Boosting Sales for a Surf School using Marketing and Design

We created a better image for Kiber’s event with appealing art, design, and photos.

By the end of this project, we had built a community of followers who chose Kiber, by using smart strategies that connected with their audience.

The key wasn’t selling surf classes, it was selling the benefits of our client's business: connection, fun, and a community. People became fans, bought packs, and stayed long-term.

We achieved this with a multi-disciplinary approach of combining Social Media Marketing, Brand Strategy, and Graphic Design.

You should plan first, research who your customers are, and then design the ads.

For example, we used Kodak and Polaroid effects, newspaper textures, and other symbols of an offline lifestyle. Our research showed that’s what our customers wanted, so that’s the kind of graphics they react to while scrolling through social media.

By using images of people with their backs turned or under shadows, viewers can more easily imagine themselves at the event.

Most surf schools miss this: they have a lot to offer but don't show it. We listed everything included in the event. Example: a surf suit, a locker to store your things, a surfboard, a surf lesson, and more. It will help answer questions before people ask them and sell the fact that a lot is included in this event.

We added "good vibes included" to the list, because it's important to add humour while we are informing people. The best marketing is a mix of humour and useful information.

Our strategy was to use newspaper textures, retro photography, and other symbols that communicate the message of an offline lifestyle, which is what our customers are interested in.

We are selling an offline lifestyle, good vibes, and friendship, but via surfing, which is more effective than just selling a surf lesson.

Adding a line stating that "all skill levels are welcome" will bring people who have never surfed before, and we can convert them to long-term customers who buy surf packs and other surf trips.

The first challenge was figuring out who would buy from us.

I used a “persona profile map” for this; a method successful companies like Apple use before creating new products.

For example, Apple makes a persona profile to see if there’s a market and enough people who would buy the iPod before they build it. This ensures the product will succeed and lets them improve it before launch.

Good graphic design is critical for grabbing people's attention, making them stop scrolling and click on your post. You can evoke a reaction in people by using specific colors, patterns, textures, and fonts that convey the message your customers respond to, without using a single word. This is the fastest and most efficient way to advertise your business.

It was also the perfect opportunity to create a campaign that would help define a Brand while delivering new Graphic Design content for the surf school to use in later posts.

We selected a few symbols to reuse, making new content fast, consistent, and recognizable by our followers. They’d recognize our content before they even see who posted it, helping to make our client’s brand memorable.

This is how we planned the timing of our posts on social media to get the most out of our campaigns. We designed them to generate hype, inform, raise engagement, and urgency about the client’s business.

We organized our content using a calendar like this: carousel posts, reels, and stories mixed to explode our engagement.

If you need us to do this for you and more, such as event management, content planning, landing pages, let me know by email or by filling out the form below. We may not be able to get you 400% guarantee, but we’ll let you know if we see something we can help with!