We’re already seeing the posts from our Facebook friends with pictures of their kids in backpacks starting their first day of school. For many parents who have watched their children grow, seeing them leave on a school bus can be very emotional for the first time. This time of year also means they’re preoccupied with back-to-school shopping and making adjustments in their schedules.

To illustrate back-to-school season’s effect on purchasing behavior, let’s take a look at the search term “laser tag near me” on Google Trends. You see a gradual decline starting in the first week of August. Since the search query has high intent for playing laser tag, this could hurt your foot traffic.

So what does this mean for FECs and laser tag centers? You have to work harder at earning the time and attention of your customers. To help you gain top-of-mind awareness for your audience, here are a few ideas you can try for your business:

When you’re fighting for busy families’ time and attention, you must cut through the noise by targeting specific groups of your audience. If your customer database can separate moms, dads, and kids, you’ll be able to better tailor messages in your marketing channels.

Now that you have identified your customer segments, you’ll realize that one promotion doesn’t resonate with everyone. If you’ve been tracking the results of your past offers, you can gain insight into creating more effective offers. Some promotional offers are more successful than others, but specific customers claim some deals more than others. Apply this knowledge to test new promo offers with your target audience in mind so you can work your way into the back-to-school family budget.

You may already be running Google Ads for the search term “laser tag” in your geographical area. Try promoting your back-to-school offers with the keywords “back to school sale,” which can get you a few valuable impressions and clicks. To get the most of your ad spend, be sure you have a quality landing page and test your ads’ variations.

If you have Facebook Pixels installed on your site, you’ll be able to run targeted ads for visitors of specific pages on your website. For those who visited your back to school sale landing page, you can run an ad to remind and entice the visitors who saw the page. Be sure to exclude the ones who have already taken you up on your offer. This will not only increase the ROI of your ad spend on Google Ads, but you’ll also be able to ‘be there’ when your audience is ready to blow off steam.

While there’s a decline in keyword searches for “laser tag near me,” you see an uptick in “birthday party venues.” This behavior could be shifting because moms can get the names of their kid’s classmates. To gain an edge over your competitors, you apply the Google and Facebook ads’ tactics for “birthday party venues.”

Maya Angelou once said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” As we mentioned earlier, this is an emotional time for parents, so you can make an impression with some ads that tug at the heartstrings. For sources of inspiration, take a look at some of these examples:

Many of you are already using social media effectively to drive awareness and engagement, but have you considered reaching out to micro-influencers in your community? A micro-influencer is someone with a lot of followers who are well-known in their particular area of interest. For a guide to micro-influencer marketing, check out this post.

There are trigger events in every community that influences where customers spend their time and attention—and create sales opportunities. Instead of sitting back and waiting for guests to come back through the doors, try some of these ideas to increase top-of-mind awareness. Not only will you outthink your competitors, but you’ll also be able to apply and refine these tactics during the holiday season.

The educational journey isn’t just for kids and teenagers; as owners and operators of FECs and laser tag centers, we have to continuously learn and improve. To get other ideas and strategies delivered right to your inbox, sign up for the Delta Strike Edge newsletter.