Blog

Facebook recently launched a brand new ad unit called a Facebook Lead Form Ad. The Lead Form Ad is a fantastic tool for summer camps! This ad allows you gather contact information from potential customers without needing any custom landing pages or pixels. Read on for a few great camp specific tips for running Facebook Lead Form Ads. What is a Facebook Lead Form Ad? When someone clicks on your ad, a form automatically opens with the person's contact information automatically populated,...

Google Customer Match for Summer Camps

Posted on January 18, 2016

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...

Using Instagram Ads to Sign Up New Campers

Posted on October 20, 2015

in Social Strategies, Social Tools

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...

Signing Up New Campers: A Social Summer Camp Case Study

Posted on September 17, 2015

in Social Strategies

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...

Missing Opportunities During The Summer

Posted on July 9, 2015

in Social Strategies

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...

Men Are Using Pinterest Too

Posted on May 11, 2015

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,...

Email Open Rate Versus Social Media Open Rate

Posted on March 9, 2015

in Uncategorized

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...

Using the right image for your Facebook ads

Posted on March 2, 2015

Using the right image for your Facebook ads is really important! It is one of the most important levers you can pull in making sure that your ads reach more people and perform well. Luckily summer camps have great images from their summer photographers, which means they always have an arsenal of photos to use for Facebook posts. Still, I see camps all of the time using images that don’t perform well on Facebook. Here are five quick tips to make...

Facebook Advertising: Not for Wimps

Posted on February 2, 2015

in Camp Inspiration, Social Tools