September 5, 2021

Facebook Ads Aren’t Just For B2C: Start Your B2B Ads Campaign

With 2.853 billion active users worldwide and as the first social network to surpass one billion registered accounts, Facebook is the king of social media.

It is not difficult to understand why 72% of B2C marketers report that Facebook is their primary social advertising channel. Indeed, there cannot be any better social platform than Facebook for B2C companies to find the right audience and market their products or services.

However, it doesn’t mean Facebook Ads are only limited to B2C businesses. B2B businesses too can leverage Facebook Ads for product or service promotions. 

Around 89% of B2B marketers are already using Facebook to outperform their competitors and improve sales. 

Therefore, B2B businesses have a significant amount of audience to target on Facebook. 

If you are a B2B business owner, you have a greater chance of acquiring quality business leads by opting for Facebook ads.

This article will discuss the various advantages that you get as a B2B business owner by running Facebook ads and how you can begin advertising on Facebook to acquire more customers for your business. 

Let’s begin. 

Why Facebook Ads Aren’t Just For B2C Businesses

Here are some compelling stats to support that Facebook Ads are helpful and can be a turning point for your B2B business: 

  • 48.5% of B2B decision makers looking for a specific product or service land on Facebook for researching and building their perception based on what they discover.
  • A Facebook user clicks on an average of 12 ads per month. Interestingly, female users tend to click on a Facebook ad more than male users. The data says women click 14 times on Facebook ads on average, while men click only ten times.
  • The average Facebook ad has the power to convert as much as 9.11% across all industries if done right. Strategic Facebook ads can convert one out of eight people, visiting the brand’s website.
  • Nearly 65% of B2B marketers trust Facebook ads to promote products and services, which is a significant jump over the last couple of years.

Hence, advertising on Facebook is beneficial to target various marketing goals that are common in both B2B and B2C, such as:

  • Create brand awareness 
  • Discover potential leads
  • Target new prospects
  • Engage with new customers 

Since you have plenty of B2B audiences on Facebook, advertising on this platform is a smart move. Besides, the platform offers many useful features that prove Facebook ads are as much B2B centric as they are for B2C businesses. 

For example:

  • You can target your audience based on behaviour, demographics, job titles, preferences, etc.
  • You can use information from a prospect’s Facebook page to populate ads.
  • You can create and share email lists for your sales team by collecting prospect’s information.
  • Targeting and promoting local businesses is easy.
  • You can create, schedule and run ads within your budget. 

How To Start B2B Facebook Ad Campaign 

You can run B2B Facebook Ads using the Facebook Ads Manager. The interface is designed to guide you with everything you need for running effective advertisements. 

For example, ad creation, ad budget management, ad placements across multiple apps, A/B testing, ad performance measurement, etc., are some of the things you can do using the Facebook Ads Manager.

Here are the basic steps you need to follow to start your B2B ads campaign on Facebook:

Step 1- Choose Your Audience

Right targeting is the first key to a successful campaign. Facebook provides three ways of choosing customers based on different criteria:

  • Core audience: The audience of B2B businesses are limited when compared to B2C companies. Filtering the audience based on age, interests, geography, behaviour, etc., helps you move in the right direction. You can further narrow down your search using Facebook Detailed Targeting, which uses professional filters like job title, employer, industry, company size, degree level, seniority, and more.
  • Custom audience: You can use your existing customer information to create a custom audience. Facebook Pixel data or Facebook SDK automatically adds the people you want to reach using the Custom Audience targeting option. It works by tracking users based on specific actions, such as users visiting your site’s home page or those who viewed a product but did not make a purchase. You can use this data for remarketing your business.
  • Lookalike audience: Once you have a custom audience, you can increase your reach by creating a lookalike audience based on their demographic attributes and actions taken on your web page, also called engagement custom audience

Step 2- Create An Ad

Once you have selected your audience, the next step is ad creation. You should create ads that trigger clicks from your audience. 

Facebook ad creation offers several options for ad formats, such as images, text, video, carousel, collection, post engagement ads, and more. 

Facebook offers a great tool called lead ads for converting B2B prospects. It enables you to gather prospects’ information directly from Facebook instead of individual sites.

Every ad format has its own set of advantages. Hence, you should select the one that suits your B2B industry type. Rest is the creativity, content, and message that would determine the success of your ad. 

You can get in touch with a qualified Facebook ads agency to help you get started with Facebook ad creation. 

Step 3- Nurture Your Leads

Since the B2B sales cycle is longer, you must have a plan to nurture your leads. 

Following are three effective B2B marketing tactics that you can use to nurture your leads and to increase the impact of your Facebook advertisements:

  • Send a series of offers, such as an invitation to watch webinars or download white papers.
  • Keep your offers the same in email as in your Facebook ads. 
  • Surround your customers in all possible ways, using other advertisement options such as AdWords customer match, AdWords retargeting, Gmail ads, and LinkedIn ads.

Step 4- Convert The Leads

By now, you would have a list of target audiences who have viewed your webinars, completed promotional offers, or signed up for product demos or free trials. Put all your efforts to convince these prospects to become your customers. 

Summary

Facebook ads are no longer just limited to B2C business. You can use the social platform to generate valuable B2B business leads. 

Facebook also provides appropriate tools to reach out to your target audiences in the best manner. Therefore, Facebook ads are necessary to reach your B2B marketing campaign goals and get more conversions. 

You can get in touch with Flow20 Facebook ads agency to start acquiring more B2B business leads. 

About Shirish Agarwal

Shirish Agarwal is the founder of Flow20 and looks after the PPC and SEO side of things. Shirish also regularly contributes to leading digital marketing publications such as Hubspot, SEMRush, Wordstream and Outbrain. Connect with him on LinkedIn.