Riding the Wave
Keeping Waterparks Afloat in a Choppy Economy
By Jessica Royer Ocken
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In addition to making sure your community knows all the good stuff you have to offer, you'll maximize your marketing power when you get a firm grasp on just who your community is, and when you use social media tools to create a community online.
There's another waterpark in the Cedar Falls metro area, according to The Falls' Verink. "It's a great facility," he said. "I take my own family there once a season." But, that's the difference: once a season. That park may be a spectacular destination, worthy of a whole day and perhaps even some planning ahead, but The Falls wants to be a more frequent place for customers to visit. "We realize our niche is not to be a big, commercial waterpark. We're meant to be a facility where you come four or five times a week—or even twice a day," he said.
And that knowledge is a great guide for Verink when it comes to everything from ticket pricing to activity planning. It costs much less to get into The Falls than the other park, and they sell a lot of season passes. They focus most of their marketing on the local community, but that doesn't mean word-of-mouth (the best marketing of all!) and events like the swim meet they host don't attract visitors from farther afield. "I got a call yesterday from a camp about 90 miles away, and they were coming," Verink said. "We've gotten a lot of press from the off-the-wall type programs we run. When the swim meet was here, the press ate that up."
Another way to know your audience? Talk to them. "If you build it they will come may work for baseball fields, but not this," Kempfer said. "You can have the greatest rides and neatest, most colorful stuff, but if you don't cater to your audience…"