Do you want to better understand how to get leads and sales with Facebook Ads for B2B? You’ve come to the right place. There’s no denying that using Facebook Ads in the B2B space can be a challenge. However, the strategies that we’re about to show you are the same ones which we use for our own clients.
By learning these strategies you’ll gain two things. First, you’ll gain a different perspective on using B2B ads which entails a variety of new strategies. Second, you’ll see how a Facebook Ads agency like ourselves handle huge budgets of $100,000+ effectively. So, without further ado, let’s get right into it.
Plan Your Sales Funnel Properly
This can make a huge difference in your Facebook campaign’s performance. You can’t just go to the end of your sales funnel and say, “I want to make sales, here’s my target audience.”. This might get you some sales but nowhere near as many as you’d get if you targeted the right people at the right stages.
What do we mean by this? We’ve spoken about “warming your audience” up in a lot of our blog posts and videos. In short, this is when you turn someone who has never heard of your business into a paying customer. To do that, you have to walk them through your sales funnel and target them with different types of ads.
So, you might start by targeting a broad audience with an ad that showcases your blog post on improving customers’ experience. Your next ad would then retarget the people who clicked on your first ad, this time offering a free eBook. Then finally, you can retarget the people who signed up for the free eBook with an ad asking them to sign up for your newsletter. You can carry this on longer and run more ads before going in for the kill (so to speak), but you get the point.
Our point: don’t target your audience at the wrong stage of your sales funnel. Start them at the beginning of the funnel or if you already have an audience you’ve been targeting, you can start a stage or two in advance.
Facebook Ads for B2B: is it Worth it?
A lot of people think that Facebook Ads for B2B are a waste of time. They believe that Facebook Ads are better for B2C whereas LinkedIn Ads are the better B2B option. This is somewhat true but if you’re targeting the right audience, have a well-thought-out sales funnel, and are using high-quality creatives, you shouldn’t have a problem with B2B on Facebook.
There is a drawback though. Facebook Ads traffic typically does tend to be of lower quality when compared to Google Search Ads or LinkedIn Ads, especially considering how great their job title targeting is. This drawback is easily countered when we take into account that Facebook Ads are significantly more affordable.
Use Facebook Retargeting Ads
We’ve discussed Facebook Retargeting Ads in another post and made a video on it, so we won’t get too into this. But retargeting ads/sequential ads are incredibly effective and if possible, should be a part of your strategy.
Facebook Ads for B2B - Creating Your Audiences
Next, let’s talk about audiences. When it comes to B2B there are usually two main categories you’ll want to create: custom audiences and Facebook lookalike audiences. The other categories should be handled on a creative level so we won’t worry about those for now.
So, go to your Facebook Ads Manager and in the shortcuts menu, click on Audiences.
This is where you manage all of your target audiences, and we can go ahead and create both those audience types from here.
Click on Create Audience and you’ll see that both Custom Audience and Lookalike Audience are listed. We’re going to be creating a new Custom Audience.
Here, you can create a custom audience based on website data, a customer list, or even from your video views.
Of course, if you want to target people who visit your website, you’ll have to have that data available. The same goes for a customer list and if you’re just starting out, you probably don’t.
Let’s say we want to have a custom audience based on our website visitors. We go ahead and click Website and then we see this window:
In this case, our audience would include people who visited our website in the last 180 days. This adds another level of control where you won’t be targeting people who were on your website over a year ago and who probably don’t have an interest in what you’re selling anymore. But we can go even deeper than this.
This type of audience is better when it comes to Facebook Ads for B2B. As you can see, it targets and excludes specific pages. If users visited the pricing page or the book a demo page, they’ll be targeted.
On the contrary, anyone who went through your funnel and visited the thank you page or call booked pages will be exempt from your targeting. These people are already customers so targeting them would be a waste of money.
Facebook Lead Form Custom Audience
If you want to target people who engaged with your Facebook lead gen ads then you can do that too. Again, you go to your audiences and click Create Audience followed by Custom Audience. Under the sources, you can click on Lead form.
One of the interesting things about this is that you can actually retarget people who filled out your form as well as people who were considering it – anyone who clicked the form but who didn’t submit it. You know those people were close to submitting a form so getting them to reconsider shouldn’t be difficult.
Facebook Lookalike Audiences
This is something we’ve spoken about before and even have a video on, so we’ll keep it brief. Facebook lookalike audiences work like this: you upload data from your current audience and Facebook analyzes this data. They gather all the data points and match them to a whole new group of people who “look like” your existing audience.
Why is this useful? If you’re targeting the same audience over and over again, you’ll eventually (and unintentionally) start showing your ads to the same people. With a lookalike audience, you can target a completely new group of people who have never seen your ads before but who share similar traits to your existing audience.
What to Do if You Don't Have Customer Data
If you’re sitting there thinking, “Well I don’t have a list of 1,000 customers or website visitors”, it’s not over just yet. There are still some things you can do, including interest-based targeting.
Before we get into this, interest targeting is one of the most expensive types of targeting. However, if you’ve not got any customer data on hand, it’s one of your few options initially.
Start by creating a new campaign as you usually would (there aren’t any special requirements at this point). Then, after you start making a new ad set, you can tweak the targeting. Specifically under Detailed Targeting, you can add demographics, interests, or behaviors.
One trick we like to use is to target business page admins. Since you’re running Facebook Ads for B2B, this narrows your targeting to focus on users who aren’t just page admins but who are page admins for a business – your ideal customer. After that, you can click Narrow and get even more focused. Let’s say you’re in the online marketing industry, in which case you could target the interest online advertising.
You can mess around with this and figure out which interests to target, but we’d recommend getting your potential reach to around 1 million. Cast a wide net first, refine your targeting later.
Income-Based Targeting
Depending on your industry it might also be worth targeting based on income. For example, you can actually target the top 10% of earners in a certain ZIP code. If you’re going for those C-level positions then targeting the top 5% is extremely worthwhile.
Free Facebook Ads for B2B Cheatsheet
That last point we want to cover is our cheatsheet. What this cheatsheet does is show you some of the best Facebook Ads for B2B that we’ve seen so that you can get an idea of what makes a good ad. If you’re struggling to get the results you want then use these ads for inspiration – what color schemes are working for other companies? What tone is being used in their ad copy?
You’ll quickly figure out what makes these ads work and can use that knowledge to improve your own ads. All you have to do is click the button below and that page will give you the free cheatsheet!
Wrapping Up Facebook Ads for B2B
Targeting the right people is a huge part of Facebook Ads for B2B. It’s really easy to start throwing your ads in front of the wrong people, get terrible results, and get discouraged. That said, with the tips we’ve gone over in this blog post, you can make Facebook Ads very profitable.
It’s not for everyone though. If you’re new to running paid ads then all of this new information can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be that way. KonvertLab is a Facebook Ads Agency and we take pride in knowing that whatever type of business reaches out to us, we can lend a hand. Take the first step to growing your business with us and book a call!
