Running a Facebook targeting campaign can help you get leads and improve your bottom line. So why not join the 54% of B2B marketers using social as a powerful lead-gen tool?
If you are in the B2B space and you aren’t targeting prospects on Facebook yet, there’s a real chance you are missing out on a massive chunk of leads.
The challenge with B2B marketing on Facebook is that there are a bunch of tactics popping up every day. Marketers are constantly being told to build a specific funnel, have a certain conversion target, add pictures to their ads… It can be overwhelming.
But just as many people fail to get results because they dive in blindly and try to “figure things out” as they go along.
If you target prospects properly and map out your ads ahead of time, you can separate yourself from everybody else. In this post, we’ll focus on the right way to build a B2B targeted campaign that builds your bottom line.
The Number One Thing You Need to Do Before Diving in
Website visitors are the perfect start for your Facebook targeting campaign. You already know they’re interested in your product because they’ve been on your site—they just might need a little more convincing.
Installing the Facebook pixel is a must if you are targeting website visitors.
With it, you’ll be able to optimize ads for businesses who’ve visited your website and make them super targeted. Without it, you’re playing a guessing game.
You can find your Facebook Pixel in your Ads Manager menu
Building the pixel takes two clicks — Facebook Ads Manager does it for you — and then you can add the code to whatever site you want to track.
Every time someone visits a page (for example, your pricing page) they’ll be automatically added to an audience list. This will give you the ability to re-target them with an optimized ad campaign in the future.
Multiple parts of the pixel can also be changed up to suit whatever campaign you build.
For example, you can gear the pixel to track sales conversions to retarget visitors who didn’t actually make a purchase. Or you can set your pixel to track website visitors who failed to click on a call-to-action like an e-book download.
The pixel gives you the information you need to be able to optimize your campaigns around any website action you choose. Just make sure it’s set up and working before you start using it on your targeting campaigns.
Now we’ve got that sorted, let’s get converting.
Tighten Up Your Target Audience From The Start
A lot of businesses stumble through their targeting and try and figure it out as they go. It’s no surprise that a lot of targeting is sloppy, especially when it comes to deciding what a campaign’s end game is.
It can be tempting to select objectives that are absolutely useless to your campaign because you are afraid of missing out. Let’s be clear— targeting store visits and catalog sales are almost completely useless for B2B marketers. End of.
By eliminating the useless objectives from your campaigns, you begin to build a conversion funnel from your targeting.
A lot of objectives are useless to B2B targeting campaigns. You should focus on the ones that will generate you leads.
Most marketers will automatically select ‘Reach’ for their awareness objective but there’s a major flaw with relying on this. Although Reach campaigns can be great for spreading your message far and wide to unfamiliar prospects, if you don’t push them hard through re-marketing and a lot of content they are a largely wasted effort.
Video views might seem like a great objective, but isn’t all that useful for B2B marketers. Why? Because it’s hard to measure the value you get from those views.
To get conversions and results from your campaign, your targeting should focus on traffic and lead generation instead. That way you can see that your targeting actually makes an impact on your bottom line.
Remember, Facebook campaigns are built for every kind of business. Make sure you only use the targeting objectives, like lead generation and conversions, that will work in the B2B space.
Get Inside Your Prospect’s Head
Know what your customer wants before they do.
This tried and tested marketing technique is an ideal strategy to implement into your Facebook targeting campaign.
While other advertising platforms focus on keywords and whether a customer is actually seeking something out, Facebook targets people based on their overall persona.
Customizing your ad copy to different buying personas will allow you to target ideal your ideal customers.
Target people that are similar to your current buyers. Don’t just target companies, either. Go deeper and target key individuals— their specific job title, financial status and even political affiliations.
For example, does one of your core customers look like this: a financial executive who works at a company with 50-99 employees, with business purchasing behavior?
You can target all three of these behaviors with one secret weapon— the B2B targeting feature.
Just select whatever aspect fits into your customer persona: their company, employee numbers and even what position they are employed in. This feature will give your ad the best chance of landing in front of a key decision maker. Plus, it doubles as a budgeting technique, too. Your ads will only show to people who have the power to make company spending decisions.
You can take this one step further and filter out your prospects directly from comments and interactions with your ad on Facebook. A tool like the Agorapulse Facebook Ad Management can track prospects who are commenting, liking or sharing any ad material you post. That way, you can automatically see who’s interested in your products.
Agorapulse automatically tracks and highlights Facebook profiles who have engaged and interacted with your ad copy
Target Lookalike Audiences
Now you know who visits your website and you’ve built a persona around them. You know their age, their job role and where they live.
But what if your customer doesn’t even know they need your product yet. How are you supposed to get your ad in front of them?
Facebook has you covered—you can mirror and target lookalike audiences.
This targets the exact same personas of the people who’ve already paid for your product or liked your Facebook page.
By targeting lookalike audiences, Facebook matches up prospects with near-similar demographics, occupations and seniority to your current customers. Talk about targeted B2B marketing. It’s almost too good.
Retarget, Retarget, Retarget!
As a B2B marketer, you should be focusing on a select few of the custom audience options Facebook gives you:
Customer file targeting will target email addresses and find prospects from the personas of those email addresses. This is a super useful way to customize your audience when you are getting started.
Remember that Facebook pixel we got you to put onto your website? It’s worth its weight in gold when you go to retarget your visitors.
We’ve talked about how to get new prospects. But don’t forget about the prospects who’ve already checked out your site—but failed to buy. Good Facebook targeting can get that prospect back to your website and onto your conversion page.
To retarget your site visitors, you need to build a custom audience.
You’ll then get to a different area in your Facebook Ads Manager where you can create your custom audiences:
From here, you can customize your website retargeting by choosing visitors who landed on specific URLs and target only them. This means you can retarget visitors who visited your pricing page but didn’t actually purchase.
Bonus Tip: Adjust Your Budget to Suit Your Clients Day
Adjust your budget spend for when you know your prospects are going to be using social media.
Take what you know from sources like your website analytics and Facebook post traffic and use it to your budget’s advantage.
Do your prospects tend to hunt for products and interact with your brand between 9am-3pm?
Then it makes sense to optimize your budget spend around those time pockets—and cut it from others.
Do The Groundwork and Let Facebook Do The Rest
Building a killer B2B targeting campaign on Facebook takes groundwork. If you do it right, Facebook can take over the hard work for you.
By tracking website visitors and retargeting them in optimized ad copy, you give yourself the best chance of getting those visitors back onto your website to make a purchase.
The added ability to hyper-target and even mirror your ideal prospects make Facebook ads a no-brainer for your advertising spend. So the groundwork, and watch your bottom line grow. You can dig deeper into the Facebook Ad analytics through the free tool AdsReports.
