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Utilizing 2 of the oldest (and still best) tricks in the books to help grow your summer camp Alright, this one is going to be quite a bit shorter than some of the other marketing articles I’ve written – largely because the ideas speak for themselves. I think both ideas are a lot easier than many people I’ve spoken to think they are, so I am going to lay down a quick how to. Flyering local schools So, this is one of the easiest and best ways we’ve grown camp in the last few years. I print single-sided, full color flyers. I’ll even attach what I use for school flyers right here. A bullet points on what I try to accomplish with these flyers, and why I’ve constructed them the way they do: 1) I always go with color – kids get so many flyers home, that I want to catch their eye. 2) I always go image heavy – kids are looking at pictures first. If I can sell them on pictures, parents will get to see the flyer. That is goal #1. 3) Since parents get so many flyers, I try to bold specific words and phrases that will catch their eye. I try to emphasize the outcomes we’re promising, rather than stuff we do. 4) I still include stuff we do, because this can be a conversation piece for kids and parents. 5) I never include the year of camp, so I can re-use extra flyers in a future year. 6) I always include obvious ways to contact me, separate from the body of text. 7)...
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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...
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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...
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