Top Camp Website Marketing Tools and Tips

There are many ways for you to promote your camp both on and offline. All camp website marketing techniques have a cost in time and some come with out of pocket costs. If you are hesitant about spending money you’ll have to free up more time – this also has a cost. Here are a few tools that tend to apply to many camp businesses.

Camp Website Marketing Basics

Your website has been fully updated with all the relevant camp information preferably on 1 page if one program and more pages if more extensive offerings.

On your homepage, some of the information below should be listed prominently with a link to the CAMP page. Let’s get visitors to the camp page quickly and easily so we don’t confuse or fatigue them. Camp information should stay up on the home page too while camps are open unless you close registration in which case you may wish to note this there.

-Program Description*

-Age/Grade of Children served*

-Days & Times including any before or after care options*

-Location Information*

-Fees and Checkout Cart utility*

–Contact info for further information/signup if no checkout cart on website*

-Call

-Email

-Fill out a short form & submit

-Description/Short Bio of Staff leading program

-Testimonials

* This information is compulsory and must be clear

Pictures and Video will help tell your story as well since many of us are visual creatures.

The more complete and clear your information is presented the fewer calls/inquiries you will get for clarification which is a time waster for you and your staff. Some won’t even bother to contact you and just move on due to confusion and frustration.

Camp Website Marketing Content and Blog

You need at this time of year to update your website content more frequently since we are aggressively trying to bring visitors there. Each time they visit we need to have something new and compelling for them. So that means at least weekly add some fresh pictures, video, information about programs and information pertaining to your area of expertise which helps demonstrate your expertise. You are running summer camps so you are an expert in this and need to discuss various aspects of this to promote your programs.

Camp Website Marketing with Social Media

It’s free to blast out your information on Facebook to your followers. You can also spend money to promote these posts as well. Go after these folks as often as you can as long as you come up with fresh content and are not being gratuitous and repetitive. You can also promote via any other social media platforms your prospects are on. If you are marketing to kids this means reaching their parents. If you are marketing to teens you need to reach both teens and parents who may hang out in different places on the web.

Email Camp Website Marketing

Your email mailing list, if you have one, knows you and will open up your emails at a much higher rate than strangers will. Make sure your email promoting camp has a link directly to your camp page. Don’t inundate these folks but this time of year you can certainly go after them once a week- try some different appeals though so you don’t get erased so readily.

Paid Search Camp Website Marketing

When you do web searches on Google you see ads that when clicked on bring you to websites of advertisers who pay Google for this click (other entities also do this – pay per click marketing). Most successful camps include paid search in their marketing toolkit as the biggest single out of pocket expense.

This is probably the quickest way to get in the game once you are marketing beyond your own community – here we mean community as in people familiar with you. This will cost some money but you only pay when your ad is clicked on and presumably it is clicked based on genuine interest i.e. the searcher is seeking information or wanting to make a purchase.

It takes a bit of time to get this going if you are doing it yourself. If you get some help you can be up within a day and should be able to get leads shortly thereafter. You can set your own budget here but it does require some care and feeding on someone’s part as you are competing with others for these searchers.

Quick Hits/Reminders

-Everyone who enters your property gets a brochure/flyer on your summer program

-If you provide any promotions/specials make sure they have to be used the first 1-3 weeks of the summer so these campers have a chance to re-up for more weeks.

-Consider an early signup bonus or a bonus based on paying upfront for an extended term.

-Ask people who signup how they found you and keep track of this.

-Make sure your website has Google Analytics on it – it’s free. Even if you don’t use it now it will track all the visits to your website so you can go back and analyze this.

-To check if you have it on your website http://www.gachecker.com/

-If you don’t have it get it for free https://www.google.com/analytics/