Last time, our Social Media Marketing for B2B Business blog series explored the value of social media for B2B businesses. Today, we’re taking a closer look at paid advertising on social media, starting with the leader of the pack — Facebook.
I know what you’re thinking – Facebook is better suited to B2C products and brands. But that’s only because B2B businesses are yet to scratch the surface of what Facebook Advertising can actually do.
Is Facebook Advertising Right for B2B Business?
Let’s start by breaking it down into the cold, hard facts to show you why your B2B business absolutely should be using Facebook as part of your advertising strategy.
Facebook has a staggering 2.07 billion monthly active users. Not only that, but 66% of those users return to Facebook every day.
Then there’s the fact that in 2016, a report by Hotwire and Vanson Bourne showed that decision makers use Facebook over LinkedIn and Twitter when making purchasing decisions.
What about ad spend? Well, Regalix’s State of B2B Social Media Marketing said that 58% of B2B marketers believe that Facebook was an efficient use of their advertising budget.
Just goes to show, Facebook’s a platform you can no longer dismiss or ignore for B2B marketing.
In a word, Facebook is colossal. And they want your advertising spend. Of course they do – so, they’re going to do everything they can to deliver an advertising platform that works for all businesses, not just B2C.
Every Like, Comment and Share is a data point on Facebook, and they track all of them. You can define your audience in so many ways: in addition to age, gender and location, you can layer demographic categories such as education, industry and even what newspaper a person reads. You can replicate the profile of your perfect lead and cut through the noise to deliver content directly in front of them.
Advertising and content strategy
Once you’ve defined your prospects, you need to formulate an effective advertising strategy. Don’t worry, Facebook does a lot of the work for you, defining objectives from brand awareness to lead generation and conversion. This helps you build a strategic sales and conversion funnel, pushing content at the right time in front of the right audience – turning strangers into leads and leads into customers.
That requires an understanding of the content that works well for each stage of the customer journey: impactful messaging for brand awareness; rich blog content for remarketing campaigns; and content designed to convert audiences, like whitepapers, webinars and product trials.
Facebook presents vast opportunities for B2B advertising, however knowing where to start can be a daunting proposition. As with any effective marketing, you need to begin with a clear strategy, which has clear objectives and works towards a demonstrable ROI – something that Facebook have gone to great lengths to establish.
So that’s the ‘why’. What about the ‘how’? Well, the next in our blog series will give you some insight into creating effective Facebook Advertising strategies and some of the best B2B campaigns on social media – you may even get some ideas you can pass off as your own!