How to Maximise Camp Bookings: Expert Insights From Charlie Hiscox at uSports
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It’s no secret that we are big fans of holiday clubs here at ClassForKids. With hundreds of club owners joining forces with us to run their holiday camps with confidence, we have some experience on the topic. Now, we are on a mission, not just to give club owners an excellent booking and management software for their camps, but to inform, educate and help club owners to grow their camps too! That is why we’ve asked successful holiday club founder and director, Charlie Hiscox from uSports, to reveal his very best tips for getting more camp bookings! Keep reading to find out how Charlie grew his camps and how you can do the same!
How to Promote a Holiday Camp
How can you earn more in one week of holiday camps than you can in an entire term of school sessions as a children’s activity provider? You must fill those camps with as many camp bookings as possible! At the peak of the summer holidays, we can make more profit in one week of camps than we do in a whole half term of school sessions. Of course, it is not easy to achieve; holiday camps are a constant cycle of building trust, raising awareness and converting sales to ensure your camps are a success.
[.pink__text]I founded uSports in 2017 and since then, we have grown to provide thousands of children with the opportunity to have a positive experience with sport on a weekly basis. In this blog I want to let you know how you can do the same by boosting the number of bookings at your children’s holiday camps.[.pink__text]
Online Marketing for Camps
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.
[.green__text]Paid advertising[.green__text]
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
[.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”:
- Does it entertain?
- Does it educate?
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.
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]
[.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.
With your website you need to again just ask yourself two key questions, this time:
- Does it build trust?
- Does it sell?
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.
[.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!
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!
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!
• 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!
[.pink__text]See what ClassForKids can do for your camp today![.pink__text]
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Offline Marketing for Camps
Some of our most effective marketing strategies are related to offline marketing and it really doesn’t have to be complicated. So, I won’t make this advice complicated for you: offline marketing is about making sure people know you. So how can you get people to know you? These are some quick and easy offline marketing tips I use:
[.blue__text]Print marketing[.blue__text]
- Paper flyers: They still go a long way! Try and get schools and other collaborators to hand one out to every child.
- Banners: Speak to your venues or other private venues to get banners put up in prominent locations.
- Branding and merchandise: Get the visual of your brand into everyday life: if you have a vehicle get it professionally wrapped, give out prizes with your logo, ensure your staff are wearing professional and distinctive uniforms and have merchandise on sale for parents and kids.
- Events and popular local areas: Where do parents go in your area? Get to those locations with flyers on a busy afternoon and build awareness of your brand.
[.green__text]Word of Mouth[.green__text]
By far, the main way that people hear about our camps is either through friends or school. If you can build trust with your current customers, you will see a natural snowball effect. We are in a very personable industry where people trust us to look after their children and want to know that you are someone that they can trust.
This strategy is simple; make sure that people are receiving the service which they expect or better! It is all well and good building up an excellent marketing strategy to bring in new customers, but if those customers then have a poor camp experience, they aren’t going to come back! Don’t forget that you are also selling to your current customers, not just new ones. There is no point in bringing in 100 new customers if you are losing 120 because the standard isn't up to scratch!
[.orange__text]Top Tip: Encourage Google or Trustpilot Reviews from your current customers. The reviews will do the work for you and will reassure parents that you are a good place to send their children.[.orange__text]
If I was to give you just one piece of advice on how to boost the numbers on your camps, it would be this: stay consistent. Make sure that you are balancing your marketing across all of the areas mentioned above, it is the combination of all of these strategies that will lead to the best results.
Running a business in this sector will require you to put on so many different hats - with marketing being just one of those hats! For more advice and insight into what it is like to run a Sports Coaching Business, visit our YouTube channel where you can watch our uSports Weekly Videos to get an insight into the day to day running of uSports, and listen to our Let’s Talk uSports Podcast where we discuss the world of children’s sports!
[.pink__text]Ready to start your camps journey? We can help! Get ClassForKids on your team.[.pink__text]
Felicia Bugge
Felicia is our resident Content Specialist. She is the mastermind behind most of our blogs, emails and Tiktoks! When she isn’t planning the next big email campaign or chasing participants for Tiktoks, she can be found travelling to new exotic places, reading the latest booktok book, or converting friends to using iPads for notes and calendars!
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