Consumer goods companies have stampeded to Facebook to market themselves. And why not? Facebook is an exceptional tool for growing brand awareness and engaging with prospects, find new customers, offer promotions and serve exceptional remarketing creative, ultimately inciting affordable conversions, says Allen Finn, a Boston-based content marketing specialist.
Is there a place for B2B on Facebook? “When it comes to multi-touch B2B marketing — industries with months-long sales cycles and niche clientele — skeptics remain,” Finn states.
For those B2B companies that have already adopted Facebook as a marketing vehicle and those who are ready to make the leap, Finn offers these tips to get the most from your investment.
Not all Facebook campaigns are created equal.
Facebook silos campaign objectives into three categories: awareness, consideration and conversion. Although each of these categories has a legit use case for B2B advertisers, not all the individual objectives are worth deploying on a consistent basis. Four sub-categories — brand awareness, traffic, lead generation and conversions — are the areas in which you need to focus if you want to successfully advertise your products or services to other businesses on Facebook.
Ad sets are where the magic happens.
The ad set level is where you control everything from budget and scheduling to audience and ad creation. Finn recommends a modest daily spend for early-stage Facebook clients because they are more predictable and allow for experimentation. More seasoned Facebook advertisers can use lifetime budgets, but keep intervals short (three to five days). You may want to squeeze more out of your spend by using the scheduling tool to limit the time of day when prospects will be exposed to your ads, allowing B2B advertisers to avoid paying for overnight or weekend ads, which may have questionable value.
Facebook’s placement tool allows advertisers to choose where their ads show up. It’s truly quality over quantity here, says Finn. Most B2B advertisers will do well to stick with placement in the Facebook news feed and right-hand column. Showing up on Instagram and the Facebook Audience Network are less successful for most B2B companies.
Audiences: the golden ticket
The capability to target by age, gender, location and a host of key-word identifiers is the whole idea for advertising on Facebook in the first place. Equally effective to selecting the right demographics is eliminating the ones you don’t want. The “detailed targeting” section at the bottom of the audience interface allows you to include and exclude prospects who display specific characteristics. The B2B targeting category allows users to identify prospects by company size or senior titles within a company.
Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences feature allows you to create new audience of prospects whose demographic and psychographic makeup parallel your source audience — any Facebook audience you have already created. Once you identify a high-performing audience (in terms of conversions or email inquiries) Facebook will generate an new audience that closely resembles your source audience.
“To those B2B outfits that still believe the world’s most popular social platform is nothing more than an echo chamber for fake news and feline hijinks, you are missing out on a massive business growth opportunity,” says Finn.
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