Contributors:
Amol Ghemud Published: August 14, 2018
In This Article
Share On:
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.
1) B2B Facebook Ad Messaging
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:
Professional – avoid slang and “fun” messages, speak the customer’s language
Trustworthy – try to show that your brand is already hugely trusted by many customers
2. Run Brand Awareness Campaigns
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:
Be clear about value proposition and your brand positioning
Target a wider audience and allow Facebook auto-optimize your ads’ reach
Simply select the Brand Awareness campaign objective for your Facebook campaign
Offer people to learn more about your product/service, rather than proposing a demo or sign-up instantly.
A brand awareness campaign by Contently, where they aren’t selling a product but creating awareness trying to reach out to the customers
3. Try Combining P.R. & Facebook Ads
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:
People trust product reviews even more when they come from a 3rd party or from other customers. Hence, they’ll be more likely to trust a publication’s opinion than a simple ad. According to BrightLocal, nearly 72% customers say – reading a positive customer reviews increase their trust in a business.
Many known brands add the “Featured In” snippet on their landing pages to increase trust. It is more likely to have the same positive effect on your Facebook page.
Positive media mentions also enhance your B2B employer branding, making your company a much more desirable workplace.
The above image shows WeWork’s Facebook post sharing media coverage by TechCrunch.
4. Make Your Product Announcements Heard
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:
In the company’s blog
And in a newsletter by mail
In an imminent press release
Or in combination of multiple options
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.
5. Write a Magical Ad Headline
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:
Be clear and precise
Use action verbs such as “Get” and “Try”
Emphasize the benefits of your product or service
The ad headline here is clear and concise – explaining what people could do by using the product (“Sell Your Photos on FB”)
6. You Must Share Product Insights and Tips
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:
Share product tips and suggestions benefiting a large percentage of your customers
Target your existing customers and fans of your social media fan pages
Adversely test promoting of product tips articles to current leads as well, in order to convert the into paying clients.
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:
Originality
Strong headlines
The actionable nature of content
Providing helpful answers
Reliable information resources
Highly engaging content
Images that help to deliver your message
Smart punctuation
Sharing the latest information
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.
8. Share Case Studies & Testimonial
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.
9. Get New Leads With Quality Content
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.
10. Side Project Marketing
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:
Scratch your own itch – build a side product that’s solving a problem you understand
Use existing resources – find out what resources that you already have which could be given away for free
Simplify your solution – take a specific feature and offer it for free to generate leads, users, and customers
React to the market – look for industry trends that you can build on
Wrap it in an awesome experience – don’t hold back when creating a perfect user experience
Promote your side project – look at your side project as an independent product and give it the spotlight it deserves
In the above example, Salesforce is promoting R.O.I. Calculator as a side project.
11. Free Demo Offers
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.
12. Enhance The Onboarding 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:
Prospects don’t understand how to use the product
They have a false impression of what the product actually does
Prospects aren’t brought into the product quickly or frequently enough
They don’t understand the value
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.
13. Upsell Campaigns
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.
There are primarily three main Facebook audience types that let you reach your B2B buyers:
Facebook Saved Audiences
Custom Audiences
Facebook Lookalike Audiences
15. Reach B2B Clients With Facebook Saved Audience
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:
Industry events
Your competitors and their fans
Other services or products used by your current customers
Industry Publications
You can choose your audience on the basis of certain factors and easily achoeve desired results.
16. Reach B2B Clients With Custom Facebook Audience
Let’s have a look at some types of Custom Audiences that we’ve seen work well when matched with B2B Facebook ads.
Website visitors – target people who have already shown some interest in your product
Pricing page visitors – get your Pricing page visitors back to your website by remarketing on Facebook
Blog readers – warm up these lukewarm leads with additional content offers
Newsletter subscribers – turn these warm leads into clients by retargeting them with a sales offer
Free trial users – help these users on board with helpful product guides and case studies
Past purchasers – there’s an audience ripe for a cross-selling or upselling campaign
This is simply the way, you create a custom audience. It is very easy to create such a list.
17. Reach B2B Clients With a Facebook Lookalike Audience
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.
18. Wrap Up on B2B Facebook Ads
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.
19. Create Irresistible Value Offers
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.
20. Social Proof Holds Weightage
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:
Include numbers that describe your product’s user number/benefits
Display testimonials from high-profile clients
Add logos of your clients to the ad images
You can very well use social proof to your advantage, by including it in your Facebook ad copy.
21. Master the Art of FOMO & Urgency
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.
22. Very Essential To Create Colorful Ads
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:
Very light ad images with a white background
High-contrast images with strong colors
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.
23. Use Videos Instead of Images
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.
24. Add Subtitle to Video Ads
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.
25. Create Attractive Landing Pages
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:
Be aligned with the Facebook ad, and deliver the same message
Include a clear value offer and call-to-action
Contain no unnecessary text or images
Use high-quality images and design
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.
26. A Separate Landing Page for Each Campaign
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.
27. Keep The Ad Frequency under Control
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.
28. Emphasize the Emotions
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:
Use illustrative images of people feeling a positive emotion
Also use emotional words such as “amazing” or “joyful.”
Use exclamation marks to give a happier tone to your ad copy
Here is an ad with happy go lucky images of people with the logo, sending out a feel of happiness and positivity.
29. Rotate Your Ads
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.
30. Keep It Simple
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.
31. Align your ad design with branding
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
32. Use More Emoticons
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:
Find an emoji in ‘Emojipedia’
Copy it to your clipboard
In the editing phase, paste the emoticon to your ad copy
Emoticons can be used in Facebook posts and ads, so you can use this hack when sharing a link to your blog article.
Conclusion
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.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
Don’t let the media or society define what success looks like for you. You know what you’re capable of, you the effort you’re putting in. You’ve got this 🙂 👍🏼
Digital Marketing Bootcamp
Leave a Reply