While Facebook is now recognised globally as an advertising powerhouse for B2C marketers, it is also a viable option for B2B marketers too.
According to a recent study by Social Media Examiner, 91% of B2B marketers now consider Facebook as the number one social media channel for their marketing campaigns, beating out B2B playground LinkedIn.
Read on to discover why Facebook Advertising is such a lucrative opportunity for B2B marketers and explore how it can work for your organisation.
The Power of the Pixel The Facebook Pixel is the secret sauce behind successful B2B advertising campaigns. It’s a piece of code that you place on your website that allows you to measure, optimise and build audiences for your campaigns.
When someone takes a specific action on your website, such as registering for a webinar or opting in to download a whitepaper, the Facebook Pixel “fires” and this information is reported back to you in the Facebook Ads Manager dashboard in real-time.
Furthermore, if someone expresses an interest in your ad and clicks through to your landing page, but doesn’t convert, you can use Facebook’s Custom Audience feature to retarget them with another ad to entice them back. Pretty amazing, right?!
Objectives for Optimum Results Facebook has also cleverly designed its advertising platform around a number of customer journey-based objectives to make it easy for you to design the best type of ad for your needs.
Let’s take a closer look at the objectives on offer that are particularly useful for B2B: Awareness:
Brand Awareness - Increase people's awareness of your business, brand or service.
Reach - Show your ad to as many people as possible in your target audience.
Consideration:
Traffic - Drive people from Facebook to any URL you choose, such as your website's landing page, a blog post, app etc.
Video Views - Share videos of your business with people on Facebook most likely to watch it.
Lead Generation - Collect leads for your business. Create ads that collect info from people interested in your product, such as sign-ups for newsletters.
Conversion:
Encourage people to take a specific action on your business's site, such as having them to add items to a cart, download your app, register for your site, or make a purchase.
Fun with Formats and Placement Facebook’s Advertising platform allows marketers to get creative and mix it up with a wide range of formats, including static images, videos, carousels, slideshows, lead generation forms and more.
As marketers, it’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming that your audience will prefer “creative A” over “creative B”, but the data doesn’t lie and the results may surprise you! This is why we highly recommend testing a few different ad formats to determine what your audience is most responsive to.
Facebook also allows you to control where your ads are shown and you can run parallel campaigns on Instagram using this feature. By default, Facebook will select most of the options available for your objective, but we’d recommend honing in on the placements that make sense for your particular campaign.
Laser-Like Targeting
With more than 2 billion active users per month, how do you make sure your Facebook Ads are seen by the right people?
Facebook’s targeting offerings allow you to be as broad or as specific as you desire and can be broken down into the following methods:
Core Audiences - based on location, age, gender, interests, behaviours and connections.
Custom Audiences - based on website visitors, contact lists and app users.
Lookalike Audiences - based on people who Facebook identifies as being similar to your current customers and likely to respond to your ads.
Another incredibly useful feature is that you can use the above targeting methods alone, or in conjunction with other methods. For example, you could run a Traffic ad to an event registration page using “core audiences”, then layer a custom audience on top of that, to exclude people who have already registered.
A Bit About Budgets Facebook’s Advertising platform is set up in such a way that it allows organisations with any budget to get involved.
If it gets charged for impressions, its daily budget must be at least $1 a day
If it gets charged for clicks, Likes, video views or post engagement, its daily budget must be at least $5 a day
If it gets charged for low frequency events like offer claims or app installs, its budget must be at least $40 a day
You can set your budget as a daily budget, or lifetime budget depending on your goals and the nature of your campaign.
Our top tip on setting budgets? Start off with a small budget while you test and learn, then scale up your successful campaigns!
Facebook’s Advertising system runs on an auction system, which means that more advanced B2B marketers can make use of the “bids” feature to state the maximum amount they are willing to pay when someone sees or takes action on their ad.
A Word on Optimisation and Reporting One of the key features that made advertisers fall in love with Facebook was the ability to see campaign feedback in real-time - and react and adapt accordingly. This is something that is impossible with print, TV or radio advertising!
Within Facebook’s Ad Manager dashboard, you’ll be able to view your CPC, CPA and CTR, as well as many more customisable options based on your campaign and specific data requirements. You’ll even be able to pinpoint exactly which ads are responsible for the most results, so you can focus on these ads and turn off under-performing variants. This means you can easily focus on getting the most out of your advertising spend!
---With all of these capabilities in mind. It’s now the time to tap into the Facebook goldmine for B2B marketers!
Start using Facebook to boost brand awareness and generate highly targeted leads and get in touch with Philip Martin to discover how DMA Partners can help: philip.martin@dma-partners.com.
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