A huge amount of effort is placed into getting visitors to your website. Paid ads, promotions, social media, SEO, etc. all play a role in traffic generation. It’s little wonder, then, that you landing page’s bounce rate is such a vital stat. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that arrive on your site but don’t go any further. Rather than click through to another page, they simply go to a different website altogether. This term can easily be applied to many other areas (I’m sure there is a more official term for these but humor me if you will): first time ticket buyers that never return, season pass holders who don’t renew, and ski school students that never become loyal, resort skiers. That last group is the one I’d like to focus on.

To be honest, when I first started looking into this I wondered if I should blog about it all. It seemed more mountain operations than marketing. When it comes down to it, however, the mountain is the product. Despite the fact that the “4-Ps” of marketing are all but forgotten, one facet of traditional marketing is shaping and refining the product to meet the needs of the market. That said, I’ve been very interested in a new venture called Socially Booked which some of you may have heard of.

Combining social media with your ski school, Socially Booked could help to accomplish a few goals, among them are two big ones: decrease the “bounce rate” and give you as a marketer an extra, unique, competitive benefit to use as you promote the ski school. I got in touch with one of Socially Booked’s founders, Jim Keenan, for a few details:
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SlopeFillers: Tell me about Socially Booked.
Jim: Socially Booked is a social media platform for ski and ride schools. We give ski and ride schools the ability to offer their instructors fully functional, resort specific, social media profile pages that allows them to market and promote themselves, interact with guests and share content with their existing social media circles.

SlopeFillers:What are some of the details of the actual product?
Jim: Socially Booked is a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform offered to resort ski and ride schools. It’s designed to seamlessly integrate into a resorts website providing guests with a single experience. We take the existing static, informational ski and ride web sites and make them dynamic and interactive. For example, one feature of socially booked allows instructors to create private, secure lesson pages for guests. This private guest page gives the instructor the ability to recap the lesson at the end of the day. The instructor is able to outline the days lesson, add pictures or video of the guest, make suggestions for improvement, reiterate the drills and award badges for the days accomplishments. It creates a permanent memorial of the lesson the guest can alway return to.

SlopeFillers: Where did the idea for Socially Booked come from?
Jim: The idea came out of frustration with the lack of tools to market and promote myself as well the lack of tools that allowed me to engage with my clients before and after the lesson. The lesson experience is awesome on the snow. Ski and snowboard instructors around the world are phenomenal. Unfortunately, 99% of the interaction happens on the snow. I felt that was too narrow. Therefore we wanted to build something that influenced learning to ski before, during and after the on snow experience. They say it takes 5 good experiences for someone to become a lifelong skier. We’d like to shorten that, to 2. If you can connect with people before their lesson and stay connected to them after, you have a lot more opportunity to improve their experience. There are more ways to hook people than just on the snow. Socially Booked is giving resorts the ability to do that.

SlopeFillers: How long have you been around?
Jim: We launched in July. This is our first season.

For more details see Eric Wagnon’s article or find Socially booked on Twitter or their website.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.