I presented a webinar a few weeks ago with Travis Allison on Facebook secrets for summer camp marketing. I wanted to elaborate a little on some of the things I chatted about there and provide more information for you, my loyal blog readers. One of the most important things I discussed were the five levers you can pull to improve your Facebook ads. Here are the questions I like to ask myself for each lever when I am running my ads. 1....
Read MoreI get asked almost every day by a camp if they should be using certain social tools, like Shapchat, Pinterest or Instagram. Nobody has asked me yet if they should be using Ask.fm, but I guarantee you they will be asking me soon. According to Wikipedia, "Ask.fm was created in June 2010. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 80 million registered users in 2013, who post 30 million questions and answers per day. Ask.fm is now one of the 200 most visited websites in...
Read MoreMost 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 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 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...
Read MoreInstagram announced last month that they will start running ads in your Instagram feed. According to Instagram, ads will look like the following: "We have big ideas for the future, and part of making them happen is building Instagram into a sustainable business. In the next couple months, you may begin seeing an occasional ad in your Instagram feed if you’re in the United States. Seeing photos and videos from brands you don’t follow will be new, so we’ll start slow....
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