Is Facebook part of your B2B marketing mix?
Has it been difficult to generate B2B leads from Facebook?
With a few simple steps, you can start fueling your pipeline with these proven B2B Facebook advertising actions.
In this article, I will walk you through five tips for Facebook. As you implement each one, your lead volume will increase, as will your opportunity to close deals and make sales!
Tip 1: Developing a Narrow Audience
Most B2B companies don’t use Facebook advertising to generate leads because they feel that it’s a waste of their time and/or that their audience isn’t reachable there.
Such companies are leaving gold on the table.
I don’t have to tell you that Facebook knows more about you than your mom does (seriously, it probably does!). Because of the vast amount of personal and public information that Facebook has access to, they have a unique ability to target niche markets that you could only dream of in years past.
In order to reach your audience, you must first identify your seed audience and match it to a target on Facebook. Use Facebook audience insights to gather target data about your audience and develop an initial seed list. Once you develop the seed audience you will be able to see how big of an audience you have on Facebook. Let’s focus on creating a narrow audience by filling in the demographics per your target audience.
If you have paid for page likes or you simply have a good batch of them, this can give you a major head start (If not, you can still use Facebooks audience insights and likely take a good guess to get you started on the interests of your market). Click on “Page Likes” to see the common interests of those who have liked your page. Take note of these, and then scroll down to view “relevance.” You’ll be able to understand how relevant the pages are to your selected audience.
Based on these insights you can set up the campaign in Facebook with the new narrow audiences. You may want to test a few different audiences against the same ads. Then create several micro-audiences to support your decision-making. The micro-audiences will help you determine which sample sizes are most effective on Facebook.
Tip 2: Building a Smart Campaign Structure for Generating Leads
Once you have identified an audience that converts well, you’ll want to focus on the structure of the campaigns. The structure of the campaign depends on what you are testing. It consists of campaigns, ad sets, and ads.
At the campaign level, you’ll be able to set your objective. At the ad set level you can set the audience, the placements and the devices, and your budget schedule. On the ad level, you can test different images, mediums (video/photo), and text.
For example, Snaplytics wanted to target marketers with their Snapchat editorial calendar. They initially created a campaign for website clicks and that resulted in a campaign that was focused on conversions. They set up three different ad sets (one for each placement). Then they tested the image in each ad so that they had a total of six ads across all of the ad sets.
The winner of the placement campaign was mobile newsfeed. They turned off the audience networks since their targets were specific. They found that the interstitial ads were ineffective because they didn’t target the correct audience.
They also learned that testing placement was an essential piece of their business. They wouldn’t be able to generate marketing qualified leads without it.
Tip 3: Testing Placement
When you test the placement of your ad, you’ll be able to find out if the newsfeed is more effective than the right column, or if Instagram is more effective than Facebook. As recommended, it is important to shut off the audience network if you want to steer away from receiving broad traffic numbers.
When testing placement, you can wait for a few days to see which one has the highest CTR. The highest CTR will help you determine which ad is most effective. Make sure you always look at the number of impressions to see if the ad has enough reach for each ad to ensure all results are fair. Then look at the CPC to determine which ad is receiving the lowest cost.
The more cost effective you are with your ads, the more you’ll be able to generate from your ad spend.
Tip 4: Strategically Testing Devices
The next step is to strategically test your devices. Is mobile more popular or is it more important to be desktop friendly? You will want to create a separate ad set for each. The findings can be informative.
For example, at Full Circle Insights we tested multiple devices ranging from mobile to desktop. Surprisingly, we discovered that most of our prospects were finding us through the mobile – android version. At the time, the website was not optimized for mobile and it made the ads ineffective. We wanted to develop a framework to ensure continuous inflow of leads.
We decided to use a third-party vendor for our landing pages and promoted our assets through the instant builder on these third-party devices.
The result? Our efforts generated over 800 marketing qualified leads in 2016 through Facebook ads.
Tip 5: Optimizing CPC on all your ads
If you want to optimize your ads, make sure the pixel is set up on every page that you are promoting your ads for tracking purposes.
The first step for optimizing your ads is looking at the times and choosing the best time of day to have the ads on. If you aren’t receiving much traffic on your website on certain days, then it’s probably best to turn off the ads on days where you are experiencing low volumes of traffic.
Then optimize for your CTR and make sure the ad scent between your landing pages and your ads are congruent. This will ensure you are getting enough clicks from your ads to your landing page.
The last step is to check for your conversions. This is where retargeting works like a charm. If someone went to your website but they didn’t convert, retarget them with other micro-commitments until they convert.
After you have the retargeting in place, you can also upload your contacts using custom audiences and lookalike audiences. This will enable you to get the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to optimizing the cost-per-click.
These are five simple ways to get started with your B2B lead gen efforts on Facebook. Your audience IS there; don’t miss out on reaching them!
