5 Things You Need to Know about Facebook Messenger Adverts

Some of you may have already seen the little adverts popping up in between pictures of your friends on Facebook messenger.

Facebook messenger advertising has been around for a while, although dropping them in the middle of conversations is relatively new. Here’s what you need to know:

1. The ads will look similar to the ones you’re used to on Facebook

Adverts in Facebook messenger look nearly the same as the advertisements on the home page. They will have your page name, a short headline, an image, and then a button for people to click. That can take them straight through to ticket sales, album downloads, your website – whatever it is you’re trying to achieve.

Source: Facebook.com

2. You can make them personal

Photo by Christina Morillo on Pexels.com

You can send your advert to anyone that’s interacted with your page before with a personal message, or a series of them. So let’s say for example they’ve watched your videos, followed your page, and now you want to get them to come to your show. You can set up a Facebook Ads campaign that lands straight into the messenger inbox, telling them all about your awesome act.

What’s more, the number of people who click through from messenger is massively bigger than your typical home-page ads.

3. You can make it super specific

Photo by Burst on Pexels.com

The normal Facebook advertisements allow you to narrow down your audience. You don’t want to shout out to 12 year olds and 60 year olds when you know your shows are best for 18-35.

You can also set it up based on location. That means you can target people local in London for your London shows, Dublin for your Dublin shows, and so on.

It gaves you way more freedom than traditional Facebook ads.

4. It’s great for engagement

Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com

Messenger is a taking app, right? And what better way to get to know your audience than by talking to them. When you pop an add into messenger, people are more likely to get talking to you. That’s great if you want to build your audience’s loyalty, or simply get them chatting. Because when they’re chatting to you, chances are they’re also chatting to their friends about you.

And we all know how powerful word of mouth advertising is!

5. There are free courses to help you get started

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Facebook advertising is daunting if you’ve never done it before. It feels like a million steps and you’re never quite sure whether you’ve chosen the right settings, or whether you’re taking a stab in the dark.

Facebook seems to realise this, too. Which is why they’ve got a bunch of free courses that you can take before you embark on any new advertising.

Super helpful if this is your first time using Facebook ads.

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Penguin in the Room @prartsmarketing is a group of creatives with an arts marketing dream: penguin stepping our way into the arts industry and helping other creatives flourish! Specialising in online marketing, social media, branding, copy writing, media coaching and web design for actors, artists, casting directors, agents, production companies, theatre companies and creative individuals.

Contact us any time for penguin chats via email:info@penguinintheroom.com or Facebook.com/penguinintheroom or waddle over to our website: www.penguinintheroom.com

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When is the Best Time to Blog?

Blogging sometimes feels like you’re just shouting into the void. You write some super awesome content, get some fancy-looking images together, hit publish.

And then nothing happens.

And you wonder, what did I do wrong?

Well, in theory, nothing. But there are two things you need to think about before you hit that tempting, tempting ‘publish’ button and check it off your list.

Is it the best time to blog?

You might be up writing at 2am on a Tuesday morning, but chances are people aren’t reading blogs at 2am. Or if they are, they’re over the other side of the world (and probably not your client base, your audience, or the people you want to reach.)

So you need to think about when to post your blog.

Now, WordPress can do some of this work for you. It has a neat feature in ‘Insights’ that tells you exactly when the best time to blog is. So head on over to ‘Stats’, and then ‘Insights’ at the top and scroll until you see this beauty:

Voila! You have the time and the day you should be posting your blog. So if your current schedule doesn’t match up to this, consider changing it.

The important thing is: check this every week! Because it changes

When is the best time to promote your blog?

Now you’ve sent your blog out at the perfect time of day and maximised all of the chances that people will stumble upon your site, what about the people who already know you exist? Those you have on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, the people you see down the shops?

You need to promote your blog. And that means sharing it on social media.

More than once.

You can set up WordPress to auto-tweet for you, and it can also auto-post to your other channels, but that’s not all.

You want to keep drip-feeding your content.

So once you’ve written something awesome, be prepared to share it once a week for the next 5 or so weeks, providing you’ve got enough tweets/posts in between to cushion that (otherwise it will look like all you’re doing is yelling about your awesome blog post, which most people will then spitefully ignore.)

You can use a tool like audiense to see when your Twitter followers are online and post it at the best time for them too.

Social media is all about good timing. And don’t forget to check out our previous post about social media tools that will make your life easier, because these will help you with the whole timing thing, too.

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Penguin in the Room @prartsmarketing is a group of creatives with an arts marketing dream: penguin stepping our way into the arts industry and helping other creatives flourish! Specialising in online marketing, social media, branding, copy writing, media coaching and web design for actors, artists, casting directors, agents, production companies, theatre companies and creative individuals.

Contact us any time for penguin chats via email:info@penguinintheroom.com or Facebook.com/penguinintheroom or waddle over to our website: www.penguinintheroom.com

Burdett Trust Award Winners 2018 — Burdett Trust for Nursing

The very first Burdett Trust Awards was held on 24th May 2018 at the Waldorf Hilton Hotel in London, hosted by Call the Midwife actress Helen George. Thank you to all the attendees, brilliant nominees and congratulations to all our deserving winners. Please find the winners list below. Young People’s Health winner (sponsored by Bircham […]

via Burdett Trust Award Winners 2018 — Burdett Trust for Nursing

How to Get Started as a Freelance Writer

So you wanna be a freelance writer? Awesome!

Chances are, you have no idea where to start. But that’s OK, because that’s where everyone starts out. Generally speaking you have a few options if you’re starting out freelance.

You can:

• Build your brand up and hope clients come to you
• Seek clients via traditional job postings (although these tend to want people on board full time or on a contracted basis)
• Seek clients via remote work positions
• Seek clients via agencies
• Send off hopeful submissions to websites in the hope you get a publishing credit

So let’s look at these one by one and break them down.

Building up your brand and hoping clients come to you

This will 100% be the slowest way of attaining business, so if earning money in the short-term is important for you (as I would imagine it probably is) I definitely don’t recommend this.

Brand building requires a few different balls to be in the air at once and it takes time to build up yourself, your audience and then convert that engagement into clients willing to pay money.

It also requires a lot of time and input commitment on your part – as you will need to be online, present and selling yourself regularly to maintain the footholds you’ve clawed out for yourself.

Seek clients via traditional job postings

This is possibly the easiest way of getting some work initially, even though the application processes this way tend to be more time consuming for you, as you’re effectively applying for a job each time you’re bidding for work.

It’s a good idea to set up alerts on a few different websites, so that you can have a steady stream of options coming into your inbox (e.g. Reed, Indeed.) You can upload your CV and pre-write a covering letter on both of these, so they save you a bit of time.

Seek clients via remote work positions

Remote working gives you the same flexibility as freelance, as often they’ll contract you on a part time or project by project basis. You need to check each position before you apply, but some great sites for job hunting this way are Remotive, Remote.co)

Seek clients via agencies

Be careful with agencies. They take a cut of your earnings, so you’re never realising your full earning potential. However, they can be a good stop-gap to make sure you’ve got some money coming in while you get your ducks in a row applying for longer-term positions or trying to attract more clients.

You also need to see whether there’s a subscription fee, because this can often outweigh the potential benefit. Some examples include Contena, and Fiverr.

With agencies you need to make sure that it makes sense money wise. Sometimes the quantity of content you’d need to produce to be earning sufficiently versus the time it would take you to produce all that content doesn’t balance out.

Send off hopeful submissions

Let’s have a look at the pros and cons of this:

Pros

You might get published

You might get paid

Cons

You might not get published

You might not get paid

You’ve still invested the time in producing a piece of content

If you need to build your portfolio then it’s definitely a good idea to send them work you’ve already invested your time in, perhaps work you’ve already self-published somewhere like LinkedIn or Medium. Don’t invest in new work unless you’re able to self-publish it as well. Your time is your money, so make sure you’re balancing the spending and earning in both senses.

Finally, here’s something extra that sounds obvious but that you should definitely do:

Tell your friends and family you’re going freelance

Mention it to them. Reach out to anyone that you think it would be relevant to.

In the words of Tesco: every little helps.

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Penguin in the Room @prartsmarketing is a group of creatives with an arts marketing dream: penguin stepping our way into the arts industry and helping other creatives flourish! Specialising in online marketing, social media, branding, copy writing, media coaching and web design for actors, artists, casting directors, agents, production companies, theatre companies and creative individuals.

Contact us any time for penguin chats via email:info@penguinintheroom.com or Facebook.com/penguinintheroom or waddle over to our website: www.penguinintheroom.com

We had a UK top 10 trending hashtag!!!

Here at Penguin in the Room we LOVE bringing the social to your events. We were delighted to live tweet the Burdett Awards 2018 for our client Burdett Trust for Nursing.

The awards were held on 24th May at the gorgeous Waldorf Hitlon Hotel in London with the super awesome Call the Midwife actress Helen George hosting. The awards were acknowledging and celebrating nurses and nurse led initiatives across the world.

The Burdett Awards had 250 guests at the event and our challenge was to extend the guest-list via social media! We created the hashtag #burdettawards for the event.

The hashtag was including on promotional material on the night and we live-tweeted through out the night and engaged with others who were interacting via our hashtag.

And the results?!

Congrats to our Twitter obsessed Social Media Manager Lucy for such awesome work!

 

 

NUS Discounts for Actors

Did you know that if you’re an actor or actress you’re entitled to the same NUS discounts that students are?

If you’re on Spotlight or are a member of BECTU you’re entitled to an NUS extra card.

What Does an NUS Card Get Me?

NUS Extra is the number one student discount card in the U.K., and with it you have access to over 200 discounts.

A card costs £12 for a year but you can also buy 2 year and 3 year cards.

Discounts include:

• ASOS (10% off)
• Co-Op (10% off)
• Pizza Express (up to 40% off)
• Odeon (25% off student tickets)

How do I get an NUS Card?

Just got to https://www.nus.org.uk/en/nus-extra/ and put Spotlight or BECTU as your place of study. And say hello to all the perks of being a student again!

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Penguin in the Room @prartsmarketing is a group of creatives with an arts marketing dream: penguin stepping our way into the arts industry and helping other creatives flourish! Specialising in online marketing, social media, branding, copy writing, media coaching and web design for actors, artists, casting directors, agents, production companies, theatre companies and creative individuals.

Contact us any time for penguin chats via email:info@penguinintheroom.com or Facebook.com/penguinintheroom or waddle over to our website: www.penguinintheroom.com

3 Reasons Why Actors Should Blog

It’s clear why people in marketing should be blogging. They wanna sell stuff, and the best way to sell stuff is to get people to come and visit a website and put whatever it is (cats, tickets, an inflatable unicorn lilo) into a shopping basket. Job done!

But should actors be blogging?

What’s The Difference Between A Facebook Profile and a Facebook Page?

Profiles and pages do the same thing, right?

Wrong.

They’re very different, and they achieve different things. Today we’re going to look at the difference between them and the pros/cons of having a page vs a profile when it comes to chatting with your fans and customers.

What’s a Facebook Profile?

A Facebook profile is your personal account on Facebook and you need one of these to create a Facebook page. It needs to be in your own name and you can only have one of them. If you have a secondary profile or a profile under a pseudonym, Facebook is liable to pull it down because it breaches its Terms of Conduct.

What’s a Facebook Page?

A Facebook page is less personal than a profile. People who aren’t your friends can view it and choose to like and follow the page and you can advertise through a page, which you can’t do on your personal profile.

A Facebook Page also includes more information for small businesses that its customers want to know: for example, the address, telephone number and contact details and can support links to external websites, ticket sales and blogs much better than a personal profile can.

Which one is better to use?

There’s a lot of reasons why you might not want to mix your profile with your public persona. For one, you’d have to accept a lot of strangers as your friend (or set your privacy to nil, meaning they can see it all without being your friend). Having a profile that’s separate from your page means you can retain your private life while still being a business owner, actor, comedian or someone in the public eye.

1. Facebook Pages also give you tonnes of advertising opportunities that profiles simply don’t support. You want to sell tickets to your upcoming show? On your personal profile, you can share a link. On your Page you can share a link and boost it so an extra 10,000 or even 100,000 people can see it. Which is obviously going to get you quite a few more clicks than the kind shares of your friends and family.

2. Pages also give you ‘Insights’ which means you can keep a track of how well you’re doing. You can see how many people are following you, whether they like the stuff you’re posting and whether they’re reacting to your Page in the way you want them to (whether that’s clicking on your website, purchasing something or signing up to a mailing list.)

3. Another thing is there’s no limit on the number of Pages you can manage, whereas you can only have one profile. Facebook’s Terms of Service are super clear about this. They want people to use their real name on their platform and they will actively delete accounts that they think are using an incorrect name or are a duplicate account.

4. Plus, Pages have more visibility. Everyone can see them, by default, without having to request access from you or anyone else. Which means Facebook is doing a lot of the hard work for you, your audience can find your Page without any trying on your part (although you might want to publish some cool stuff on there to keep them coming back.)

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Penguin in the Room @prartsmarketing is a group of creatives with an arts marketing dream: penguin stepping our way into the arts industry and helping other creatives flourish! Specialising in online marketing, social media, branding, copy writing, media coaching and web design for actors, artists, casting directors, agents, production companies, theatre companies and creative individuals.

Contact us any time for penguin chats via email:info@penguinintheroom.com or Facebook.com/penguinintheroom or waddle over to our website: www.penguinintheroom.com

Is Facebook Advertising Worth It?

For a long time, Facebook advertising was seen as the best way to spend your hard-earnt and painfully spent marketing pounds.

Not only did it reach your ideal audience with their trained targeting tool, but it also offered a higher conversion rate (ie. sold more tickets/got more clicks) than your more typical Google Adwords campaigns (those adverts at the top of google search engine). Well that was according to Facebook anyway.

However, with the new changes that have been brought in: is Facebook advertising still worth it?

The short answer is yes.

1. Facebook and Google are predicted to have a bigger market as large as $3 trillion (that’s about £3 trillion because of Brexit)

In a recent study conducted by Credit Suisse, they claimed that online advertising will be a bigger deal in the coming years than is currently predicted.

This has been put down to the ‘death’ (harsh) of traditional retail, with most shoppers going online to make their purchases rather than heading to their local shops.

This is a huge benefit to online companies because it means your audience online won’t dry up and it’ll continue to grow.

The $3 trillion figure is the amount of profit that is estimated to be sunk into online advertising in the coming years. That’s a lot of dollar! Staggering, right?

2. Facebook’s Targeting Will Only Get More Tailored

Facebook’s ability to draw in advertising money is due to the amount of data it collects on its customers. They use this to place your product in front of the people most likely to buy it: a service that Google also offers, but not down to the same amount of minute detail.

Not only can you target based on age but also down to interests, location and gender.

So if you know that the people who buy your tickets/product tend to be 20-somethings in the London area who love Peep Show: Facebook has you covered!

3. Facebook Allows You to Flex Your Budgets

One of the beauties of Facebook advertising is that you can achieve a lot for a little: and switch it off at any time.

Not that this is a comparison with Google (which also lets you do this) but Facebook has a much lower access point (you can spend less) than Adwords advertising does versus the amount of engagement and reach you’re estimated to get.

You’re just not battling the same algorithms you are with Facebook.

With facebook you can also set a lifetime budget, to make sure that you never unintentionally spend more than you can afford – so your two year old can spend thousands on your phone apps but not on your facebook ad account! Phew! This level of control is what makes Facebook advertising so attractive to small businesses with a tighter marketing budget.

4. You Can Get Creative

Facebook advertising can be as creative as you are, and there are only a few restrictions (such as text to image ratio) that you need to abide by.

This means you can let your flair and personality show a lot more than you can through Google Adwords, which requires some canny manoeuvring in terms of keywords and buzz terms.

As well as opting for image and video led campaigns, you can also run a collection campaign (using more than one image) or a canvas campaign, which allows users to have a full-screen experience of your ad (so it better be an awesome experience!)

5. The Numbers Say They Work

According to in-depth research conducted by Sprout Social 93% of marketers use Facebook regularly to advertise to their customers.

That means that there are nearly 3 billion businesses benefitting from Facebook advertising, earning Facebook nearly $8 billion.

Not only this, but 70% of these businesses were outside the US like us!

If that’s not reason enough, we don’t know what is! Want to talk about running a successful Facebook campaign? Contact us today! 

Penguin in the Room @prartsmarketing is a group of creatives with an arts marketing dream: penguin stepping our way into the arts industry and helping other creatives flourish! Specialising in online marketing, social media, branding, copy writing, media coaching and web design for actors, artists, casting directors, agents, production companies, theatre companies and creative individuals.

Contact us any time for penguin chats via email:info@penguinintheroom.com or Facebook.com/penguinintheroom or waddle over to our website: www.penguinintheroom.com

3 Steps To Running A Re-Consent Campaign For Your Newsletter Subscribers

If you read our previous post about the changes to data protection laws coming into place in the EU this May 2018, chances are you’re thinking about running a re-consent campaign.

If you’re not thinking about this yet- well, you should. Because all of your data, even old data, needs to be GDPR compliant if you are a business or enterprise and you are sending emails in order to make sales.

Step One: Identify Those That Need to Reconfirm

If you have explicit permission from your customers that you can store their data for the express purpose you are storing their data, then you do not need to send them a re-consent email.

However, if you acquired their data via a ‘lead magnet’ (e.g. download this awesome video in return for your e-mail address!) or via a GDPR non-compliant opt-in form (e.g. a pre-ticked box or one that does not explicitly tell the customer how and why you are storing their data) then they need to re-consent.

Implied consent is not active consent and therefore is not GDPR compliant.

Step Two: Give Them A Reason To Stay

We all get flooded with e-mails we ignore and there are going to be a lot of re-consent emails flooding our inboxes in the next few months.

You want to re-affirm that your product, your brand or your content is useful to them, that it will add something to their day that they need (check out our post on how to add value to your customers this way)

You can do this in a number of ways:

• Give them exclusive access to something
• Give them a discount
• Give them a freebie

Whatever works for your brand and your product. Weigh the value of the giveaway/discount against the value of losing their custom.

Step Three: Make It Important

You want to ask your list to take action, to re-consent, so scream it at them. Maybe put ‘ACTION NEEDED’ or ‘IMPORTANT’ in the header of your email.

You want to try and get them to reconsent before the date passes, so make your e-mail scream OPEN ME.

You can run several emails as part of one campaign, so why not try A-B testing the first and re-deploying your more successful campaign header to those who didn’t open the email the first time around?

Penguin in the Room @prartsmarketing is a group of creatives with an arts marketing dream: penguin stepping our way into the arts industry and helping other creatives flourish! Specialising in online marketing, social media, branding, copy writing, media coaching and web design for actors, artists, casting directors, agents, production companies, theatre companies and creative individuals.

Contact us any time for penguin chats via email:info@penguinintheroom.com or Facebook.com/penguinintheroom or waddle over to our website: www.penguinintheroom.com