Most camps have a pretty fluid marketing budget, where they spend money on print ads, camp directories, attending camp fairs, driving to home parties, but they have not put a significant amount, or any, of that budget toward social media. I honestly believe that you should always shift your marketing budget toward what is working the best for your camp. If print ads drive a lot of new campers then you should continue to do them. But IF you are...
Read MoreA recent topic in the Summer Camp Professional's Facebook group came up regarding SEO. A camp director was asking how much you should spend on SEO v. other types of marketing. I posted my opinion in the group but wanted to get it live here as well: In my opinion the search volume for the types of searches camps need just isn't high enough right now. I would rather spend my marketing budget on increasing demand (Facebook ads, social media content,...
Read MoreI ask my camps a lot about what they are doing on mobile. Here are the general responses I hear: Nothing :) We have a responsive website that works on mobile We are building or would like to build an app Here is what I don't hear from them, but would like to: I'm building a Facebook and Instagram strategy that will help me reach all of the people I want to on mobile. Of course I am super happy if you also have a responsive...
Read MoreA lot of camps ask me where they should drive their social media ad traffic. This is a great questions and one that doesn't exactly have a good answer. If you are running social ads you are likely trying to drive new leads and ultimately information requests. Getting a new lead to input their information means that you now have their name, email, phone number and some information on their child, which you did not have before. However if you...
Read MoreA few months back I covered holiday promotion for summer camps. If you haven't launched a plan yet for the holidays, it is almost too late! But, if you get your act together in the next few days you could have a few opportunities left. Here are the posts on what I wrote as a reminder: 1. Holiday planning for your camp 2. Developing your holiday marketing goals 3. Creating holiday-specific messaging 4. Executing and measuring your holiday marketing plan If you run a Jewish...
Read MoreAttribution for social media is one of those extremely advanced marketing topics, so I'm not going to spend TOO much time here. But I did want to cover a couple theories when it comes to understand and attributing your social ads. According to Wikipedia: Attribution is the process of identifying a set of user actions that contribute in some manner to a desired outcome, and then assigning a value to each of these events. So what does that mean for marketing? Attribution allows...
Read MoreI never, ever, ever thought I would be running Ad Words on Bing. It's not that I have any problem with Bing, but I pretty much swear by the effectiveness of Google Ad Words and I never use Bing, so in general I have stayed away from the product entirely. Until my self-serve ad guru (and friend) Alyssa mentioned to me that she has seen success running Bing ads. But it wasn't really Bing that was super successful for her,...
Read MoreI'm actually shocked that I haven't written a blog post about Facebook Custom Audiences yet. This is an extremely important topic for summer camp marketers. Why, you ask? According to Facebook, "Custom Audiences let advertisers find their offline audiences among people who are on Facebook. Using email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs or app user IDs to make the match, Custom Audiences let you find the exact people you want to talk to. You can create a Custom Audience representing any...
Read MoreSometimes the easiest way to measure your social media activity is by creating specific landing pages that you drive social media ads to. There are a few specific landing pages I like to drive camp ads to: - Download a brochure - Download our parent guide - Speak with our camp directors - Sign up for more information - Learn more about our camp I especially love if on these landing pages you can try and collect name, email, phone and age of potential camper. But, the...
Read MoreSometimes having a great social media content strategy means that your camp spends a lot of time and effort posting content every day. Here are some things I try to remember when creating and scheduling your social media efforts to reduce the amount of time spent on content creation and execution: 1. Write at least 30 days of content ahead of time This is the biggest key to having an organized social content strategy. This DOES NOT mean that you can never...
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