How to Maximise Camp Bookings: Expert Insights From Charlie Hiscox at uSports

Online Marketing for Camps

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Be honest, how much time do you spend online? Probably too much if you are like me! But, this is exactly why online marketing is so important. Getting your online marketing right can make a great impact on your holiday camps. There are so many camps today which are run by excellent coaches but because they have no online presence, it is nearly impossible to find out about the camp! I will cover a number of different areas of online marketing, so in this section I will talk you through the basics of paid advertising.

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[.green__text]Paid advertising[.green__text]

1. Where and how do I create paid ads?

We use Google Ads & Meta Ads. Both are fantastic resources but both can also be very confusing to decipher! If you aren't super confident when it comes to tech, I'd recommend watching some helpful webinars or testing the waters by boosting your social media posts first.

2. How much should I pay?

You will often be recommended budgets on these platforms, remember that you should keep in mind the size of your business and your own budget. Try with a small budget in the first instance and you can always increase it over time.

3. How do I know if it’s worth it?

Make sure to regularly track your paid adverts to make sure that you aren’t paying for searches which are completely unrelated to your services! Unwanted search terms can really add up and it is important to keep an eye on them. It is also good practice to keep track of how people heard about you to see if anyone mentions your adverts. On ClassForKids you can add bespoke registration questions and one of ours asks ‘How did you hear about us?’ It is one of our most useful marketing tools!  

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[.orange__text]Social Media[.orange__text]

With everything that we post on social media, we try to provide our audience with posts that will interest them and just a sprinkling of sales. These are the key things to ask yourself before hitting “post”:

1. Does it entertain?
2. Does it educate?

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Focusing your social media feeds on these two questions allows you to create a platform that is engaging for your audience. Why is this important? If your feed is filled with just sales content asking parents to book onto your camp, it isn’t going to keep their attention. Instead, you need to make your page one which parents want to follow. Then, by building that trust, you can then add in posts which directly encourage parents to book on to camps.

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Social media allows you to build rapport with a far larger number of parents than you could personally. You are also able to build trust with existing and new parents! Ultimately, the key to social media is consistency so make sure your social media feeds are regularly updated. [.pink__text]Get more tips on how to use Instagram and Facebook to grow your business over on the ClassForKids blog![.pink__text]

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[.blue__text]Your Website[.blue__text]

Your website should be easy to understand and should give parents all the information that they need. You can have a fantastic marketing plan but if parents end up on a webpage that looks unprofessional or is difficult to understand, they are likely to leave and book elsewhere. Here at uSports we have developed our own website, however, if you are not very confident with IT, I would highly recommend that you invest in a professionally built website. I’ve found that it can really help you to stand out from the crowd.

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With your website you need to again just ask yourself two key questions, this time:

1. Does it build trust?
2. Does it sell?

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Parents need to be encouraged to book. They need to be able to do so easily and they want to be reassured that what they are booking is the best option for their child.

[.green__text]Take some inspiration from the uSports website to see what you could include in your own site to make the experience user friendly[.green__text]

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[.orange__text]A Good Booking System[.orange__text]

Just like having a good website, you need to make sure that you have a good booking system to make the user experience as seamless as possible! At uSports, we have been using ClassForKids since the very beginning. We have been approached by numerous other platforms but genuinely none have quite matched everything that ClassForKids has to offer!  

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For us, the main reason that we use ClassForKids is that it is clearly designed with ease of use in mind. Whether you are a parent making a booking, a coach taking a register or an administrator creating a booking link; the platform is easy to use and clearly built with the children’s activity provider sector in mind. It sounds simple but trust us; we have seen a lot of platforms in our time which just don’t meet even the basic requirements!  

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There are so many excellent features of ClassForKids which help us to run our holiday camps that I could go on, but two of my favourite features are:

• Simple Discount Codes

Not only does the platform allow you to turn on automatic sibling discounts, you are also able to create your own unique discount codes. These codes can be tracked which allows you to see how many times a code has been used. This means you can measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign by linking it to a special discount code!

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• Quick Process For Changing Days

Plans change, sickness bugs strike & sometimes camp bookings need to be moved! ClassForKids allows you to easily change a parent booking from one day to another which allows you to offer flexibility to your customers; something which I have found invaluable!

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[.pink__text]See what ClassForKids can do for your camp today![.pink__text]

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