How to Market Your Summer Camp | Summer Camp Marketing | CampMarketingNews.com

Even though everyone may have different marketing goals, we all use content marketing to achieve them.

For example, you may be trying to get more sales leads, while I may be trying to close more sales.

Your sister may want more Twitter followers, while your girlfriend wants more YouTube.

And so each of us spends time creating and distributing content relevant to our respective marketing goals in hopes of getting our customers and prospects to take some kind of action (follow your sister on Twitter, for instance).

But even though each of us might use different content marketing tools to reach our goals, there's one thing we can all agree on, one singular purpose we all share:

Each of us wants to capture -- and KEEP -- our target market's attention all the way through our respective content marketing messages, because if we can't we severely hurt our chances of achieving our goals in the first place.

Let's face it.

If just won't matter if your sister creates the best…

After reading with interest this week the post about how teenagers use social media, I wanted to get my own 14-year-old twin boys' opinions on the matter. The reason why is because the original blog post was written by a 19-year old college student, and I run a summer camp for kids, so I thought my kids' insight would be more valuable to me and other people who run youth-serving organizations or companies that market to kids.

So I asked my boys, Josh and Noah, if I could interview them over video about their social media preferences and post it online but they declined. They'd rather play baseball today since it's their last day of winter break. But they did say I could have 45 seconds with them to ask a few questions. Here's what they told me in a nutshell:

 "Twitter is FAR better than Instagram for two reasons. One, it's much easier to talk to people on Twitter than Instagram, and two, you can post several times a day on Twitter without losing followers. …

If you're like most camps, you probably offer an Early Bird discount as a marketing strategy. There's a reason why so many of us do this...and that's because it works!!

There's no doubt about it, all of us typically see a huge enrollment rush just before the Early Bird deadline expires or even ON the deadline itself. (This rush of sign-ups shows just how important saving money is to families these days, and also how such a discount can be such an important enrollment driver for your program.)

But here's the thing. Even though you may be getting a bunch of sign-ups at the Early Bird deadline, wouldn't it be nice to get even more? The good news is, you can.

Consider this: Even though everyone loves a discount, sometimes saving money still isn't enough to get people to sign up for camp. In fact, I'd be willing to bet there's a lot more campers you could be getting just by offering a LITTLE SOMETHING MORE beyond your Early Bird discount itself.

Now I&#…

A long-held strategy among summer camp marketers has been to retain current campers first, and acquire new ones next. I used to feel that way myself, but not anymore.

The fact is, if you run a great camp, you should have no trouble getting lots of referrals and repeat business from happy families, which means camper retention should take care of itself.

On the other hand, if you don't have a constant stream of new campers every year, let's face it - you're toast. There's just no way to continue operating without loads of new kids each summer.

Camps aren't like restaurants or car dealerships or airlines or pro sports teams or any other business, for that matter, that can rely on keeping customers for life. As camp professionals, we only have a few years at the most before customers move away, try other things, age-out of our programs, or otherwise stop coming to camp for whatever reason.

So even though this thinking flies in the face of traditional marketing strate…

My ideas of summer camp marketing are different than most. The traditional way to market a camp is taking a safe, comfortable, familiar approach, doing things like they've always been done, and thinking "inside the box."

My way involves taking risks, trying new things, borrowing marketing ideas from other industries and applying them to my promotional activities, and employing an "edgy" marketing style I believe helps my camp stand out.

For example, I think cell phones should be allowed at camp. I've held this position a long time. There's lots of reasons I feel this way, but in general, it's just the way the world's going and camps that try to fight it will have a tough time.

I gave a marketing speech in Tucson last month to summer camp owners and directors where I posited cell phones should be allowed at camp.. I'm not sure my position went over too well because from what I observed, the vast majority of camp marketing people (or at leas…