Blog

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...

Read More

Setting Up Facebook Lead Form Ads for Summer Camps

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,...

Read More

Updates to Facebook Lead Form Ad

Facebook Lead Form Ads have been an incredible marketing solution for summer camps and this past week Facebook made some really useful changes. These changes should help make these ads even more powerful. According to Facebook you can now:  Save time with duplicate forms "In order to save time and effort, advertisers can now duplicate lead ad forms and edit specific fields across ad sets and campaigns. For example, if an advertiser is running a global lead ad campaign that requires specific...

Read More

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...

Read More

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...

Read More

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:...

Read More

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...

Read More

We’ll take care of it!

I recently read a post by Seth Godin that had me thinking about how we try to operate at Social Summer Camp. Here is what the post said: "There are endless opportunities for people and organizations that can reliably and fairly take a problem off our hands. "I'll take care of it," and I'll do it well, at least as well as you can, for a price that won't make you feel stupid. "I'll take care of it," and I won't come...

Read More

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...

Read More