5 Things Everyone in the Camp Industry Should Do Before Summer Ends

The entire camp industry feels it when… there’s only one month of the summer season left. Do you have some marketing plans set in motion for the future? Perhaps personalized notes to each of your camper families or a social media campaign around back to school? Check out our examples that you may like below. Don’t let the clock tick any faster before getting these ideas checked off your list!

Preset Your “Thank You” Notes Beforehand

It’s better to build up those “Thank you!” email and text messages now than just a few hours before sending them out. One suggestion would be to have counselors type letters to their camper parents and include them in your email template message. Once those message templates are set, there also exists the opportunity to create personalized messages for your clients within each template. (The response will be worth the preparation time!) Remember that these communicative tasks can be achieved in the Email & Communication Tools and Text Messaging feature. If you’re new to our text messaging feature, our blog here can also help you.

Acknowledge The Back to School Spree

Whether your camp hours are overnight, daytime, or operational during the school period itself, ‘Back To School’ is a flexible marketing period for each and every one of your camps. Approach back to school as a chance to spread awareness of your camp at local schools. You can also use our Geographic Locator to find popular regions your campers come from to pick school locations. For example, if fifty of your campers come from one town, advertising along with the local school district in that area could prove to be very beneficial. Another option would be to partner with local businesses to offer discounts to your campers on school supplies. Brainstorming with other non-competitive (think complementary) services in the camp industry is worth exploring, too.

Websites & Web Advertising

Are you digital with your advertisements? It’s well worth a try if you haven’t! If you’re new to the process of advertising online but have done an ad in the paper, ask the newspaper if you can spread the ad to their website too. If you’re comfortable with advertising online, you can also start creating ads and pitching relationships with local businesses who also have websites. For example, let’s say that 15 miles from the fictional camp: Good Pine Tree Center is a town tourist spot. The head counselor of Good Pine decides to dig up some names of the most popular children’s oriented locations. He then meets with several owners of these locations and pitches an idea for a camp advertisement. For the owners who agree to the pitch, there is now not only advertisements in a popular area of your camp but the beginning of a sponsor relationship!

Get on Social Media

There are events happening every day, in every industry, that allow businesses to reach out to their audiences through social media. The camp industry is no different! The downtime between the end and start of summer camp is the perfect time to spruce up or set up a social media account. If you’re concerned about returning to a social media account that hasn’t been up-to-date for a while, build a campaign around your return! Doing so will retain interest from your current followers and gain new attention as well. яндекс

Get Feedback From Your Camp Industry

Although many are small, all campers are mighty! Do not underestimate the importance of camper feedback on their direct experiences. They do make up a majority of the summer camp industry, after all! They’re why you run a camp to begin with. Have you read our blog precisely on getting fast feedback from your very own campers in all sorts of creative ways? If not, it’s time to think like a camper! From talent shows to cardboard boxes of animals that only eat camp reviews—the process of getting quick camp feedback is more intuitive than you think! Start reading here!

Want to further expand your networking efforts? Check out our post on trade shows!