How to Market a Tennis Program So Families Find You First

Your program is probably better than its marketing. That's the gap. Programs that grow show up in three places when a parent starts looking: the feed, Google, and the AI answer. And the next step is ready when that parent is interested.

Picture a parent at 9:40 at night with two academy tabs open. She's scrolled both Instagrams, read both Google listings, and asked ChatGPT which one is better. Neither program knows she exists. One of them gets the call.

The front door moved

Between 2025 and 2026, the share of consumers who read reviews on Google fell from 83 percent to 71 percent. The share who use ChatGPT or other AI tools for local recommendations jumped from 6 percent to 45 percent. That's BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey.

AI also reads your reviews before the parent does. 82 percent of consumers read the AI summaries that sit on top of reviews. So when a parent asks for the best tennis academy near Bradenton, the answer is built from what's written about you online: your site, your listing, your reviews. Programs with clear pages and fresh reviews get named. Programs with a PDF brochure don't.

Demand isn't the problem. The USTA counted 27.3 million Americans who played tennis at least once in 2025, the sixth straight year of growth. The families are out there. They have to find you first.

Fix what a parent sees first

Start with your Google Business Profile. Google says customers are 2.7 times more likely to see a business as reputable when its profile is complete. Complete means hours, what you offer, and current photos of your courts. Then post there every week or two. It takes one afternoon, and most programs skip it.

Then reviews. 47 percent of consumers won't use a business with fewer than 20 reviews, and 74 percent look for reviews from the last three months. A program with 12 reviews from 2023 loses nearly half its families before the phone rings. The fix is a habit: at the end of every camp, text every family the review link.

Pick one goal, then build the path

Most program marketing has no goal. That's why it looks busy and doesn't move anything. Pick one for the next 90 days: signups, revenue, fundraising, or reputation. Point every post, email, and listing at it.

Then map the path. A family goes from seen, to followed, to trusted, to signed up, to staying. Each step needs its own page, post, or email. Most programs stop at seen. They get the view and have nothing on the other side: no camp page, no email the next day, no reason to come back.

Turn one hour into a month of posts

The players live on their phones. Pew's late-2025 survey found 61 percent of US teens are on TikTok every day and 55 percent are on Instagram. Their parents are one scroll behind.

You don't need a video team. You need one recorded hour a month and a plan for it. Film a practice. Clip a talk your head coach already gave. Record a signing. That hour becomes the month: a signing story, a carousel of your coach's best advice, a guide parents save, a post on a player's rise. Same templates, your colors, every week.

On one academy's Instagram, this system took the account from 11K to 17.7K followers, with a 6.2 million view month and one reel past 1.1 million. Your numbers will depend on your moments and your market. The system travels. The numbers are yours to earn.

Measure the money, not the likes

The feed gets attention. The email list gets money. Your list is every family that ever asked about a camp, a lesson, or a tryout. Give them a reason to open every two weeks: a result, a date, a spot that just opened. Camps fill from the list before they fill from the feed.

Then read four numbers every month: reach, clicks to your site, inquiries, and signups. Put one more under them: what a signup is worth. If reach climbs and the rest don't, the path is broken between seen and trusted. That's fixable. More posts won't fix it.

This is what Showcase builds for programs. We pick the goal with you, build the whole system to it, and train your team to run it. You see the results after 90 days. No setup fee, you keep everything we build, and it runs $2,000 to $10,000 a month depending on how much you want from us. See how Marketing OS works, or book a call. You leave with a plan either way.