Now that we’ve seen why B2B businesses should be using Facebook Advertising, we’re going to take a look at how it can be used to build effective B2B advertising campaigns.
If you’ve missed any of the previous entries in our Social Media Marketing for B2B Business blog series, you can find them here:
OK – we know that B2B businesses should be using Facebook Advertising – let’s dive straight in and explain how you can use it as part of a B2B marketing strategy.
Using the Facebook Pixel to measure campaigns
First things first, you’ll want to install the Facebook Pixel. You’ve probably heard people talking about tracking pixels before. If this sounds daunting and technical, don’t worry – it’s actually quite simple.
Thankfully, Facebook has done our job for us and created this handy guide, which explains what the Facebook Pixel can do. Basically, it allows you to track different conversion types, builds audience data and measures the success of your campaigns.
Installing the Facebook Pixel
To use the Facebook Pixel, you’ll have to add the code to your website. You can either send the code to your developers, update the code manually or use a tag manager if your website is hosted on a platform such as Magento or Weebly.
Fair warning – this is the technical part. You’ll now want to set up the pixel to track for particular events, like a purchase or download. You can do this yourself – again, Facebook has a useful guide – but you may want to consider using your developer. Of course, this is something we can help with too (because what’s a blog without a good bit of self-promotion?).
Still with me? Good. Because whilst nobody may be talking about pixels around the water cooler, they’re how you track conversions and measure ROI – something that every B2B marketer should be thinking about.
Building a B2B Facebook Advertising strategy
Now, let’s start building your actual campaign.
Don’t be tempted into thinking that one set of adverts will generate sales overnight. We know that B2B buying decisions are complex and develop over time and Facebook is no different.
There needs to be a strategy behind our advertising, so let’s try and map the customer journey and push them through a sales and content funnel. Whilst every product or service is different, we broadly define this funnel as:
- Raise awareness
- Improve recall
- Provide information
- Encourage action
- Nurture relationship
Would you look at that? It’s another nonsense marketing acronym. R-I-P-E-N. Like a fruit that ripens over time. That wasn’t even intentional. Can you trademark an acronym? Or go on Dragon’s Den with it?
Yet another marketing acronym (TM)
Facebook Advertising campaign objectives
Where was I? Oh yeah – campaign objectives.
Luckily, Facebook can segment campaigns by their objectives, categorised as ‘Awareness’, ‘Consideration’ and ‘Conversion’, each with defined subcategories. Here, we can focus on goals such as brand awareness, traffic generation, engagement, lead generation and conversion.
That’s great, but how do we get these campaigns in front of the right people, like decision makers? Well, we have to build an audience profile.
Defining your Facebook Advertising audience
We can use ‘Core Audience’ and combine all of Facebook’s audience data with our own customer insight, using data points such as age, location, education and a myriad of other differentiators.
We can even create new prospect lists by using ‘Lookalike Audiences’, which takes characteristics of our pre-existing audience and finds similar demographics that we may not know about already.
Or, we can use ‘Custom Audiences’, which is a B2B marketers best friend. Here, we can use that little Facebook Pixel to specifically target people who have completed certain actions on our website or use a pre-existing database that contains email addresses.
Different messages for different stages in the funnel
Are you starting to see how it all comes together?
We define a pre-existing audience or build a new one and target them with brand awareness messaging.
Next, we follow-up with some more product or service-led messaging, to provide more clarity about the brand they’ve recently been introduced to.
Then we’ll monitor their actions and, if they’ve interacted with our content or visited the website, we’ll prompt them with an advert designed to convert.
Finally, we’ll build campaigns that keep converted customers engaged, which could be cross-selling and up-selling, engaging brand content or even soliciting feedback.
Developing your Facebook Advertising Strategy
This is just scratching the surface of how B2B business can use Facebook Advertising to create a highly segmented, forensically targeted sales funnel. When used correctly, you can build comprehensive data and genuine leads.
But you need to use it properly and smartly. Simply boosting a post or trialling Facebook Advertising for 1 month won’t get anywhere – the strategy needs to be continually refined and tested, monitoring the ROI and always making improvements.
So, you’ve got the beginnings of a Facebook Advertising strategy. Now, you need some creative concepts and messaging that resonates with your audience. Where do you start? Well, luckily for you, that’s exactly what we’ll be talking about in the next entry in our Social Media Marketing for B2B Business blog series…
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