JSB Talks Digital is a weekly digital marketing and social media podcast hosted by author, strategist, consultant, speaker and trainer Joanne Sweeney-Burke. Each Friday Joanne shares her digital marketing and social media insights from her work as CEO of Digital Training Institute. 

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This special series of podcasts takes a forensic look at how individuals and organisations are embracing digital transformation.

Coming up in today’s show: why communications managers need to embrace social to leverage corporate messages

In this, the fifth in a series of special shows on Digital Transformation, I look at how corporate communications is changing in a social world.

• So coming up in today’s episode, I have a digital transformation conversation with Julia Bramble, Facebook Ads expert and founder of BrambleBuzz.

• In shout-outs: 3 tips to making your Facebook advertising campaign work for you

• In JSB’s column – Why amplifying your corporate message with social advertising is a good idea; and

• Find out what social media tool will bring your social advertising to the next level.

Interview with Julia Bramble | How Facebook Ads can be a corporate communicators best friend

I am delighted to be joined on today’s show by Julia Bramble, a former Forensic Scientist but now a social media strategist, consultant & speaker. She’s also a practitioner and trainer and writes for Social Media Examiner.

Based in beautiful Devon in the UK, Julia helps organisations bring results to their social advertising campaigns, particularly on Facebook, with her business BrambleBuzz.

Julia and I talk about the power of Facebook advertising to amplify corporate messages and that sales is not always the final outcome of a campaign.

So be sure to tune in if you want to hear Julia answer my questions:

Q1: While Facebook has a network from which we can drive business results such as leads, conversions, bookings, downloads, sign-ups and ultimately sales – there are other users who want something different from social advertising. I’m talking about amplifying a corporate message.  In your experience what types of ads work best for this type of goal?

Q2: How do you manage the expectations of your clients when it comes to Facebook advertising? Surely they all want results but there’s so much to be done in advance of achieving that goal and the client needs to be will to work for it? So how do you temper a client’s enthusiasm and expectation?

Q3: With almost 2 billion people now using Facebook and their ad revenue spiralling to new heights, it means the cost per conversion is undoubtedly only going one way – up!

Q4: 42% of marketers report that Facebook is critical or important to their business. But how do you stand out from the crowd to get noticed when organic reach has plunged to 2% for many of us? And this includes on Facebook ads?

Q5: Let’s turn our attention to why Facebook Ads work – let’s talk about the emotional connection that many people miss when launching a campaign? Even though the algorithm does the scientific and analytical work, we know as social media marketers that getting an emotional connection with an audience is the secret ingredient to getting the most from your social advertising spend. So how does an organization need to do to achieve this?

Q6: Should organisations use Facebook Ads to build up their funnel from top to bottom, cold to hot and unaware to loyal? How long does this take and what should be their approach?

Follow Julia on Twitter @JuliaBramble

Like her Facebook Page

JSB’s Column |Should I amplify a corporate message with social advertising?

Public relations and reputation management is just as important as sales in your organization. Never forget that.

If you are an organization that needs to amplify a message, then here’s why you should consider using social advertising as a social marketing tactic.

Social advertising = targeted advertising. You can serve your message to precisely the audience that you believe needs to hear what you have to say.

The analytics and data that results from a social advertising campaign will tell you who has actually engaged with your message. This is critical to measure the success of your campaign.

Social advertising knits nicely in with an overall PR or corporate communications campaign. Your ads should complement your press release, media interviews and speeches. In fact, why not consider promoting a media interview.

By embarking on a social advertising campaign you can collect the digital footprint of those who are engaging with you by a piece of code called a pixel. This will help you build a community of people interested in your message and your organization.

Social is ubiquitous and we expect to hear from all types of organisations and agencies on social media. But social advertising by its very nature will help you craft your story and your message better.

Will you engage in social advertising?  What outcome do you want to achieve and what message do you want to amplify?

If you want to have a Digital Transformation conversation with me. Simply drop me an email to [email protected]. Everything starts with a story or a conversation.

Shoutouts | Three Facebook Advertising Tips

In this part of the show I usually give shout-outs to brands, organisations and individuals whose work online is worth talking about.

But in today’s show I’m sharing three tips to run a successful Facebook Ad campaign.

• Did you know the Page Post Link ad is the most popular Facebook Ad type? This ad type is perfect for promoting your external website. AdEspresso, now owned by Hootsuite, analyzed the text, links, type, and CTAs of 111,018 Facebook ads that were created by 1,000s of companies over the course of a year and used on Facebook. They found that the page post link ad gained a popularity score of 75%.

Driving Facebook users to your website is something all organisations, particularly those with a corporate message to share should be doing. By clicking on your web link they are demonstrating an interest in you and your content. You can also use their data vis-à-vis the Facebook pixel to re-target them in similar campaigns in the future.

• Shout your message in 5 words or less. Short headlines grab attention and make visitors more inclined click to find more information. Sentiment analysis studies the emotional context of text. Most non-neutral Facebook ads show a slightly more positive tone. But negative words also generate more engagement than sentiment neutral text.

• Capture attention and increase engagement with video. To be effective, video ads have to accomplish two things: grab the user’s attention in 2-3 seconds and have a short duration, probably no more than 20 seconds total.

So if you are running a Facebook Ads campaign make sure you use my top 3 tips to increase engagement and conversions!

Social Media Tool of the Week: Pixel Caffeine

The social media tool that saved my working week this week is Pixel Caffeine by AdEspresso which is a free WordPress plugin.

In just a few simple clicks, you can begin creating custom audiences for almost any parameter you want – whether its web pages visited, products and content viewed, or custom and dynamic events.

Features include:

• Instant Installation – get the Facebook pixel site-wide without typing a line of code – just a simple click.
• Advanced Custom Audiences – create audiences based on standard/custom events, referring sources (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc.), categories/tags of content, specific URL parameters…literally almost anything you’d like!
• Facebook Dynamic Ads with WooCommerce – automatically track visitors based on what they viewed (product name, product category and product tags) and then dynamically re-target them with advertisements on Facebook or Instagram

Here’s what you can do with Pixel Caffeine:

• Create “category” audiences for your blog or website and then re-target these visitors with lead generation or direct sale campaigns
• Create audiences of people that viewed specific products and dynamically target them with specific incentives or coupons for exactly the products they viewed
• Create audiences of those that submit particular forms, click on certain buttons, or take certain actions while navigating or searching your website.

I love feedback

I’d love to know what you think about this episode. So please get in touch by commenting below or tweet me @tweetsbyJSB or send me a snap to jsbsnaps.

Listen: JSB Talks Digital Transformation | Episode #37

I would like to thank Eoghan Murphy aka The Galway Gamer for producing my podcast series and to Flirt FM on the campus of NUI, Galway where I am based for the use of their studio.