Blog

Retargeting on Facebook for Summer Camps

  The summer is the perfect time to test out retargeting on Facebook. What is retargeting on Facebook? Facebook retargeting allows you to reach people on Facebook after they have visit your website. This allows you to re-engage customers who have already shown interest when visiting your site. How to start retargeting?  You can install the Facebook pixel on your site that captures all your website traffic, or just certain pages. Then you can run ads to reach those website visitors on Facebook. Where to start?  I...

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Learnings from Pubcon Austin for Summer Camp

The Social Summer Camp just returned from a fun filled day at Pubcon! Pubcon is an incredible digital marketing conference and our team had a really great time learning about new SEO and SEM tricks for our clients. I'll be sharing a lot more information in the next few weeks regarding our learnings, but there are give quick things I wanted to share that we learned: By 2017, 74% of all internet traffic in will be video- If you aren't...

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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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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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Missing Opportunities During The Summer

I've mentioned it a few times before, but summer should be the biggest time for marketing your summer camp. During the summer I spend a lot of time looking at what other camps are doing and, of course, refining the strategies of my current clients. I've noticed a few things that really back up my recommendation for how important summer marketing can be. 1. Many camps are not posting during the summer, but the ones who are see large increases in...

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Instagram advertising for summer camps

Instagram is finally ready to roll out advertising to small and medium size businesses, including summer camps! In a recent article in TechCrunch they said, "After a year and half of format experiments and basic targeting, Instagram is giving advertisers much more powerful tools. Those include “Shop Now”, “Install Now”, and “Sign up” buttons, interest and demographic targeting, and an API for efficiently managing huge campaigns." BUT...

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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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