Agency, DIY, or somewhere between

The question is rarely agency or nothing. It is which parts a park does itself, and when hiring starts making sense. Most parks get that sequence backwards, and spend money on the sophisticated work while the basic work sits undone.

The three jobs to finish first

Every competent agency would start here anyway. A park doing them itself keeps the money and gets the same result.

1. Fill in the Google Business Profile completely. Hours, categories, photographs, attributes, the pin at the entrance. An afternoon, using the Maps audit checklist.
2. Ask every eligible departing guest for a review. Even manually, even badly. Reviews are the strongest available signal to the next camper.
3. Answer the phone, or explain what happens when nobody does. At minimum a voicemail greeting that does something, per the after-hours scripts.

A park that finishes these three has captured most of the easily available gain. Hiring before they are done means paying somebody to do an afternoon's work, then paying again for everything above it.

What a park can genuinely do itself

• The Google profile, entirely. It needs knowledge of the park more than expertise.
• Replying to reviews. An owner writes a better reply than an agency, because they were there.
• Photographs. A phone and good light beat stock imagery, and nobody knows the park better.
• Answering the questions campers ask, in writing, as website pages. The knowledge is the hard part and the park already has it.
• Emailing past guests, which needs consistency rather than skill.

What these share is that the park already holds the raw material. The constraint is time, not capability.

What usually needs hiring

• Technical website work. Redirects, canonicals, indexing faults and speed. Getting these wrong is expensive and hard to detect.
• A rebuild, particularly the URL mapping in the redesign checklist.
• Sustained content. Not because the writing is hard, but because nobody at a park writes in July.
• Automation that has to keep running, including review requests and call handling.
• Measurement set up properly, so decisions rest on something.

The pattern is consistent. Parks can do the things needing knowledge of the park. They struggle with the things needing consistency through a season.

The middle option most parks miss

Buying one thing rather than a programme.

A park can hire out review automation and do everything else itself. Or hire out the website and manage the profile in-house. Agencies push bundles because bundles are easier to sell, and parks accept them because it feels decisive.

Starting with the single thing most obviously broken is usually better. It is cheaper, it is testable, and it reveals whether the provider is any good before more is committed.

Signs a park has waited too long

• The three jobs above are done and the park wants more.
• Reviews stopped arriving because asking stopped in July, two seasons running.
• The website cannot be edited without a developer, so nothing gets updated.
• Nobody knows what is working, because nothing is measured.
• The owner is doing this at eleven at night and it is the thing that slips first.

The last one is the most common and the most reliable. Marketing that only happens when everything else is finished does not happen.

The honest summary

A park that has not done the three jobs should do them, and hire nobody yet.

A park that has done them, and finds the work stops every season regardless of intention, is buying consistency rather than expertise. That is a reasonable purchase and it should be judged on leads.

How to judge who to hire is in choosing an RV park marketing agency, including the answers worth walking away from.