Bring more kids to summer camp, but only if you don’t screw it up the way I have! The world of online advertising is downright scary. Purchasing nebulous “clicks” and “views” was enough to give this traditional marketer fits when I first threw my hat into the ring of online advertising. While we had some nice successes along the way, we had some fairly epic failures as well. I’m here to share with you the good, the bad, and the ugly. I’m going to break down the three ways we’ve attempted to pay for advertising online, and our various successes and failures with each. I’m here to take the mystery away from online paid advertising – this stuff really works if you know which choppy waters to avoid, and which low hanging fruit to pick. Luckily I’ve gotten chopped up quite a bit on my way to picking some delicious advertising fruit, and I’ll share the details of my experiences with you for free 🙂 The 3 ways we’ve paid for advertising online are Facebook advertisements, Google Adwords, and standard banner ads with a local newspaper’s website (syracuse dot com). If you want to skip ahead to either of those sections, go for it. No? Let’s start with some...
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Deciding what print ads (if any) are right for you I have to be honest with you: sometimes, print marketing vexes me. Let me explain. With all of the “modern” ways of marketing, like creating an awesome website, or powerful and targeted online ads (more on that coming soon), print marketing feels a little… scary. The reasons for this are two fold. 1) It’s very hard to know if someone found you via a print advertisement, whereas our websites will tell us exactly where people have come to us from. 2) Print ads are, per capita, simply more expensive. Now, you might be ready to hit your “back” button and go read about some other opportunities. But it isn’t so simple. While it’s true that our marketing dollars are scarce, and their are a LOT of low hanging fruit opportunities out there, it doesn’t have to be a question of “should we take advantage of these marketing opportunities while ignoring these others?” That’s what I like to call “narrow framing, or a decision making approach that thinks of things in terms of “do I do this, or do I do that?” while ignoring the fact that for every single dollar you have, there are infinite possibilities. You don’t need...
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Mobilizing your camp website for maximum marketing impact Let me bring you back to my own brain in 2011, when I sat down to design a website for the first time. Our camp was broke, but our website was both outdated and difficult to update (since I had to work with someone else to do it). I was overwhelmed, plain and simple. The idea of creating a website sounded like something that had to be either A) incredibly expensive, or B) done by people much more technical than I was. But, we didn’t have options. So I had to learn. Thankfully, there was someone to hold my hand through the first few steps. And he was wise enough to get me set up with something that was decidedly NOT technical. So, while this post could be 100,000 words (and I might do follow-ups on this at some point, if people are interested), I am going to try and pare it down as simply as possible – and walk you through how you can set up a new camp website for yourself in a week of hard work. And first, I just want to say – a new website changed the directory of our camp more than the rest of...
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