Managing a campground is no small task. In addition to guiding day-to-day operations, you also need to find time in your busy schedule to reach new campers and market your campground. Luckily, you already have a beautiful and marketable campground, you just need to tell your story. Here are some tips for marketing your campground to help your content stand out, reach new campers, and book more spots.
Create & Curate Quality Visual Content
In today’s digital landscape, visual content is critical to reaching your camper audience and advertising your campground’s wonderful features. From your website to your social media posts and videos, you want your visual content to be quality, consistent imagery that accurately represents the natural beauty of your campground.
While there is measured value to hiring professional photographers and content creators to capture visual content for your campground, there is also a lot you can do with just a smartphone and an eye for detail. When capturing photos for your website and property management system, take photo and video in a horizontal orientation to better capture landscape views, RV spots, and vacation rentals. Make sure not to crop too close to your subject while taking photo and video – you can always edit your photos later if needed. For social media posts, videos, reels, and TikTok content, you will want to use portrait orientation to make use of the real estate on the viewer’s phone. Some general best practices for capturing quality visual content include:
- Utilize the “golden hour”, the hours after sunrise and before sunset, for optimal lighting.
- Avoid capturing content on overcast and rainy days. This will lead to dreary, uninviting imagery.
- Lifestyle imagery performs best. Your campers want to picture themselves at your location, so be sure to capture plenty of content with people enjoying your amenities and taking part in recreational activities, rather than capturing content when the property is empty.
Dive deeper into camping photography and videography with these content ideas and hacks.
Tell Your Story
Tell your campground’s authentic story through customer communications. Camping is all about making meaningful connections, and campers resonate with content that has heart. Let your campers get to know you, your staff, and your campground through targeted storytelling on your social media, website, blog, and all of your marketing efforts. Take the time to introduce your staff on social media, or give your followers the opportunity to ask questions during a Facebook Live session. Write a blog post about the history of your campground that can easily be repurposed as an email newsletter. Campers are a passionate group of people who love to talk about their experiences, so interview one of your camping superfans to talk about the campground. The storytelling possibilities are endless.
Maintain Content Consistency
You will want to consistently capture new photo and video content as often as possible to showcase new features of your campground, special events, and any other exciting updates that will keep campers wanting to return for more. Determine a cadence for when you will update your website and social media so that your audience knows what to expect from you, and so that your content always appears fresh. We recommend making this a quarterly task.
Prospective campers arriving at your Facebook or Instagram, only to find that the campground hasn’t posted in a year, may incorrectly assume that your campground doesn’t have much to offer. Sharing social media content is crucial to communicating with prospective campers who you are as a campground and what kind of experience they can expect when they book a stay.
Free Tools to Help Your Content Stand Out
Creating quality content can be time-consuming, so the more tools you have at your disposal, the better your content will be. Below are some of the best free marketing tools for campground owners.
- Canva is a user-friendly design platform perfect for park owners and staff to create a multitude of graphics for marketing their business, from social media to video to flyers. You can easily apply your campground logo, colors, and fonts to Canva’s library of templates to create unique graphics that are easy and fast to create.
- Later is one of the leading free social media scheduler apps, allowing you to schedule content for your social channels in advance. Later’s free tier allows you to schedule up to 10 posts per profile per month on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, and LinkedIn.
- Mailchimp is a marketing automation and email marketing platform with a free plan that allows you to create email campaigns and market to up to 500 contacts.
Marketing your campground can seem daunting, but with the right tools and strategies in place, your campground can stand out, attract more visitors and increase bookings. Are you looking for additional ways to market your campground and increase bookings? Connect to Spot2Nite through your existing property management system and gain exposure to over a targeted audience of over 60 million campers.