If you’re struggling to keep your social media presence vibrant and engaging during your seasonal slump, you’re facing one of the industry’s most persistent challenges.
In this episode of the Social Pulse Podcast, we’re joined by Amanda Lahn-Boyer, Director of Marketing at Lahn Hospitality Group, where she oversees marketing strategy for The Funplex amusement centers across multiple locations. With over seven years of experience navigating the seasonal nature of family entertainment destinations, Amanda has mastered the art of maintaining year-round social media engagement, even when the rides aren’t running at full capacity.
Social Pulse Podcast host Mike Allton asked Amanda Lahn-Boyer about:
- Strategic Content Planning
Learn how to build a year-round content calendar that maintains audience engagement regardless of season - Off-Peak Opportunity Mining
Discover creative ways to turn traditionally slower periods into unique marketing advantages - Measurement That Matters – Understanding how to adjust and interpret social media metrics based on seasonal patterns
Learn more about Amanda Lahn-Boyer
Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode
Full Transcript
(lightly edited)
Mike Allton: Welcome back to Social Pulse Podcast, where we’re digging into the challenges, successes, and stories of social media and community professionals in the industry, just like you. Subscribe to gain valuable insights that you’ll be able to apply to your own work and social presence from each and every episode.
Every hospitality marketer knows the pain of seasonal downturns, your social media metrics start to dip, engagement becomes harder to maintain, and suddenly those bustling feeds that were bursting with activity feel more like an echo chamber .. Still, today we’re joined by Amanda Lahn-Boyer, director of Marketing at Lahn Hospitality Group, where she oversees marketing strategy for the FunPlex amusement centers across multiple locations.
With over seven years of experience navigating the seasonal nature of family entertainment destinations, Amanda has mastered the art of maintaining year-round social media engagement, even when the rides aren’t running at full capacity.
Hey, Amanda, welcome to the show.
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: Hi, good morning.
Mike Allton: Good morning. I’m so glad to have you here. I grew up just miles from an amazing, huge amusement park in Ohio, so I’ve got that consumer perspective of seasonality and that sort of thing, but could you walk us through what a typical year looks like for the Funplex in terms of peak and off-peak seasons?
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: Sure. Yeah. So we have two amusement parks in New Jersey, one in Mount Laurel, which is about half an hour from Philadelphia, and one in East Hanover, which is about half an hour or a little bit more from New York City. While we have a sizable indoor park with bowling, arcade, and rides, we also have what I would call like a mid-size waterpark in both locations, and our Mount Laurel Park also has outdoor rides and a hotel on the property.
So we have a good amount of seasonality that goes with our parks, and typically, what we do is we start to open our outside rides around spring break time. The water parks open Memorial Day weekend, which just happened, and then we close up Labor Day weekend for the water parks, and we leave the outdoor rides open a little bit in the fall, and then we close everything up for a while, and once school goes back in, we see a lot of that seasonality that you’re talking about.
Mike Allton: Got it. Yeah, that tracks very much with, again, my experience growing up.
I’m wondering, though …
What are some of the biggest challenges you had with social media during off-peak seasons when you first started?
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: Yeah, I think that when you say if it’s a hot, sunny day outside and you say waterpark, then you really find that your social media gets busy right off the bat, you didn’t have to do much.
But if you’re in the middle of the winter and people are thinking about school, they’re thinking about other things. It’s really hard to keep your engagement going, and we try all different things, whether it be a shot of our waterpark in the snow on a snowy day, which oddly is really popular or just finding different angles of things to talk about that we feel like our guests would be interested in.
Mike Allton: Yeah. Again, I’m trying to think of some of the posts that I recall seeing from my local park growing up, ’cause they’re literally on Lake Erie. They like jut out into the lake, you can’t even go out there in the winter, ’cause the whole thing’s covered in ice. I do remember seeing ice-covered roller coasters.
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: Yes.
Mike Allton: Which is unique, and that’s interesting. That’s not something you would normally see up front, so I could see how that would work on social media.
Do you adjust your content strategy as you transition from peak to off-peak seasons?
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: We do. Like I said, we are lucky in the sense that we have an indoor park, so we can start to talk about different things and what we’ve really worked on, specifically the last year, is picking different age groups to talk to and then having that content be totally different.
So even right now, like at the Funplex, we have a separate account called Funplex After Dark, and that one is all for ages 21 and 21 plus, and it’s a totally different vibe than our normal amusement park content, and I think that that has also really helped with our engagement, instead of having one page that’s trying to do talk to all people in the same way, like just changing up the content that we have for different age groups, different interests even sensory abilities. That’s a really important thing for us right now. So we’ve been doing a lot focusing on that, and that’s timeless, right? Like that, that applies to people year-round; it’s really not seasonal, and that has shown a lot of traffic and engagement for us online.
Mike Allton: Talk to me more about that.
What do you mean by sensory disabilities, and what kind of content are you creating on those lines?
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: Yeah. So … every year we have an amusement park convention down in Florida called IAAPA, and a lot of parks we’re having seminars and talking about, like, how can we be more accessible to everybody? And the need is, unfortunately or fortunately, growing, and so you hear this topic a lot, and amusement parks are not always the most welcoming place.
We’re loud, we have a lot of music, we have a lot of lights, some rides are not accessible, and so how can you transform your place to be more welcoming for all? And so we’ve focused on what we call our sensory series, where we have special times where the park might be closed just for people with all different types of sensory needs.
And then we do that monthly, and we do a lot of posting about it, like, How does this work for your family? A month from now, as of yesterday, we’re gonna be doing our first-ever sensory-friendly swim lesson in our waterpark, where we brought on a partner swim school that’s coming in to help us.
And we’re letting people register in advance and let us know about all their needs, and this is something really new for us, but we’re already seeing a pretty big response in terms of “Oh, we’ve never seen this before.”
And I think if you’re thinking about social media, like your own base can help you with that, too. Like they tell you what they’re looking for, and you can put polls out there and really get a sense of what people need. But yeah, like that’s a great topic that applies whether it’s sunny out or it’s raining, people are always looking for more resources in that area.
Mike Allton: That’s a terrific initiative and certainly a great example of how you can reflect the great work that a brand is doing through social media. I also wanted to come back to your point you made earlier about having a completely different profile or set of profiles for your Afterdark, I think you called it the AfterDark initiative.
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: Yeah.
Mike Allton: Did you start them at the same time that you started that programming, or did the programming start first, and you first started posting to your regular social channels, and then you said, “We need our own presence”?
How was that timeline?
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: I really wanted to commend my team for this because they started seeing a need for different content, and we work with influencers a lot, and sometimes you step into something and get a little lucky, and that definitely happened for us in that space.
We just started putting things out about it, an influencer went live, and all of a sudden, one of our events that maybe we were having like 50% capacity of what we wanted sold out in 48 hours, and really ever since then, it continued to grow on itself. We have to keep doing influencers, keep doing relevant posts pretty regularly.
We do a lot of giveaways on that platform, or we focus on themed drinks that match our party theme that night. All different types of things, but it really didn’t mesh well with our brand for the park, so that’s why we branched it out and it’s a lot of work ’cause it’s creating a whole another channel that you have to maintain, but for us it’s been worth it and we wouldn’t do it for everything, but for that, it’s been really nice.
Mike Allton: Yeah, that makes sense. And hopefully, folks, if you’re listening, you’re getting some ideas and applying some of the things that Amanda’s doing to your own initiatives, to your own channels, to your own peak and off-peak seasonality. I love how you talked about the team, which is great.
How do you maintain their motivation and their creativity when there’s kinda less immediate activity to share during these off-peak points?
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: Yeah, it’s really hard. I think, first of all, the people that we put in place are really creative and that’s really important, and I try to give them time to work on things that they find interesting, and then I also give them the leeway to explore our operations team and bring everybody into the loop because the more perspectives from all different angles of your business, the better the content.
So sometimes it’s our social media coordinator doing the content, but sometimes it might be, a bowling attendant talking about mechanics, which again could be like any time of year, but I think the more people that come into it, the more creative you can get in the time where you don’t have a lot of programming or things to talk about. And then obviously, they’re always on the lookout for anything that’s trending and how to incorporate that into our business.
And you might see, like in the off-peak time, you might see more content relating to things that are trending versus maybe, more specific to what’s happening in the park at that time. Just to help give more content and stay on top of people’s news feeds, likes, and everything.
Mike Allton: Yeah, that makes complete sense … Amanda, I’m wondering if you could share, like a specific campaign, something where you guys worked on it, about the park on your main channels, and you turned that off-peak period into an engagement opportunity.
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: I would say, maybe this isn’t the best thing, most exciting thing to talk about, but during COVID, for us, we were shut down, and after we got into it a little bit, about a year or so in, we were actually under construction.
We decided to expand our waterpark and go under construction, and it was an odd time to do any content, I would say but we try to talk about, just back to something people would wanna think about instead of everything else.
And so we showed construction pictures of our really awesome, huge slide, and we would do updates throughout the progress of everything, and even now, like any campaigns that are tied to construction, even showing, maybe a piece of equipment, not even anything that exciting, and then having people try to guess what it is or doing engagement that way has shown like a lot of success, We’ve been building this for the last 10 years, where we run a Black Friday campaign, and even though it’s November, we focus on our summer waterpark membership, and it’s always our best price of the whole year. We try to stick to that, like that’s our best promotion, and then we started up a full week before Black Friday and ran it straight through.
And even though it’s a quiet time for us, we might sell. For us, a big number would be like a thousand; we would be close to that number for each of our parks for sales around that time. And even people will come in where our park is closed, so like nobody would even think of coming into the park, they’ll come in, we’ll have little promotional gifts made, so they can put the membership in something that way they have something to give to people. So it really has given us almost a full month of time where we can talk to people about the waterpark or about the outdoor park and their summer plans, in a really faraway time from that.
So every year we see that grow, and we’ve also seen, I’m sure everybody sees this, with Black Friday and the holidays in general, the campaigns have to change a lot every year. A lot of things have started to run much longer, so we’ll change up what the promotion is, the length, and how we keep people interested, which was even more so this year. There’s not even Cyber Monday anymore; it’s super long, so we change up our social strategy to match the promotion depending on how long we wanna fence everything in for, and then we’ll also create like really big Facebook and Instagram paid ads for that to run alongside our organic content, and that has given us a really big reach.
Mike Allton: That is a really good reminder, I think, to folks listening if major holidays and national events like Black Friday occur during your off-peak season, figure out a way to use them for, whether it’s for a sale or something else, to get those people who are already thinking ahead towards the next in season moment, whether that’s summer or something else, depending on, maybe you’re a ski park, so the seasons are opposite for you.
You can still find those times to talk about your park, your hospitality situation, or just your business overall, and apply that to future thinking.
And I love that you mentioned construction, ’cause that also reminded me of the park that I grew up with, they put in a new ride almost every single year, and they build it obviously during their off-season.
So they’ll talk about it on social during the offbeat times, and even here in St. Louis, we’ve got a park that’s local to us, and I can recall seeing posts from them about how they’re cleaning the park, they’re getting it ready for spring, the new paint jobs maybe they just show just a railing next to a walkway.
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: Yeah.
Mike Allton: That’s got a fresh coat of paint. And it reminded me how, as a local, I can already imagine myself in that park, so I’m seeing it, and the post is reminding me, oh yeah, the park is there. We’ve gotta get our tickets, we gotta think about it, and I’m reminded of that, and it reminds me of a post that other people would post to social media, and I’m wondering how you leverage user-generated content during these different seasons?
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: Yeah. We love to see people’s family memories, right? Our parks are local destinations, just like you’re talking about, and they’re really like age 4 to 13 is our prime time, and so we try to be there for the full family, and people come back many years in a row.
In fact, just like a funny story, we recently had a new salesperson start in our Mount Laurel location, and she sat at her desk and showed me a picture, and it was her son, who’s now 17, in preschool holding a picture up that said, “Why do you love your mommy?” And it said, “Because she takes me to the Funplex.” And I just love that, so we are always looking for people to share content like that.
Show us your memories and show how Funplex has impacted your family over the years. I think it’s rare. We’re also a family-owned park; it’s my brother and my dad, we have a CEO over everything, and we also own a few other properties. But we are always looking for that kind of content to show people what we can be for our community.
So a lot of times, even in the off-peak times, if we’re doing something like a giveaway, for instance, where we’re looking for people to enter, so we’ll say, your entry has to be a photo of your family from last summer, show us you guys in the lazy river or, what’s your biggest thrill from last summer? And we really see a lot of engagement that way, and people like to share their memories, so we’re always looking for that; it doesn’t matter the time of year.
Mike Allton: You mentioned the age group, and I was reminded just two weeks ago. We’re recording this in late May, so it’s mid-May, I think, before the local park actually opened, they had all of the eighth-grade classes from the local school district come to the park. The park was exclusive to them from 9:30 to 5:00 PM. I think it was maybe 2:30 PM, and I think they left on the buses.
So all of these kids had the park to themselves, and they all brought cell phones, they were all posting to social media selfies and group pics, and making the memories, of course, which is great for them. But for us as the brands they’re sharing those memories to social media and probably created way too much UGC, frankly for that poor parks team to keep up with. So they just had to pick and choose what they were to use.
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: Yeah.
Mike Allton: But it also asks, begs the question, how do you measure that impact?
When you’re posting to social media or you’re reposting other people’s posts, how do you know how that’s actually impacting a park like yours?
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: Yeah, it’s hard. Some of it we try to put numbers on and for results in the park, and the best tool we have right now for that is promotional codes that tie directly, let’s say, to a specific post or a specific influencer or a certain campaign.
And we can check for instance, like even recently, not so much social media, although we did end up writing it a little bit on social media, was we featured a giveaway on a Spanish radio channel for our Funplex in East Hanover. And so we did a promo code tied to that whole campaign and watched the results, and so sometimes it’s a measurement like that. We wanna know on paper exactly what kind of dollars it returned.
A lot of times, though, for us, it’s how many likes, comments, shares, we really like bookmarks, and overall, do we continue to see our follower account increase?
If we start to see that plateau where we’re not reaching new people, then we feel like we have to change things up.
So a lot of the things that on the marketing side, I would say two-thirds of our focus is on the engagement side, and then the rest is on the dollar and cents and how the campaign is returning especially if our accountant reaches out and say, “Hey, how do you think the ROI is on this campaign?”
Then we’re looking at it in that way, but the majority of the time we’re looking for likes, clicks, traffic to the website, and then we do a lot of pixels and everything from the website to our web store to make sure we’re tracking conversions on whether it be a birthday party booking or a regular everyday ticket sale.
Mike Allton: That makes sense. That definitely tracks with all the hotels and restaurants and other kinds of parks and leisure activities that we’ve talked about. It’s really hard ’cause it’s not like the retail folks that we talk to, where there’s usually a much more direct correlation between social media campaigns, traffic, and actual sales.
Now, beyond the native platforms and maybe a scheduling tool like Agorapulse or whatever you guys are using, are there any other tools that you’d say are essential to your social media management?
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: Right now, my social media coordinator would tell you the editing tools are really like what they lean into the most, and they’re changing so frequently that I definitely don’t keep up, I can’t keep up as much as she can, so I feel I bring that up.
It’s not really results, like measurement focus, but without the really good edited content, then our results are never as good, and so she’s currently working on, there’s a new Instagram-specific editor app that she likes better, but you know, a lot about this CapCut is really big, and focusing on the quality of the content with apps like that seems to be really important for us.
Mike Allton: No, I couldn’t agree more.It’s the same kind of feedback I’m hearing all the time and in our community. I’m wondering, are there any resources or communities that you turn to for fresh ideas and inspiration, particularly when you’re trying to plan seasonal content?
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: I definitely lean into our own industry because I feel like there’s just so many different types of amusement parks, but we also own a restaurant, we own a private golf club, and I feel like industry perspectives are really helpful so we will always go out there and see what’s going on see what kind of topics people are talking about.
And then recently, with the addition of our hotel to Mount Laurel, we’ve reached out more to like our tourism base and have found really good communities. I honestly think it could apply to not just hospitality businesses, too, within the like, for instance, for us, we have Visit Philly or we have Visit New Jersey, and they have subsidized campaigns for tourism, and they use ’em in all different ways.
So we’ve been using that resource a lot, whether it be just looking at their own content or on their website, seeing how they speak to people because they reach every type of demographic that you can reach, and that’s been really nice. It’s given us some just really good brainstorming, starting off points all year round, I would say.
Mike Allton: That’s fantastic. I’m really looking forward now to being at Social Media Day Philadelphia this summer cause now I have something to do.
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: Nice. You’re welcome to come over, too.
Mike Allton: Absolutely. Amanda, you’ve been absolutely amazing. This has been such a fun interview.
I know folks are gonna have more questions for you, and if they do or they just wanna connect, where should they reach out to you?
Amanda Lahn-Boyer: Oh, sure. You can just put my email out there. It’s amanda@lawnhospitality.com, or you can always reach out through our Funplex social channels as well, and they’ll forward those over to me.
Mike Allton: Fantastic. That’s all the time we’ve got for today, friends. Thank you, Amanda. Thank you, all of you, for listening.
Don’t forget to find Social Pulse Podcast on Apple and drop us a review. We’d love to know what you think, and please join our exclusive community on Facebook, Social Pulse community, to network with our podcast guests, other social media pros, and gain access to helpful resources. You’ll find the link in the show notes or just search ‘Social Pulse community’ on Facebook. Until next time.
