November 8, 2017
Campground advertising is an essential component of your success. Properly advertising your campground can ensure higher occupancy, but if you choose the wrong options, it can be a very expensive proposition. Let’s look at ways you can reduce your campground advertising expenditures without affecting your results.
A referral program encourages your current guests to send their friends to your campground by allowing them to earn rewards for their efforts. It’s a great way to generate low-cost campground advertising: your current visitors send their friends and earn a small percentage of every sale in the form of a reward, such as a reduced campground rates or even the ability to earn free nights for those guests that refer the most friends. Then those new guests refer their friends, who refer their friends, and so on!
Before long, you can have an army of loyal guests actively promoting your campground – with every new referral, you exponentially increase the chance of getting more guests. And all for the price of a small discount or some other loyalty reward.
Choosing the most relevant campground advertising channel is absolutely critical in decreasing your advertising costs. If you are a destination RV park, you could spend thousands of dollars with your local Yellow Pages, but you are unlikely to get much business from it. Your guests will typically be from out of town who don’t even see your Yellow Pages. You must advertise to the people you want to visit your campground. Look for campground advertising mediums that hit your target market – RVer’s. You will also likely have to invest a little money in trial-and-error learning to figure out the best medium for your RV park.
Look into whether or not your State Association of the ARVC publishes an annual directory of campgrounds. Ask how the directories are distributed. Often times, the State Association will visit local RV shows and distribute them and they will also keep them local visitor centers, Chamber of Commerce’s and Interstate rest areas stocked with them.
It is often said that it is more expensive to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. For this reason, it is important that you strive to build a relationship with your guests. Answer queries quickly, make sure complaints are dealt with swiftly and always try to exceed their expectations. This will ensure that you build a positive, rewarding relationship with your guests, and allow you to decrease your campground advertising costs in the long run.
It is easy for campgrounds to spend a lot of money on advertising and get less than desirable returns. Don’t just assume that throwing money at an ad campaign will automatically bring in guests: research the best medium, consider all the options, then run tests to figure out where and how to invest most effectively.
At Campground Accounting, we specialize in working with Campground and RV Park owners throughout the USA. Our industry knowledge is focused on taking the headaches out of accounting and helping you grow your campground’s value. Don’t you owe it to yourself to see how we can help you? Schedule a complimentary chat with us today at www.campgroundaccounting.com/meet.