If you struggle to see the value in business-to-business (B2B) Facebook ads, you aren’t alone. Many marketing professionals see Facebook as a platform that isn’t a good fit for B2B ad targeting.
In reality, if you don’t include Facebook in your overall ad strategy, you are probably losing important customer acquisition opportunities. Keep reading below to understand the benefits of B2B ad targeting with Facebook.
Are you already convinced of the value of B2B Facebook ads but don’t know where to begin? This article was also written for you. In addition to going over the benefits of B2B ad targeting on Facebook, we’ll also detail 5 powerful B2B ad strategies.
What Are the Benefits of B2B Facebook Ads?
There are undeniable benefits to using B2B Facebook ads to reach out to and engage with your customers. Here are just a few:
Improve Human Engagement
Facebook is designed to foster interactions between people. Keep in mind that while your goal is to sell a product or service to a business, it’s people who you will be dealing with. Facebook can help you create friendly, personable engagement that can build better relationships and soften up gatekeepers.
Robust Advertising Options
Facebook has the most powerful advertising infrastructure of all social networks. You can truly do things with audience targeting and segmenting that you can’t do elsewhere. Facebook may only be rivaled by Google Ads B2B lead generation in terms of paid advertising impact.
Access to Extensive Metrics
The B2B sales process can be long and complex, so the last thing you want to do is spend a lot of time and effort pursuing a sale or campaign that was never meant to be.
Because Facebook provides tracking tools and analytics data via the Meta Business Suite, you will be able to track the progress of your campaigns and make decisions based on those insights.
5 Top B2B Facebook Ad Strategies
It’s clear that Facebook is a B2B-friendly ad platform. Now, it’s time to make it work for your brand. These 5 strategies should help with that:
1. Take Advantage of Audience Customization
Source: Social Media Examiner
One of the best parts of Facebook ads is that it allows you to reach prospects who may not be connected with you on the platform. All you need are email addresses.
Most people tend to use the same email address for various online accounts — and that may be the very email you have in your CRM. With Facebook ads, you can upload those email addresses, then get your ads in front of the accounts associated with them.
The process for doing this is simple. Go into campaigns and find audiences at the bottom. Click that tab, select custom audiences, and then choose “customer list.” You’ll be able to upload your email addresses there.
2. Use B2B Categories in Targeting
Facebook allows you to target audiences based on a variety of characteristics. Many of these are more geared towards business-to-consumer (B2C), like age or gender. However, there are several other categories that you can use to target prospects using criteria that are much more relevant to B2B advertising. These are:
- Job title
- Recent new job
- Employer
Imagine being able to target everybody with the job title of buyer or operations manager with your ads. This feature gives you a direct line to B2B decision makers. That is key to ensuring you get the most out of your Facebook ad spending.
3. Retarget Your Prospects
Facebook is great for customer acquisition and lead generation. It also works quite well for retargeting prospects. These are the potential customers who have already looked into your products or services but haven’t taken any action just yet.
Facebook retargeting allows you to reach those prospects again and get them to go back to your site for a second look.
You can do this with the custom audience feature on Facebook as well. In this case, you will select audience members who have previously gone to a specific web address (URL).
This URL can be your company home page, a product page, or one of your landing pages. Using this feature allows Facebook to target people who have clicked on your pages but not answered your CTA.
Here are the steps to follow once you enter the Facebook ads manager:
- Go to “Audience”
- Select “Create Custom Audience”
- Go to “Under Website Traffic”
- Select “People Visiting Specific Pages”
- Navigate to “Visited Page”
- Customize the details to match the URL you want
- Click or tap “Create”
There is one more thing to do. You have to add the Facebook pixel to the code behind the web pages you have selected.
When you do this, anybody who visits the page you indicated will be added to your custom audience list that has been created in Ads Manager. Then, they will be shown ads based on the ads you have already used to target them.
4. Review B2B Facebook Ads Examples for Competitive Research
Competitive analysis is an important part of nearly every ad campaign. Take a look at B2B Facebook ads examples from your competitors to see what you are up against.
How do you find those B2B Facebook ad examples? Here are a few things to try:
- Start a file to store ideas you find in B2B Facebook ad examples
- Scan competitors’ pages or FB ad examples
- Use the Facebook ads library as a resource
- Review the ads you see carefully as well as the engagement they create
Finally, you may see ads if you follow your competitors on Facebook. If this happens, you can use the “why am I seeing this ad” feature. This dialog will give you insights into the targeting your competitors are using.
5. Focus on Audience Growth
Source: Statista
Creating a strong Facebook presence is an important precursor to engaging in B2B advertising. This work is a great way to build an audience and connect with them by creating and curating valuable content. Do this correctly, and you will establish a loyal following.
However, if that is all you do, your reach is going to be limited. Your posts will reach your followers. Maybe someone will share your content from time to time.
When you invest in Facebook ads, you can extend your reach and your audience — because ads connect you with people on the platform, whether they follow you or not. Considering that Facebook has well over a billion users each month, this is something that is worth pursuing.
If you are familiar with Google Ads B2B lead generation, Facebook ads work similarly. Your ads are shown to people for whom they will be relevant. This setup is a great way to introduce your brand to people who may be interested in your products or services.
The best way to approach this is to identify the people most likely to be interested in doing business with you. Then produce ad creatives that will be most engaging to the people you want to target.
B2B Facebook Ads — Increasing Customer Reach
With Facebook advertising, you can increase your reach to potential clients who have connected with your business but never taken action and those who simply never engaged with you at all.
When you use FB ads for your B2B brand, you are also able to take advantage of some of the best segmentation and targeting options in online advertising.
If you’re ready to get started, Galactic Fed can help. Check out this information on creating Facebook ads that stand out. It highlights excellent information on getting started with ad creatives. Then, look into our paid media services.
