Marketing That Gets The Bums In Bunks

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It's that time of year again. Registration has been open for a bit, staff applications are rolling in and school groups are calling to book for Outdoor Education.

You've made that first big push. Way to go!

Now, let's get at it, shall we?

Summer Camp is the main reason why most of us are here. We believe that every camper deserves a week at camp. We believe that every camp is great, but we're REALLY proud of our camp and we REALLY hope that kids will come.

Unfortunately, hope isn't a very high-yield marketing scheme. That's why in this time of year, you're going to be getting a LOT of emails from Camp Marketers (ahem...), who have an absolute bumper-crop of ideas to help you raise camper numbers for the summer of 2018.

While they (ahem...) may have a lot of great ideas, it can be a little overwhelming to not only implement them, but even just choose one in the first place!

Well have no fear, the CampHackers are here! Three of our regulars, Travis, Gab and Joe are joined by the meme-staff-hiring-posting-guru and all around great-guy Marc Cooper from Camp Tamarack are here to give you ideas that WORK.

Tune-in to hear these CampHacker's talk about their first principals, what their insider tricks are, what they are surprised to hear other Camp Directors aren't doing, and even more awesome tips for rocking registration this year!

These are easy to implement, or even better, easy to delegate to the rest of your team (board, staff, alumni, etc!). Get your pencil and papers out, y'all!

What are your Marketing miracles? What have you done that have really got registrations rolling? Let us know in the comments below!

Tool of the Week – Make Yourself a Better Camp Director

Travis: https://readwise.io - Tie your Amazon and Kindle apps into a searchable database & email digest.

Gab: Pegboard for your office - Make your office space match the clean, excellent marketing you do.

Joe: Klein Tools Voltage Tester - Because your camp likes you better not shocked to death.

Marc: Mematic app - Step up your staff hiring post game.

Your Hosts:

Travis Allison, Summer Camp Consultant - CampHacker.TV, Founder at Go Camp Pro
Joe Richards, Executive Director - Pearce Williams Christian Centre
Gabrielle Raill, Camp Director - Camp Ouareau
Marc Cooper, Director - Camp Tamarack Partner at Go Camp Pro

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(Thank you!)

Marketing summer camp to the decision makers: Moms

As summer camp leaders we need to market to moms in order to reach the person in the house who has the greatest influence on purchasing decisions.

In this CampHacker Podcast we talk about ways that camps can be as effective as possible at reaching out to mothers of camp-aged children. We addressed online tools such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest and discussed some basic camp marketing strategies that have worked well for other camps.

Thank you to Jessica Smith from CampEasy.com for joining us and adding so much to the discussion today.

Jessica was kind enough to send us along some Google Alert recipes for you to try:

"sleepaway camp" -camping (to get Google alerts around news, blogs, and conversations for sleepaway camp but not camping)
"homesick at camp" (this will search for the phrase in quotes)
"packing for camp"
summer + camp (results will include both keywords)
sleepaway OR "day camp" (will search for either/or)

What do you know about who does the “buying” with your camp families?
Please leave us a note in the comments below or tweet us @CampHacker with your suggestion.