Blog

Updated – Instagram for Summer Camps

Want to reach your campers with a targeted message on social media? Instagram is the place to be! Over 1 billion people actively use Instagram each month, and 500 million use Instagram stories every day. Here are some quick tips to get active on Instagram. 1. Set up your account - Go to Instagram.com and set up your camp's account. Find a few camps to start following and see what types of photos are getting good engagement. Post to your other...

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Improving your visual content

Visual content marketing and social media go hand in hand. This is especially true for summer camps, where it is so much easier to show rather than tell visitors what a magical day at camp looks like. According to CMO Council 65% of senior marketing executives believe that visuals are the core of how their brand’s story is communicated. With everyone relying on visual content, it’s no longer enough to simply post a photo and hope it garners enough likes....

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Instagram Ads Rolling Out Mobile Banners

Instagram made an interesting announcement that they will be rolling out mobile banners on profiles called "profile taps." According to AdWeek: "Advertisers can measure profile clicks in their campaigns. Photo Illustration: Yuliya Kim; Sources: Instagram Slowly but surely, Instagram is turning into a direct-response platform for brands, and now calls-to-action look a little bit more like banner ads than highly styled and edited posts. The Facebook-owned app is rolling out a feature that links ads to profile pages so that when someone clicks...

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Facebook Live Video for Summer Camps

Recently Facebook launched a live video platform. This platform is similar to periscope in that you can broadcast at any time you want directly from your Facebook page. Since this is a new tool for Facebook, they have been giving a lot of distribution (and even a notification) to brands that are using the live video option. If you are headed up to camp or have some exciting summer camp news to share, I definitely recommend trying out this awesome tool!...

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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 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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Men Are Using Pinterest Too

We talk a lot on this blog about developing a Pinterest strategy to reach moms, which is why this Mashable article took me so by surprise! "Earlier this year, the five-year-old San Francisco startup announced that men are actually its fastest-growing user demographic, with the number of men pinning and re-pinning doubling in 2014 to an unspecified number. From March 2014 to March 2015, Pinterest's user base climbed 25% year-over-year to 72.8 million monthly active users. And during the same period,...

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Social Media for Summer Camps During the Summer

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the summer is the best time to market your summer camp. If you have ever wondered when the best time to start a social media program is, the answer is right now! Here are some of the benefits of marketing during the summer: 1. You have a large audience- Parents, friends, aunts and uncles are all online looking for information about what their camper is up to! This is your best chance...

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Email Open Rate Versus Social Media Open Rate

This is a post from the Social Summer Camp blog archives that I find to still be VERY relevant today.  One of the most successful ways for camps to market is through email. I happen to love email marketing, especially if like most camps you already have a list of parents and campers who have opted-in to receiving your newsletters and updates. That being said, I am definitely concerned about email marketing open rates and how camp email marketing has become less...

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