As one of THE most popular social platforms available today, advertising on Facebook for B2C companies is a no-brainer – millions of consumers at media buyers fingertips just waiting to be marketed to, a dream! But how about the use of Facebook ads for B2B? No, you cry? Well, how about, yes! If you work in the B2B space and haven’t tested this tactic, you could be missing out on a HUGE opportunity to promote your brand, your services and generate leads from your target market pool to your door and most importantly, grow your business.
There is still a considerable amount of scepticism around FB ads for B2B, so to highlight just some of the potential and capabilities out there, we’re going to run through a few of the basics and hopefully change some minds while we’re at it!
1 – The Power of the Facebook Pixel
You may be thinking about testing out FB advertising for your B2B, and you may not. Either way, we’d strongly urge you to get a Facebook pixel installed on your site asap!
This clever bit of Facebook generated code sits on your website. It will track visitors, and most importantly conversions from Facebook campaigns if set up to do so, giving you the ability to create warm custom audiences, lookalike audiences of a similar user to retarget and also keep a track on that all-important marketing ROI. Clever stuff!
2 – Identify Your Campaign Objectives BEFORE Making a Start
Ahead of kicking off your Facebook ad campaign, you must understand the different types of campaign setups available to you. Facebook separates its campaign types into Awareness, Consideration and Conversion; each of these campaign types offers up a set of objectives, but not all of them are suitable for B2B marketing.
As a rule of thumb, focus only on Brand Awareness, Traffic, Lead Generation and Conversions as part of your campaign strategy and what’s known in the industry as your “funnel”.
In short, the Brand Awareness objective will attract prospects to the top of your marketing funnel. The point of this is to create interest around your brand and service offering to a broader audience.
Traffic campaigns, as the name would suggest, allow you to drive traffic to your website or specific landing page. From here, you can build remarketing lists and lookalike audiences of the same lists, so you can start to sync your products and services with a relevant audience using Facebook’s granular targeting features, including demographic and job title amongst many others.
Facebook Lead Generation campaigns allow advertisers to collect prospect data directly through Facebook, giving ease of use to the user and mitigating any friction or difficult user experience that may occur when leads land on your website.
The process of completing lead gen forms on Facebook are typically swift and easy, meaning it’s more likely that a user will freely give you their information, as the action in doing so is so straightforward! This is a perfect approach for building out email marketing lists or handing warm leads straight to your sales team.
Conversion campaigns are what help you seal the deal, and for that reason, they tend to be expensive! We don’t recommend using conversion campaigns for prospecting to your website, instead, utilise this objective to drive traffic to specific and targeted landing pages. For example, if you are an IT services provider, you could use a conversion campaign to funnel prospects to a 14-day trial or fact-finding call booking.
3 – Creating and Controlling your Ad Sets
Ad sets are where you’ll control scheduling, audience and your ad creative – many of the important factors that make Facebook ads a genuinely viable option for B2B marketing.
Historically, Facebook ads allowed you to control your budget at the ad set level. As of February 2020, advertisers will now manage their budget at the campaign level, to make budget control and ad set spend easier and more robust. This means Facebook automatically and continuously finds the best available opportunities for results across your ad sets and distributes your budget in real-time to get those all-important results. The amount you set can apply to each day the campaign runs (daily budget) or over the lifetime of the campaign (lifetime budget).
Selecting the correct placement for your ads in incredibly important – Facebook will give you a host of options to choose where you want your ad to be seen, from desktop to mobile, messenger and Instagram, make sure you select the right placement for your ads before hitting publish, so you know when and where your ads will appear and also that your budget is being spent wisely!
The audience targeting options available on Facebook can be split into 3 main categories; core, custom and lookalike.
Core audience creation can be made up of location, age and gender, allowing you to instantly clear away any audience members that won’t be a good fit for your product or service. Detailed targeting options also enable you to include and exclude audience members who possess specific characteristics, making it even easier to ensure that your ads are being served to the people that are most likely to resonate with your offering.
In addition to this, you can also create audiences based on a variety of other
demographics, including job title, industry and employer, further helping your campaign to be super targeted and relevant.
Custom audiences can be created using various different methods, but as a B2B marketer, the main areas you should focus on are:
Finally, lookalike audiences are a great starting point for creating a targeted, brand-new audience of prospects whose interests and demographics are super-similar to those you already work with.
So, as you can see, Facebook advertising presents a massive opportunity for B2B marketers to promote their brand, services and vitally, generate leads and conversions. What are you waiting for? Test out this exciting medium today! If you’d like to speak to us about getting started or managing a campaign on your behalf and what’s involved, get in touch, here.