Do you want to get more leads for your B2B business but don’t know the best way to approach Facebook B2B marketing? This is pretty common for businesses that are broadening their online marketing efforts and only have basic Facebook Ads experience.
You’re probably going to have a hard time right off the bat because the quality of leads you get from Facebook Ads isn’t as high as platforms like LinkedIn Ads. LinkedIn allows you to target based on job title, seniority, industry, and even team size, making the leads a lot more valuable.
The biggest mistake we see people making is approaching B2B marketing the same as they would a regular campaign. Doing this won’t get you the results you want but in this blog post, we’ll explain how you can get Facebook Ads to work for B2B.
Strategy #1 - Avoid Common Facebook Ads Mistakes
The first thing you need to be aware of is that it’s really easy to make simple mistakes when you run Facebook B2B marketing campaigns. Here are some common mistakes we see being made:
- Not using ad creatives properly – take advantage of Facebook Video Ads and use eye-catching images!
- Having bad ad copy – speak directly to your target audience, try and relate to them.
- Setting a really low daily budget – this is a huge mistake to make at the beginning of a campaign and it can derail the rest of your campaign.
- Targeting too broad of an audience – casting too wide of a net will quickly drag you down.
On LinkedIn you can be more relaxed because you can be more granular with your targeting. On the other hand, with Facebook you need to be more aggressive and A/B test your creatives, ad copy, and audiences so that you can start getting high-quality (and cheap) leads.
Setting a really low daily budget
In regard to using a low daily budget, this might seem like a good idea because Facebook Ads are generally cheaper, but it’s not. Initially, you’ll want to spend more on the testing we described above to discover where those high-quality leads lie. So, whilst Facebook Ads won’t cost you as much in the long run as LinkedIn Ads, the initial investment is going to be pretty hefty if you want accurate data.
Don’t make the mistake of skipping over this. You need to get this data, otherwise the rest of your campaign will be a wasted investment.
Targeting too broad of an audience
Targeting a broad audience, especially early on in your campaign, is an easy mistake to make (more so if you’ve been focusing on other platforms up until now). When your focus is on Facebook B2B marketing, you instead want to cast a bunch of smaller nets which equates to a larger audience.
This is a point we’ll be diving into in more detail but to briefly explain: casting these smaller nets instead of a single large net will get you more data. Different audiences will react differently to your ads and knowing how they react is valuable for figuring out who your ideal audience is. These smaller nets give you so much more data than a larger net would.
Strategy #2 - Getting Your Targeting Right
Another crucial step in Facebook B2B marketing is constructing your audience. For this, you’ll benefit from creating a buyer persona and looking at your customer data to find out who is engaging with your ads the most.
If you’ve already got customer data then this next thing is a game changer: Facebook lookalike audiences. All you have to do is upload your data and Facebook will scan its database of over a billion users, and it’ll find out which users are best suited for your ads based on that data. In other words, it’s creating an audience that “looks like” your previous customers.
This is the lowest hanging fruit out there when you’re trying to get leads using Facebook Ads for B2B. For that reason, we’d recommend using this strategy first when you’re just getting started on Facebook.
Strategy #3 - Targeting Granularity
When it comes to Facebook B2B marketing, the more you layer your targeting the higher your CPM will be. So, if you have all these demographic and interest-based audiences, with a bunch of exclusions, your CPM will increase.
The best solution here is to pull back some of your exclusions and do all placement campaigns. Sure, this will make Facebook display your ads elsewhere – perhaps on Instagram feeds or Facebook mobile feeds – but that’s fine. Not only will Facebook’s algorithm quickly learn where your ads perform best and optimize the placements around that, but you won’t be penalized with a higher CPM. More restrictions equate to a higher CPM.
Why is this important? Remember, we’re trying to collect data as efficiently and as cheaply as possible. By not limiting placements and reducing the number of exclusions we use, we’re keeping our CPM at a lower level.
Strategy #4 - Segmenting Out Your Audience
Now that you’ve got your CPM under control, segmenting your audience is a good next step. This is easy to do, can save you money, and it can be done right off the bat.
After just a few days of Facebook B2B marketing, take a look at your campaign performance. If you do a “deep dive” into your audiences, you can get incredibly valuable information. Maybe you’ll discover that under-30s engaged with your ads twice as much as other age groups, or that users in a specific state were getting further through your funnel.
You can then build your targeting around this information. Sticking with the under-30s, you’d then want to heavily focus your targeting on them. That’s not to say you should only target them, but they should be receiving the majority of your budget.
On top of this, you can also use your audience data to find out what appeals to specific audiences. The fact is, different audiences respond differently to, well, different things. Even something as simple as the color scheme used in your creatives will influence how audiences react. It’s also useful to segment your audience to target them with relevant content – people in Arizona don’t want to see ads that are intended for people in Colorada, and HR managers don’t want to see ads for market analysts.
So, segment your audience and target different groups based on the data you have.
Strategy #5 - Retargeting Through a Funnel
Facebook retargeting ads are something we come back to a lot, so we won’t focus on them too much here. They’re still worth reminding you about though.
In a nutshell, instead of trying to hammer the message of “Book a free demo now” or “Sign up for a free trial” straight away, we start more passively. For example, you might target your audience with an ad that says “Download our free whitepaper” or “Check out our blog post on…”. The point is to not go for a sale instantly but rather give your audience genuine value.
You can build on this without compromising the strategy too much. Let’s say you take the blog post route. After a user clicks on the ad and they’re taken to the post, you have a lead upgrade so that they can opt into a free lead magnet.
But why go through all this effort? If they’re interested enough to sign up for a lead magnet, surely they’d be willing to sign up for whatever we put in the ad? Unfortunately, people don’t engage with ads that way. People need to be “warmed up” to a new business before they consider signing up or paying. Sure, you could go directly to making a sale, but this will get a lot less leads.
Strategy #6 - Relate to Your Audience's Problems
As generic as this sounds, it needs to be done and will have a huge impact on your Facebook B2B marketing experience. It’s simple: relate to your audience’s problems. This is key if you want your audience to even just consider your ads let alone do business with you.
Ask yourself what the main problems your audience faces are which are relevant to your product. Then, in the first line of your ad’s description, highlight one of those problems immediately.
For instance, in the ads for our software, we might say something along the lines of, “Managing Facebook Ads is a pain and time consuming, here’s how this software solves that”. Right away anyone who sees this ad will relate to that problem and will be intrigued to find out more about the software that solves that problem.
If you were running Facebook Video Ads then you can take the same approach. Instead of mentioning the problem at the beginning of the ad description, you’d say it within the first 6 seconds of the video.
Hire a Facebook B2B Marketing Agency
Facebook B2B marketing isn’t a simple step-by-step process. As much as we’d like it to, it doesn’t work like that and you’ll need to work these strategies around your existing campaign.
Sure, no matter what you do, you’re going to start off by getting a bunch of low-quality leads. This isn’t avoidable and if you want to succeed on Facebook Ads, you need to take onboard our tips so that you can get through that phase as quickly as possible.
You might not feel up to the challenge though, in which case it’d be worth asking a Facebook Ads agency for help. With our experienced team, you can push your business to the next level. Just book a call with KonvertLab by clicking the button below and we’ll get to work.