What You Don't Know About Ski Moms

Nicole Feliciano, CEO of MomTrends Media, presented her input on what the ski industry gets wrong when marketing to moms.

500 respondents shared feedback about their family ski habits. Importantly, these respondents indicated that 70% of all family vacation planning is done by moms.

For moms and families, it's about more than just relaxation, connection, and sport. It's about the intersection of all three of these items. Mom doesn't just want to be offered a day at the spa, and she doesn't just want to get active. She wants to connect with her family in a genuine way. Skiing, done right, can provide this.

While cost and weather are somewhat out of our control, it is important to emphasize the ways that this can be controlled. Spring skiing is both warmer and cheaper, so this is a great message for moms. Additionally, new equipment makes the sport more approachable. These are perfect opportunities for content marketing to lead the story.

While some of these items seem like small additions, they go a LONG way to making mom feel welcome and comfortable. Nicole put a special emphasis on lesson scheduling — don't schedule youth and adult lessons to start at the same time. This is unrealistic for a mom who needs to drop her kids off, get her gear ready, and get to her lesson. These small details make all the difference.

DATA. Facebook has over 1.25 billion daily users, and has information about all of them. The upside of the platform is the fact that Facebook allows you to leverage this data for relatively low cost, and with virtually no minimum spend. On the downside, it is becoming and increasingly "pay to play" model. With that said, Facebook Live is currently favored in their algorithm, and is a great way to show what is going on at your resort.

Instagram is your greatest hits album. It's very visual, and it's a place for you to share stories about your location. While this can be time consuming, it is a sandbox to build your brand the way you want it. Looking forward, Instagram stories provides a great opportunity to show people around your location like never before.

Short, punchy, newsy. Twitter is a young, fast paced medium. While it doesn't carry the high gloss imagery of Instagram, or the super-targeted audience of Facebook, Twitter can be a great way to push out events, jump on trends, and share links.

MomTrends put together a blogger event at Camelback Mountain in New York. While the mountain was reticent at first, the success of the event was pretty substantial. For a couple of reasons...

In large part, this group of moms were beginners or never-evers on skis. This provided a unique opportunity to leverage an audience that would allow for growth.

When working with Mom Bloggers, it's important to remember that they aren't always sitting at a desk. Provide them with a reasonable and reliable contract, so that you both know what to expect. More importantly, focus on what they can do, how they can leverage those events and make her feel included. Finally, don't forget to look at moms of all backgrounds. Reaching out to moms that haven't ever skied can still make for amazing content.

For very little cost, Camelback was able to generate a TON of highly targeted content, and is interested in hosting again next year.