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B2B Facebook ads campaigns can actually turn out to be very profitable, even though as reports suggest – Facebook has always been considered a fun playground for B2C companies.
Social Media Examiner’s reports show that 52% of B2C marketers consider Facebook marketing highly effective, compared to a meagre 38% of B2B marketers.
All this while, the consumer brands are busy having a blast organizing challenges, competitions and of course free takeaways. meanwhile, the B2B brands seem to have been left out of the game.
The common way of thinking simply has been: “people mostly spend their time on Facebook to communicate with their friends and family and not do business nor network. Facebook’s 2016 “News Feed Update” prefers posts from your friends and family rather than the ones by companies trying to sell you stuff online.
Facebook’s ads feature does deliver major website traffic, leads, visits and sales both to B2C and B2B brands. We are going to enlist a few ways how that works.
In addition to the conversion funnel stages on Facebook, the B2B audience largely differ in regards to elements namely – job seniority, industry, and many more.
The quality, context, message type that you target on a CEO vs. an assistant can be highly different.
As you get started with B2B Facebook ads, you must invest your time to define the conversions you expect your target audiences to make. Once you have achieved that objective, must you proceed to the development process for messaging and value props.
Your B2B Facebook ads should abide by the set objectives: Convincing the potential customers. There’s a way to improve their work, rather increase their company’s profits and output. The solution is as simple – ‘Your product’.
Therefore, your B2B ad messages should be:
It doesn’t really make sense to jump right at a sales pitch during your first encounter with any potential customers.
If the decision-maker is not very familiar with your brand and product, they likely won’t feel the urge to make any purchase in the heat of the moment.
That’s exactly where the brand awareness campaign enters the center stage.
For example, Contently’s Facebook ad doesn’t ask the reader to immediately sign up or make any purchase. Instead, their ad focuses on creating awareness around their product.
Their entire Facebook ad copy emphasizes on the fact that they’re working with high-level customers and have won awards in the past.
These are the best practices for running a B2B brand awareness campaign on Facebook:
A brand awareness campaign by Contently, where they aren’t selling a product but creating awareness trying to reach out to the customers
If your company has been regularly featured in the news or has recently won an industry campaign, you must share the good news with your Facebook audiences.
Meanwhile, having your product mentioned on any popular news site is already a massive P.R. win, you can amplify the results by extending your campaign to social media.
There are plenty of reasons why to include 3rd party media mentions on your Facebook page and even promote the posts to amplify their reach:
The above image shows WeWork’s Facebook post sharing media coverage by TechCrunch.
Almost all the B2B product announcements are closely read by the existing customers.
After all, they care most about your product’s improvements. Depending on the company’s processes, a product announcement can be made:
However, it may happen that many people who are genuinely keen in hearing about your product news, simply miss seeing the email or won’t bother visiting your blog the moment you publish the announcement.
To ensure your product updates reach a wider audience, create a Facebook ad campaign the way “Teamwork” has done.
Here is a product announcement by Teamwork where they are making an announcement to their customers to know more of their goodwill, etc.
The headline is indeed the most crucial element of your Facebook ad. That’s what people first read instantly when looking at the advertisement. It’s incredibly important that you lock your audience’s attention from the first moment.
A study showed that 70% of the audience only read the headline of a Facebook share before sharing it.
It’s no joke, tho, that the headline text makes a big difference in the click-through rate and the cost-per-click of your Facebook ads.
To write ad headlines that people can’t help but click, follow these best practices:
The ad headline here is clear and concise – explaining what people could do by using the product (“Sell Your Photos on FB”)
Sharing some product tips is very similar to promoting product updates in which it’s generally relevant to your existing customers.
Although, ensuring your existing client base happiness is strongly advisable in B2B business. A 2014 study pointed out that 74% consumers recognize word-of-mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decisions.
Moreover, the same study found out that consumers prefer brands that engage them on their passions and interests, 42% more likelier than those simply urging them to buy something.
You must try not to be too pushy in your B2B Facebook ads. Instead, focus on delivering value, to every single customer.
Here are a few of the best practices for sharing product tips on Facebook:
You can share product tips like DropBox does.
The users of any popular publishing platform such as WordPress, produce about 84 million new posts and more than 40 million new comments every month.
When done right, content marketing gives immense value to your potential client that they’re already more or less sold before reaching out to you.
But what really is the true meaning of great content?
According to an article in Kissmetrics, these are the nine pillars of awesome content marketing:
An original article empowers both the existing customer relationships while also increasing the brand awareness.
‘Optimizely’ is promoting a free playbook here, on conversion rate optimization. It’s both relevant and interesting to their target audience — marketers.
A detailed study of 150 companies found that 58% of B2B buyers spend more time researching purchases, compared to its actual results.
Another format of B2B Facebook ads that has recently caught everyone’s attention, is promotion of customer testimonials and case studies.
For example, ConvertKit placed a customer testimonial right in the ad image. According to a survey conducted by Dimensional Research, 90% of respondents claim that positive online reviews influence their buying patterns.
In the image above, ConvertKit places a testimonial right in between the ad.
B2B sales and content marketing go hand in hand. According to a Content Marketing benchmark study, “social media and blog content are the most widely used types of B2B content marketing tactics.”
Not all content marketing will get the largest companies to your user list. Your content marketing efforts must deliver high-quality experience and be relevant to your target audience.
Before you create content for any upcoming advertising campaign, take a moment to think hard as to who is in your target audience.
Only then must you proceed to the content creation process.
OkDork here, is offering a fabulous 30 day free course, targeting its audience to avail of the service perfectly.
In recent years, we’ve seen a huge number of brands succeed with this marketing tactic.
But then, what exactly is the side project marketing?
The simplest way to explain the term is: Side project marketing signifies building a new small product alongside your main product. The new product will solve a highly specific problem or help people achieve a particular goal.
Combining the side projects with Facebook ads is indeed a great way of attracting new leads and increasing brand awareness.
According to an amazing article by Crazy Egg, the best practices for creating B2B side projects are:
In the above example, Salesforce is promoting R.O.I. Calculator as a side project.
If your product needs time to get used to, a free trial offer would help to increase the lead-to-sales conversion rate. You could also consider test running a Facebook Lead Ads campaign to collect leads.
However, while we are busy promoting SaaS products, you may want people to sign up on your landing page as you would be able to lead them directly into your product’s onboarding funnel.
Facebook Lead Ads work great with eBook and whitepaper offers.
Pipedrive landing page in this case offers a free trial for customers to avail and have the experience.
After you get a new lead sign up to your SaaS product, you’re just halfway through the sales process.
You still need to convince people to pay for your product. And that’s exactly where onboarding enters the game.
According to an article, the main reasons why your leads never turn into paying clients:
Intercom’s Facebook ad could be targeted both on leads and cold audiences to show both how Intercom helps to improve the demo process.
You can also consider advertising onboarding guides to people who have just signed up to your product by creating a custom audience on Facebook for new trial users.
Intercom’s Facebook ad herein, invites prospects to learn more about their Intercom Demos features online.
Upselling campaigns can be used both by eCommerce and B2B business and these campaigns can be highly effective.
According to an analyst, product recommendations like upsells and cross-sells are simply responsible for an average of 30% of e-Commerce revenues.
Depending on the nature of your B2B product, you could find opportunities such as adding users to the subscription plan or selling additional products to existing clients.
Be careful not to ask for too much additional spending from your customers.An article by Shopify suggests that you must upsell and cross-sell products that cost 25% or less of the overall order.
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There are primarily three main Facebook audience types that let you reach your B2B buyers:
Saved Audiences on Facebook, let you reach people based on their interests, location, demographics, and behavior.
When creating a new Saved Audience, your most important tool will be the Detailed Targeting box.
You can simply reach out to potential B2B audiences by targeting the following interests:
You can choose your audience on the basis of certain factors and easily achoeve desired results.
Let’s have a look at some types of Custom Audiences that we’ve seen work well when matched with B2B Facebook ads.
This is simply the way, you create a custom audience. It is very easy to create such a list.
Lookalike Audiences are based on an idea that people who are most similar to your existing users are the most likely to convert.
To create a Facebook Lookalike Audience, create a Custom Audience of your top clients and past purchasers. Post which, you can use that Custom Audience as a seed for your new Lookalike Audience.
In case the seed audience of your top customers is smaller than 1,000 people, you can create Lookalike Audiences based on other conversions, e.g. leads for the last 60 days.
If the seed audience of the top customers is less than 1,000 people, you can create a Lookalike Audience based on other types of conversions.
It is like an untraditional match, combining your Facebook ads and B2B audiences can be a great opportunity to reach out to additional customers.
B2B facebook ads is very obvious that the B2B deals take a longer time to close than B2C. It implies that, you should focus more effort on brand awareness and lead nurturing campaigns.
As a B2B advertiser, you must always be aware of an off season or vacation time in order to strategize our next move wisely.
The best way to make someone sign up for a free trial product or buy your product is to create a crazy value offer. Try to promote something that people actually want to avail.
For example, offer an extended trial period or create a limited-time discount offer.
And here is an offer you do not want to miss out on.
When you seek to target a cold audience that hasn’t visited your website before, use various types of social proof to emphasize more trust:
You can very well use social proof to your advantage, by including it in your Facebook ad copy.
FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out is the one fear that haunts us daily.
To put FOMO to good use, write a Facebook ad copy making people believe that everyone else is already using your product and they’re the last ones out.
This is a good tactic to invite audience to be tempted. In turn, you have a strategy more likely to win.
You can create a sense of urgency by promoting a limited-time offer. Nobody likes missing out on a great offer.
In order to get your ad noticed among others, you need it to be different from the rest.
There are two ad image designs that indeed work perfect:
Anything in between tends to disappear among other similar Facebook ads and posts
In addition to creation of colorful ads, you can also use color psychology to choose the right colors. In this case,Yellow stands for optimism, red for excitement, blue for trust, etc.
It is reported that video ads have the lowest cost per click (C.P.C) which is said to be about an average of $0.18.
Creating a video ad in Facebook Ads Manager is as simple as setting up a regular ad. Only instead of an image, you would be using a video.
This image just shows how dominant are videos and their usage on Facebook’s media.
Facebook claims that videos with subtitles have about 12 to 15% higher chance of being viewed compared to the other ads.
If you do not have captions in your videos, your video may never get viewed by the audience as they may not understand what’s going on in the video.
There is always an option to add subtitles in as many as 160 languages other than English.
Marketers spend loads of hours on creating and setting their Facebook Ads campaigns. Within the first 10 seconds, the visitor evaluates whether your website is trustworthy, interesting, and worth staying longer now.
A good landing page should:
Here is how a set of attractive landing pages would seem like. If you have something like these, it’s always a good sign for your B2B campaigns.
Smart Facebook marketers rarely advertise the same offer to everyone simply because it’s never going to work that way.
Every Facebook advertiser has audience groups with varying industry, lifestyle, and social backgrounds. You are required to segment your audience and deliver highly relevant offers to each one of them.
According to HubSpot, companies experience 55% increase in leads when increasing their number of landing pages from 10 to 15. The more landing pages created, the more leads you will capture.
There is always a positive impact in B2B with a separate landing page for every campaign.
After running a Facebook ad campaign for couple of weeks, you will notice the click-through rate going down, and ad costs increase.
The reason being, people are tired of seeing your ads in their News Feeds over and over again.
Unless you’re targeting an audience of million people, Facebook will re-show your ads to your audience really fast.
If you are worried about ad fatigues, you must target the ads for 4 out of 7 weekdays
The more people see your offer, the less likely they become to click on it.
Emotions are a very important part of our decision-making process. People who feel strong emotions looking at your ads are likely to act upon them.
You can use both your ad image or the messaging to initiate emotions in the viewer:
Here is an ad with happy go lucky images of people with the logo, sending out a feel of happiness and positivity.
Incase you are not happy about missing potentially awesome advertising days with custom ad schedule, try creating multiple ad images and show the ads on different weekdays.
This process lets you create 2 ways of looking at 1 objective
Above is an example of how LinkedIn rotates its ads to see the Recruiter’s Guide.
Writing a long ad copy to display your product’s features and benefits is not always the best you can possibly do.
People won’t read your ad copy if it’s too long and if it may contain irrelevant information. What they seek is a quick answer whether they should click on the ad or not.
While Facebook allows 500 characters in the ad text, no need to use all of it. Short and clear ad messages ask for less effort to be read, so people tend to prefer them more.
Shorter texts are a lovely contrast to other ads in the News Feed, helping your ads to shine out of all.
When people fail to associate Facebook ads with your company, you’ll lose a great opportunity to increase brand awareness.
By using branded colors and keeping your messages aligned across all marketing channels, you’ll get better results on every channel.
Above is a message that explains colors with branding and its features too which is beneficial in understanding the components of the brand better
It had been researched that the ad with emoji in the headline has a 241% higher click-through rate compared to the ad with no emoji.
Adding emoticons to your Facebook ads is very easy:
Emoticons can be used in Facebook posts and ads, so you can use this hack when sharing a link to your blog article.
We are sure this article gives you some insights to B2B Facebook ads and how you can easily succeed using them.
Let us know your opinions in the comments below.
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