth “buzz” The big idea I had at the time was to create singular, memorable events at camp. Big events, with lots of pomp and circumstance. My guess was (and still is) that kids rarely go home and tell their friends about playing soccer, but they WILL tell them about building a raft from scratch in order to cross a lake. Now, I stand by the idea that we shouldn’t actively market our camps based on these big events alone. After all, Your Camp is Not its Jet Skis. But when kids want to verbalize their camp experience to others, they definitely mention this sort of thing. While they likely come back to your camp each year for things a lot more important than activities, they may not understand your why as well as you do, so it really helps to give them some big memories to point to, specifically, when sharing the story of your camp with others. But giving you a tip like “Have a really fun and memorable camp” seems like a cop out, so I’m not even counting that as part of the list of 11 ways to enhance your word of mouth summer camp marketing. Call it a bonus 🙂 On to the list! Leveraging your web presence to enhance your word of mouth marketing campaign. Tips 1-4 are ways we’ve seen to leverage word of mouth marketing concepts online. 1) Gather and share camper and parent testimonials. Here is our page at Vanderkamp. This isn’t classic “word of mouth marketing” in that people aren’t talking to each other directly, but it provides “social proof” (more on that in the web design articles coming up at a later date) – showing that real people have had terrific experiences at our camp. We’ll link to these from our Facebook page, references them in e-newsletters, and so on. 2) Encourage people to share things digitally If you’re going to all that work connecting with people online, why not ask them to pass that information along to others? It helps to have universally interesting content (pictures of kids doing interesting things, as opposed to just text), but often times just asking people to share things...
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Posted by James Davis on 3:27 pm in featured, Summer Camp Marketing Ideas | 0 comments
Engaging your #1 target audience There’s a trick to marketing that a lot of folks don’t know. I certainly didn’t when I first started trying to market summer camp. I was so desperate to engage all those other people out there. Those people, who if they just heard about my camp, would fill every bed for me next summer. Unfortunately for me, focusing on people who had never heard of my camp at the expense of those who had already heard of my camp was like fishing pennies out of a fountain while ignoring a stack of dollar bills on the bench next to me. You see, it really boils down to a math problem. Per the formula used in our summer camp retention tool, we realized what our average camper was worth to our camp, monetarily (not even including referrals, and volunteering – just what that camper alone would be worth over the lifetime of her experience with us). We then looked at our retention rate – roughly 63% at the time. So we asked ourselves – what would it cost us to increase our retention to 65%? How about 75%? Was 85% possible? We weren’t sure – but one thing was clear, spending $2,000 to advertise on the local city’s website would be insane if we only had $2,000 to spend. If we only had $2,000 to spend, we realized, we needed to spend it on retention – or marketing to the people who already cared about us. And then we realized, Hey – we might not need to spend much money at all on retaining more kids. We talked to some other camps, and used our own creativity, and we settled on these 7 tricks that have made a world of difference for us. And to be clear – we’re not talking about “tricking” anyone into coming to camp. We’re talking about ways to authentically connect with people – to give them full information about what their attending camp means to us, so they can make the best decision possible. On to the tricks! The 7 tricks to guarantee greater summer camper retention 1) Make sure every kid is told, to his face, that you want to see HIM back later THIS summer. 2) On the day they leave, have counselors encourage kids to thank their parents for sending them, if they want to come back in the future. 3) Have each counselor talk to each parent, and tell them something special about their child. 4) Add a new program every year, and specifically talk to each returning camper about it. 5) Early in the week, ask each camper, specifically, what they want to do later in the week. If that activity isn’t on the schedule, make it so. 6) Call every family that came to camp, they day AFTER the day they registered during the previous year, to ask after their intentions for the upcoming season. 7) Have counselors write birthday cards to every kid at the end of the week, and mail them on the kid’s birthday (we didn’t actually do this one, but I’ve heard it’s killer.) Tricks to empower your counselors and campers on the last day of camp. The most important day, by far, when it comes to retaining a camper...
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Posted by James Davis on 6:32 pm in featured, Summer Camp Marketing Ideas | 0 comments
Congratulations! You’ve decided to market your camp! You’ve figured out why a kid should come to your camp instead of going elsewhere, and you’ve figured out what each camper is worth to your camp monetarily by using our summer camp retention tool, and you’re ready to dive into what to do next. Let’s start with a few broad concepts. Did you know that the average marketing budget for most non-profits represents between 9 and 11 percent of the overall budget? And maybe your camp is different, but at the places I’ve worked, camp marketing budgets tend to fall far below that. It makes sense, to some degree. We’re a word-of-mouth enterprise. Most of our new summer campers will come because their Moms went here, or because little Jack across the street said he couldn’t wait to go back next year. If your camp is like mine, however, you’ll occasionally get a comment like this: “Oh, I found you in the pennysaver,” New Camp Mom says. “And you’d never heard about us elsewhere?” I’d ask, incredulously. “Nope. But then I went to the website, and Robin thought it looked like fun!” And just like that, your camp has added your “what each camper is worth” figure to its bottom line, and it hasn’t even accounted for the gains possible if Robin brings a friend next year, or if her family decides to hold a family reunion there during retreat season. Parents send their children to camp for all variety of reasons, but one thing all of those parents have in common is that they have heard about your camp. And this is what marketing is. Marketing is not coercion, or trickery, or deception. Marketing is communicating that you are offering something that can help someone else solve a problem. Sounds pretty easy, right? Well, for me, it was, and it wasn’t. Let me show you what we did. The first step The first step will always be to determine what each camper is worth (WECIW), monetarily, during its tenure at your camp. Once we got this number, we realized that there are basic, quantifiable ways we could approach various marketing opportunities. Say your WECIW # is $800. This is enough to run a targeted Google Adwords campaign for keywords like Summer Camp in [insert your area] for a handful of months (depending on what sort of campaign you run). With how people use the internet these days, do you have any doubt that you’ll be able to generate at least 1 new camper in 3 months of using Google Adwords? 2.4 million searches are done each month on Summer Camp. Those peak months are April, May, and June. Obviously, there are no guarantees when it comes to marketing, but given that our campers are worth so much to our bottom line – isn’t marketing your camp a relatively small risk? As an industry, we are drastically under marketed. People need to know how darn important camp is in the lives of young people. They need to know about as many camps as possible. They need know the statistics about how it’s impacted so many people. If some don’t think summer camp is relevant anymore, that’s their loss. But it’s our job to make sure they know we’re still around and...
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Posted by James Davis on 6:31 pm in featured, Summer Camp Marketing Ideas | 0 comments
The best places to connect with people, and how to get your materials there. Marketing summer camps has actually never been easier. We have opportunities today that camp directors from the 1970s could literally not have even dreamed about. Unfortunately, though, a lot of us ignore a lot of the marketing approaches that got the summer camp boom going in the 1950s and 1960s. The key to marketing in the 21st century is blending both old and new practices, and I’ll explain what I discovered along the way to growing Vanderkamp from 207 kids in a summer to 418 just two summers later. There are 8 basic marketing platforms we’ve worked with, and I can give you some insight into the costs and benefits of each. I’ll give the cliffs here, and follow up with some more long-form posts on the nuances of each. But this will give you a general idea, to help you understand what worked for us, or what we want to try next. The Eight Major Camp Marketing Platforms 1) Retaining current customers – Check here for details on the 7 inexpensive tricks we used that are guaranteed to boost your retention. 2) Word of Mouth Marketing – Here are 11 easy ways to enhance your word of mouth marketing campaign. 3) Making materials available publicly (mailing brochures to churches to be put out, putting them in libraries, at the mall, etc) 4) Direct mail to cold prospects – check out a more in-depth article here: Getting first time campers with 2 easy direct-mail strategies 5) Creating a website that’s great for prospective customers and search engines – here’s an article on mobilizing your camp’s website for maximum marketing impact. 6) Traditional print advertising to new clients – Are traditional print marketing platforms still worth it? 7) Paid Online Advertising – Check out this post that demystifies online advertising, and shares our successes and failures with easy things you can do to pay for advertising online better. 8) Creating online outposts (facebook, twitter, pinterest, facebook discussion groups, etc). Are you ready to grow your camp and change more lives? * indicates required Email Address * First Name Last...
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Posted by James Davis on 2:57 am in featured, Summer Camp Marketing Ideas | 0 comments
So why are you marketing it that way? Whenever I talk to a camp person, we wind up talking about what hooked us on summer camp. And it seems like we all have basically the same feelings on the subject. “Camp was the first place I could really be myself.” “The friends I made at summer camp just weren’t like anybody I had ever met.” “I had this one amazing counselor who…” “It was the place I became my best self.” You get the idea. I’ve literally never heard anyone reflect back and say something like, “They had this insane rock wall there,” or “You’ll never believe the jet skis they had at my camp!” Now, this isn’t totally fair, because I’m mostly talking to summer camp die-hards. These people found something so much bigger than jet skis, or rock walls, or color wars, and this is why they’ve dedicated their lives to summer camp. But I think we can all agree that those first set of quotes are the things about summer camp that we really care about. The things that we love to hear back from parents regarding their kids’ experience at our camp. The objectives we’re putting forth during staff training. I started thinking, as I was making my promotional materials in 2012 – if that’s what is actually important about summer camp, why did my marketing materials brag about all that other stuff? A promotional video I helped work on spent 7 minutes showing “fun stuff” and less than 3 discussing why camp was so important. My own summer camp brochure had pictures of kids smiling, sure, but it was essentially a list of cool things to do at camp. And I’m pretty sure that many parents who read our brochure set it down, and said, “Who cares?” Parents who first encounter information about your camp are not looking for activities, whether they realize it or not. They’re looking for a place to entrust the care of the most important person in the world. Now they might see your awesome jet skis and say, “Wow, Darren loves jet skiing!” But you haven’t gotten to the heart of what they want, and this is a critical marketing issue. You see, marketing summer camp is just like marketing anything else, and successful marketing has a pretty basic formula. What I learned from late night infomercials So, you’re watching late night TV. A charismatic, middle-aged man comes on screen, and begins talking to you. He is talking about a problem. Let’s say he’s talking about the problem of being out of shape. He’s probably talking about something even more specific, though. Hmm. He’s probably talking about being out of shape AND getting into shape without working out 3 hours a day. He’s going further – he’s talking about being in shape while juggling all of your other responsibilities in just 8 minutes a day. Essentially, he’s communicating that a problem exists, and you may very well have it. Once he finds you nodding along that it would be nice to solve said problem, he continues. He explains how he has something that solves this problem. “In this box,” he might say, “I have an 8 minute abs video (or a home gym, or a pull up bar, or...
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