Blog

Updates to Facebook Lead Form Ad

Facebook Lead Form Ads have been an incredible marketing solution for summer camps and this past week Facebook made some really useful changes. These changes should help make these ads even more powerful. According to Facebook you can now:  Save time with duplicate forms "In order to save time and effort, advertisers can now duplicate lead ad forms and edit specific fields across ad sets and campaigns. For example, if an advertiser is running a global lead ad campaign that requires specific...

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Retaining Campers Using Social Media

The American Camp Association recently camp out with their 2015 Camp Enrollment Survey Results. While many of the trends were very positive, there were a few areas of concern to me and I am going to cover all of them on my blog in the next few weeks. The first area I noticed is highlighted in the chart below and shows the percent of campers who were returning from prior summers. 19% of camps had less then a 50% retention rate...

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Google Customer Match for Summer Camps

Most of my Summer Camp clients have been using Facebook Custom Audiences for quite some time. This allows you to upload a customer list to Facebook and target an ad toward them. While this has been very successful on Facebook, you can actually use this same technique on Google as well. According to Google: "Customer Match allows you to upload a list of email addresses, which can be matched to signed-in users on Google in a secure and privacy-safe way. From...

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Facebook Lead Form Ad for Summer Camps

Recently Facebook launched a brand new ad unit called a Facebook Lead Form Ad. It is fantastic for recruiting on Facebook because it requires no custom measurement. According to Facebook: "When someone clicks on your lead ad, a form opens with the person’s contact information automatically populated, based on the information they share with Facebook, like their name and email address. Automatically populating the contact information that people share with Facebook makes filling in the form as fast as two taps:...

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Using Instagram Ads to Sign Up New Campers

We are absolutely loving Instagram ads over here at Social Summer Camp! In addition to being a brand new advertising platform for us, they have some unique advantages that we really enjoy: 1. Targeting: The targeting of Instagram ads is exactly the same as targeting of Facebook ads. Facebook's targeting is some of the best in the business, so we were absolutely thrilled to see so many great targeting options for Instagram. 2. Creative: In addition to doing one photo, you can also use...

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Signing Up New Campers: A Social Summer Camp Case Study

Our number one focus at Social Summer Camp is helping our customers sign up new campers. Today I am so excited to present some anonymous results from one of our clients. All of their leads came directly from Facebook Ads and Google AdWords. This camp was able to sign up 9 families at a cost per customer of just over $1,000. These are fantastic results for camps, who have a lifetime value of MUCH larger than $1,000 a camper. If you aren't...

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Facebook Ads Embracing Gifs

Facebook has finally accepted Gifs with open arms! After years of refusing to let the animated photos be featured on the platform we can finally share Gifs in your status or on a friend’s page. Now they are upping the Gif game and letting some marketers include Gifs in ads and Page posts. For the Gif-newbies, a Gif is an animated image on a video like loop. They are very popular on the social network Tumblr and in listicles featured on...

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How Pinteresting

Some of you may think that big red swirly P stands for procrastination, but Pinterest is striving for efficiency in ways you could have never imagined. I used to think that too, until I found what I was pinning to actually be useful and extremely relevant to my everyday life. Pinners spend an average of 15 minutes on Pinterest per visit. These pinners are made up of about 80% women, and 20% men and 23% of these pinners are active...

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Facebook Carousel Ads

One of the most exciting advertising updates from this Summer has been the launch of Facebook's Carousel Ad Unit! This is a great ad unit for summer camps who have a goal of driving traffic to their website. The ad unit lets you showcase 3-5 images and links within a single ad unit to direct people to specific locations on your website. I especially love this ad unit for camp's who are advertising multiple objectives of "types" of camps. You can...

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