How to Successfully Market Your Camps

May 14, 2021

Planning a summer camp is tough stuff so make sure your hard work pays off by getting as many attendees as possible!

Attracting new campers is never as easy as it seems. You would think that the promise of all those awesome activities would be enough to get you as many sign-ups as you could take! But as we all know, that is just not how it works.

That being said, here are 6 of our favorite ways to market your summer camp to boost enrollment.

 

1. Social Media

Social media is everywhere and it’s everything these days when it comes to marketing. Odds are, you have a social media account. Your business manager probably has social media accounts. Your coaches probably have social media accounts. And your customers definitely have social media accounts! So ask yourself, how are you utilizing these audiences?

If you have a Facebook page for your business, posting about your summer camps just one time isn’t going to cut it. So, don’t be afraid to post weekly announcements to your customers reminding them to sign up for your camps. Be sure to share those posts from your business account to your personal account and instate an incentive for your employees to share the posts to their accounts.

Another way to drum up excitement about your camps is to encourage your customers to share your camp promotional posts by doing a giveaway! Post a graphic that states your summer camp details and caption it something like this:

GIVEAWAY: Are you as excited as we are about summer camps?? Like and share this post for the opportunity to win! One lucky winner will be selected to receive 30% off of tuition.

And make sure your social media posts have amazing eye-catching graphics. Not a graphic designer? Fear not! There are tons of online services that make designing for social media easy. Check out the hundreds of easily editable templates on canva.com.

 

2. Email, Email, Email

Emailing your customers in iClassPro is easy! You know that flashy summer camp graphic you made for social media? Use it to design an awesome custom email template to make sure that all of your customers know about the camps that you are offering! Maybe students that haven’t been enrolled in a while will be interested in joining a summer camp and that could lead to them also enrolling in the fall!

To learn more about setting up custom email templates in iClassPro, click here.

 

3. Snail Mail

Postcards, letters, or simple flyers are a sure-fire way to reach people who may not be reading their emails or aren’t seeing your posts on social media. Snail mail doesn’t have to be fancy, it just needs to tell your customers 1) what makes your summer camps awesome 2) why they should sign up and 3) how to sign up for your camps. As long as you communicate that information, you’ll get the point across.

Don’t want to spend the money to send it to a printer? Print it on copy paper from your office printer. Remember, something is better than nothing!

 

4. QR Code

Speaking of snail mail, there is no way to click a link on a postcard! So one of the most important things to remember about getting students enrolled in summer camp is that you need to make the signup process as easy as possible. To do so we recommend using QR codes. QR codes are a great way to get your customers to your registration page with a single click.

QR Codes are a unique code that appears as an image that can be read by phone cameras. If you generate a code to link to your customer portal, you can print that code onto flyers, postcards, letters, or even business cards! With most cell phones, as soon a camera is focused on the code, a link will appear and take them directly to where they need to go.

This simple tool may prevent your customers from reading a letter and setting it down with the intention to sign up later. Instead, maybe they will see how cool your camp is and pull out their phones and sign up right away! Check out this easy online QR Code generator.

 

5. Referrals

Remember that cool giveaway idea for Facebook? The reason “like and share” posts work is because people tend to trust the opinions of their peers. Put into place a word of mouth referral that if your customers or students refer a new customer, they get a free t-shirt, or a percentage off of their next tuition! Be creative!

 

6. Great Videos and Photos for Next Year

And last but certainly not least, don’t forget to take amazing photos and videos to be used to promote your summer camps next year!

Showcase how awesome your staff is, catch your students having an absolute blast, and don’t forget to save all of those photos and videos in a place where you can use them for next year’s promotion. It is one thing to tell customers that kids always have a blast at summer camps but it is a whole other thing to SHOW them. These awesome photos and videos can also be used to showcase your camp in the form of an update on social media so parents can see that their investment is paying off. And if you are still accepting enrollments, these photos may draw last-minute signups to your camps.

 

So there you have it! As long as registration is still open, it’s never too late to promote your camps. Take note this year of what works for you and what doesn’t and apply it to next year. Use everything as a learning opportunity and continue to grow your camps every year in order to grow your business!