B2B marketers are a little sceptical about social media advertising but in recent times, more and more of them are stepping out to try different strategies and ideas to leverage social media for brand awareness, lead generation, and nurturing.
LinkedIn and Twitter have proved to be useful and effective for B2B marketing but Facebook still lies in the grey area for most of the marketers.
Well, Facebook is the best marketing platform in B2C space for sure. But it is also relevant for B2B brands and in this blog, I will walk you through 6 ways you can leverage Facebook Ads for B2B marketing.
1. Retarget your leads.
Retargeting the prospects on Facebook at different touchpoints in the buying process can be the best way to nurture them toward conversion. Since the B2B sales cycle is quite long, the retargeting campaign can enable you to keep the prospects engaged and stay on top of their mind.
Facebook allows you to create a custom audience by uploading the email and contact number of your prospects and target the users attached to respective contact info.
However, a retargeting campaign is only effective if the ads are aligned with the customer journey map. You have to make sure that the prospects are receiving relevant marketing communications based on their past interactions and current deal stage.
For example, if a prospect moved from a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) then your campaign should be around showing off your previous works by promoting case studies and customer testimonials to win their trust and build credibility.
2. Target Lookalike Audiences.
Lookalike Audiences allows you to reach out to new potential customers based on the demographic and interest attributes similar to your existing customers.
Facebook analyses different attributes of the profiles from your source audience and then identifies the common qualities among them to create a lookalike audience comprising the users only with similar interests and demographic behaviours as of your existing customers.
Once you’ve created your lookalike audience, you have a completely new set of potential customers that closely resembles with your current customer base.
Now, create campaigns to reach out to these audiences with the most relevant marketing communications and resources to drive them to your website and generate leads.
3. Use B2B relevant targeting attributes.
Apart from targeting your prospects based on the geographical locations, age, gender, location and behaviour, the following attributes can be extremely useful for B2B marketers to target the decision-makers on Facebook.
- Employer – If you already have identified the best companies you want to target for business, then using this attribute you can reach out to the employees of these companies.
- Job Title– Using this attribute, you can target the decision-makers like Owner, founder, CEO of potential companies.
- Industry – Use this attribute to reach people with roles in respective industries. Remember, this attribute doesn’t identify industry based on the company they are employed at but the role they hold a job. For example, to target the sales manager of a company, you need to select ‘Business and finance’ or ‘Management’ industries.
- Interest – Target people based on the interest they expressed or liked pages related to the topic.
Now, combining these attributes while creating campaigns can help you reach out to a very narrowed audiences who might be interested or in need of your solutions. So, be creative with your ads and messaging to grab their attention and bring them to your website.
4. Retarget your website visitors.
Almost 95% of website visitors leave the website without sharing their email address and this is where Facebook Ads can help you drive those visitors back to your website.
To utilise this feature, you first need to set up Facebook Pixels on your website which allows Facebook to track the actions of visitors on the website and using the data, you can build custom audiences to retarget those visitors on Facebook.
However, as I mentioned earlier, you have to be very strategic with retargeting campaigns. You must reach out to them with information based on their past actions on your website. For example, if a visitor finds your website through a blog post and explores the service and pricing pages then you should reach himher with resources to show off your expertise in the field.
5. Retarget cold prospects.
Using the custom audience feature again, you can target the prospect who went cold and isn’t responding to your emails and phone calls.
These prospects might not be willing to talk to you for now because of any possible reasons but using this feature you can make sure that you always stay on top of their mind whenever they decide to change the existing vendor or upgrade to a better solution.
You have to consider the timing since when they went cold and the possible reasons behind it so that you can reach them again on Facebook strategically with relevant communication that triggers urgency or curiosity in them to know more about your solutions.
To target such prospects, you can run a campaign by creating a custom audience comprising all the prospect that went cold as discussed in the first point
6. Leverage lead generation forms.
Lead Ads is the most powerful feature I find on Facebook for B2B marketers. This format lets people show their interest in your solutions by filling out a form in the ad without leaving the page.
You can use lead generation form to let your prospects book a demo or share their contact info for a callback. This saves a lot of time for your prospects and you don’t even need to build a landing page – everything happens right on the Facebook news feed.
You can also add fields in the form to ask for more information from the prospects in addition to the contact details that can help you qualify leads before finalising the demo & for the follow up that goes after that.
Wrapping up
There are so many ways B2B marketers can leverage Facebook to generate new leads and nurture them for conversion but aligning this platform with your marketing funnel is very crucial to make the best out of it.
Above mentioned are some of the ways I came up with to use Facebook ads for my clients and by exploring the different feature in Facebook Ads Manager you can also find many new ways to connect with your customer personas to grow your business.
So, don’t limit yourself with these 6 ways to use Facebook for B2B marketing instead explore more and find more effective ways. When you find a new way make sure to share with us as well.