Blog

Sometimes 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...

Scheduling social media efforts

Posted on November 14, 2013

Sometimes 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...

Instagram Ads

Posted on November 4, 2013

Instagram 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....

LinkedIn Sponsored Updates for Camps

Posted on November 1, 2013

A few months ago LinkedIn launched sponsored updates. According to their blog post, "Sponsored Updates can be seen on desktop, smartphone and tablet devices and will clearly be marked “sponsored,” appearing in the member’s homepage feed along with the organic posts from their network and the companies they follow. Members will have the option to “Follow” the sponsoring company as well as “Like,” “Comment” and “Share” posts with their network." In order to take advantage of this, camps will need to...

Marketing your camp’s event on Facebook

Posted on October 30, 2013

Does your camp have open houses, city visits, home parties, etc? If so, you should be marketing them on Facebook. Here are a few quick tips for your camp to market an event successfully on Facebook. 1. Create a Facebook event with fun photos and information on the event 2. Add multiple admins and ask them to invite friends to the event 3. Invite fans in the event's location to your event 4. Encourage your fans to invite their own friends to the Facebook...

Snapchat for Camps

Posted on October 28, 2013

Snapchat is a very cool real-time photo chatting app on iOS and Android. According to Business Insider, they have 350 million photo uploads DAILY. It may still seem like a little app to a lot of people, but the growing popularity among middle and high school aged students is something that most marketers (including camp marketers) can not ignore. I always like to look toward big brands for advice on what smaller brands should be doing when a new social medium...

Pinterest and advertising for summer camps

Posted on October 23, 2013

Last month Pinterest announced that they will be starting to provide promoted pins (also known as ads). They are currently testing this with a few companies and promoted pins will only show up in search results and category feeds. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before this is open to everyone and available in the Pinterest news feed. Of course, this is exactly how Facebook started out, first allowing a few promotions on their right hand side and...

Social marketing v. traditional print media

Posted on October 4, 2013

If your camp is doing a lot of traditional print media (newsletters, newspaper ads, magazine ads, etc.) then it is really important to measure your success against your social marketing. Most print media only has two measurement qualities: 1. Reach: How many people received your newspaper/magazine/newsletter? (There is no way to know how many people actually read it, but this is a good enough metric to lean on.) 2. Response to your call to action: How many people either dialed the number or emailed...

Creating holiday-specific messaging

Posted on September 30, 2013