10 reasons to use Facebook for B2B Marketing

Maurizio Zanotti

We often hear from B2B companies that Facebook and Instagram Ads don’t work for them, most of the time without even trying. I suggest you visit some of your competitors’ websites, and then open your social media accounts and pay attention to the ads that will target or “retarget” you. This is an experiment we have carried out for our clients who work in the enterprise space and have reservations about Facebook. We demonstrate how leading global brands use Facebook by visiting some of the big brands' websites: in the image above, you can see the first ads that appeared on our testers (me) Instagram feed.

Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, to name a few are using Facebook because they know it works. So why wouldn’t you? 

Today I would like to give you 10 reasons why you should include Facebook in your B2B marketing strategy, and for “Facebook” I mean the whole Facebook family, which includes Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Facebook Audience Network. 

1. Audience

Facebook has the largest audience in the world, with 1.62 billion daily active users (9% increase year-over-year). In Australia, there are 17 million people on Facebook, 11 million on LinkedIn, almost 10 million on Instagram.

2. Time spent

The time spent daily by Australians on Social Media platforms is very different: 46 minutes on Facebook, 53 minutes on Instagram, 30 seconds on LinkedIn. 

3. Top-ranked platforms for B2B

As reported by Statista, these are the top-ranked social media tools used by B2B marketers: Facebook (91%), LinkedIn (79%), Twitter (70%), Instagram (57%), YouTube (52%). 

4. Several options

In Facebook Ads there are 4 campaign objectives that work well for B2B ads: 

  • Reach / Brand Awareness;
  • Traffic: allows you to drive traffic to your website. Once they have visited, you can retarget them;
  • Lead Ads: they bring the user to an optimised form, built-in Facebook. You don’t even need a website for that;
  • Conversion: allows you to ask the user to take any action: submitting a form, subscribing to a service, making a purchase, etc. 

5. Full of decision makers

Facebook is full of business decision-makers (BDMs), the category you usually want to target in B2B campaigns. Here are some facts about BDMs:

  • According to Facebook IQ, 40% of BDMs use Facebook to message their coworkers;
  • The median amount of time spent on Facebook by BDMs is 74% higher than other people on the platform. They also tend to engage with a wider variety of content;
  • Non-BDMs use Facebook on desktop 10% of the time, compared to 15% with BDMs. This number jumps to 23% in the IT industry. These numbers indicate that users might be using FB at work.

6. Retargeting

Facebook is perfect for retargeting, which means showing the user the same product/service that he/she has already seen on your website. In this way, you can segment people that interacted with your website in different ways. Consider these pages on your website, for example:

  • Pricing page
  • Contact page
  • Check out page
  • Product-specific blog post
  • Feature-specific blog post
  • Webinar sign-up page

..and now think about how effective your ads would be if you could retarget these viewers with a very specific message related to the page they visited. On Facebook this is possible!

7. Facebook groups

To create engagement and credibility for your brand, you don’t necessarily have to spend money on Facebook. You can always add value to online conversations about domain areas where you or your company are experts. Usually, these conversations take place in Facebook Groups, so join them, or open yours, and add value for free, before asking for anything in return. Your comments are not just seen by the person who created the post, but also by many other people in the group.  

8. Videos

On Facebook, you can take advantage of the potential of videos. Just to give you some examples:

  • On Facebook Watch you can host a weekly interview series with industry experts;
  • You can use Facebook Live videos to make your B2B brand engage with an existing audience. 

9. CRM

You have the opportunity to upload contact lists, to target your actual customer (for example, trying to up-sell something) or to build lists of similar people (it’s called Look-a-like audience, and it’s one of the most powerful Facebook tools).

10. High reach

Do you know what percentage of adults can be reached on every platform via paid ads? 76% on Facebook, 56% on LinkedIn, 46% on Instagram.

 

So, now... Why B2B marketers don’t want to invest in Facebook Ads?

Facebook is a mainstream platform, and unlike LinkedIn, it doesn’t allow you to target specific company employees or job titles. So the risk of targeting people “not in the target” is real, which likely means a certain waste of money. 

At Bang, we do something that nobody does here in Australia (as far as we know). Thanks to exclusive partnerships with tools like Bombora and our own data practice, we have a good idea which companies are "in-market" for a certain product or service. This allows us to launch targeted campaigns on Facebook that get in front of the right people, and improve ROI.

Our Account-Based approach lets us focus our media spend for highly targeted people (mostly, decision-makers) that work for organisations currently looking for your solutions. 

Do you want to make a real difference in your Lead Generation? Get in touch and we look forward to talking with you.

 

Credits:

https://zephoria.com/

https://foundationinc.co/

https://www.ironpaper.com

https://www.lyfemarketing.com/

https://www.statista.com/

https://hootsuite.com/

We often hear from B2B companies that Facebook and Instagram Ads don’t work for them, most of the time without even trying. I suggest you visit some of your competitors’ websites, and then open your social media accounts and pay attention to the ads that will target or “retarget” you. 


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