Growth marketing is a relatively new form of marketing that has been gaining popularity in the past decade. A perfect example of this new way of thinking about marketing can be seen through the way many tech-savvy RV Parks utilize their email marketing and social media growth to bring campers back many times over. Growth marketers are those who apply the basics tenets of growth hacking - which include elements like tight feedback loops and experimentation - to grow customer growth and revenue.
The growth marketing of today is more about driving incremental growth than creating expansions that bring about substantial growth. To be a successful marketer in this space, you must know how to measure your success and achieve measurable results. You need to know how to leverage many tools from both the digital side and the traditional side. As far as digital tools are concerned, you should do your best to understand how data can be leveraged to optimize your marketing efforts. You need to know how to use the ever-growing number of measurement tools available on any given platform, from email marketing software like OptinMonster all the way down to Google Analytics and Facebook Insights.
Growth Marketing vs Traditional Marketing
Traditional Marketing arms to convert a lead into a camper as quickly as possible, while growth marketing is going to take that lead and move them through each stage of the marketing funnel. To put it simply, traditional marketing focuses on getting people in the door once they see your campground, whereas growth marketing emphasizes retention and recurring visits. This turns your campground from a one time visit to a favorite campground that they will visit many times throughout their life or for full time RVers they can be at your campground many times a year.
While this may seem like a good idea in theory, it can be difficult to know what techniques will work. Growth marketing is not just about developing strategies and tactics to attract new customers; it also includes nurturing existing camper throughout their entire experience with your RV Campground.
What Marketing Strategy does your RV Campground use?
- Traditional Marketing (i.e. PPC, Social Media and print ad)
- Growth Marketing (Email Marketing, SEO, CRO, Content)
How do I start with Growth Marketing?
First thing I recommend is if you can hire someone, you should. This takes a lot of time and even more experience to interpret the data and maintaining a consistent relationship with your campers. As a business owner, you wear so many different hats and marketing shouldn't be one of those hats. You really want to make sure that your campers are having a great time at your park, keeping up with activities, staff, local representation can take a lot of your time. We want a healthy work and home lifestyle here.
So, how does Growth Marketing work?
Growth marketing does this by incorporating practices that can be hypothesized, tested, analyzed and optimized. Marketing strategies such as search engine optimization (SEO), paid advertising, content marketing, A/B testing, conversion rate optimization (CRO), email marketing and social media become the pillars in which brands can specifically and routinely gather data and make improvements. The value here is data-driven insights that allow brands to be product-focused and help them avoid decision fatigue when it comes to investing in each campaign they launch simultaneously.
Now as a Biology Major and now a RV Park Marketing Specialist I use the Scientific Method a lot in my marketing strategy. When I am starting with a new client, I want to create a strategy that has replicating patterns of problem-solving, conducting controlled tests, deduce meaningful insights from data collected, and create better experiments and enhance products.
Now if you aren't familiar with the scientific method, you move through designing an experiment through 5 steps:
Formulate a question
Construct a hypothesis
Structure a test
Analyze and report
Refine and implement
I move through this process in every campaign I run to finely pinpoint where my client's campers are searching for and how to bring them back. Since I have worked with a few campground, I get to start with that more refined procedure however every RV Campground is different.
RV Campground Storage Marketing
For example, I had a client that had an RV Campground in Illinois and for some of the winter she had a pretty low residency percentage compared to the summer. She luckily had room to create a section for RV storage that was safe and could bring her some extra cash. First thing was we got her some winter storage pamphlets printed to give out to all of the campers, but we assumed that most of those would get lost but the first exposure was important. This isn't trackable and therefore unable to analyze.
We made sure to post blogs about winter RV Storage and pushed her social media about it starting in August. We boosted every post with a minimum of $5 every day for 5 days to get the coverage that we needed. We also used reverse searching on her website to provide advertisements for anyone who looked for RV storage. She had her lot full by year 2 and had returning campers.
The best part is that they stayed at the park before and after storage.
Growth Marketing is where the money is and it's here to stay!
Since the rise of growth marketing in 2013, the demand for growth specialists has grown. The result has been a proliferation of growth marketing agencies and products that are intended to help marketers launch, grow and nurture growth campaigns at an accelerated pace. This presents an opportunity for marketers who can leverage growth marketing practices to attract new customers organically.
While this technique is relatively new, there are many brands that are succeeding with it.
Comment below of a way to implement this in your RV Park Marketing.
