Let’s face it, the decision of where and how to advertise your business online can be a daunting one, especially if you are making a hefty marketing spend. It pays to know you’re going to hit it right first time and reap the rewards soon after.
Over the last ten years, Google Adwords has been the big daddy of paid advertising, by offering relevant, effective and often profitable search advertising campaigns to consumers most engaged in the buying process.
However, many businesses, especially in the B2B sector, neglect to consider the full value and potential of the alternative – Facebook Advertising.
Facebook has always had an astonishing potential reach for businesses.
Over 1.18 billion people log into the social network on any given day and a further 600 million use its photo sharing child company, Instagram.
But it’s not just the astounding figures that should lure you towards Facebook marketing in 2017, it’s the site’s undeniable shift towards solutions that benefit B2B companies.
Why you should use Facebook Ads for B2B Marketing
Slick new Advert types
Over the last couple of years, Facebook has rolled out some really slick new advert types, like Lead Ads and Canvas. And these are tools for a modern marketer to really sink their teeth into.
Lead Ads, for instance, streamlines the B2B lead collection process by completely eliminating the need for consumers to visit a website to fill in clunky data captcha forms. Instead, they can do it within the familiar Facebook interface.
It means less time needed to produce high converting landing pages and more time spent on a value proposition.
By using tools like this in one of our most recent client campaigns, we were able to generate leads to the value of £42,000 within the first two weeks. It reduced the cost of acquiring a new customer by 63%, compared with the more traditional methods.
When it comes to a considerably longer sales cycle, Lead Ads can also be incorporated into an organic social media strategy to influence those key business decision makers when they show the strongest purchasing intent.
Facebook Canvas
Want to increase your brand awareness, or have a more complex product that really needs to stand out? Facebook Canvas might be for you.
Pitched as the storyteller’s dream, it is a fantastic way of delivering beautiful, immersive brand experiences that take brand interactivity to the next level.
It enables advert creative to include multiple images, text areas, video and even a list of products or services that can link directly back to your website.
Powerful Targeting
Facebook offers some of the most powerful, innovative and advanced advert targeting on the market today.
With over a billion active users, it’s no surprise that it tracks vast quantities of user data. Crucially, it is this data that can be leveraged by marketers to create highly targeted advertising campaigns that resonate with the appropriate audiences.
So, ‘how can I target the correct people for my business’, I hear you ask? Most marketers will start with interest, age, gender and location, along with other variable based targeting, which can produce a relatively good ROI, if your advert’s value proposition and creative is strong enough.
However, many businesses often overlook the holy grail of Facebook targeting, which involves combining the use of Facebook Pixels code with its audience expansion tool, Lookalike Audiences. And that’s where your answer lies.
What are Facebook Pixels?
Essentially Facebook Pixels allows businesses to follow up on people who have visited their website. The tracking pixel works by adding a piece of code to the head section of every page.
When a potential customer visits your website, their browsers make use of cookies which allow timely and highly relevant adverts to appear during their subsequent time on Facebook, based on their individual web behaviour (e.g. pages visited, duration on the page, outcome etc).
Combine this user data with a Lookalike Audience and Facebook will create an even larger audience of other people who most closely match your website’s users.
What it means is that you can spend your advertising budget on people who are most likely to display purchasing intent. Clever huh?
Lookalike Audiences can also be created from not just pixel data but also rich data from your own CRM system, which makes it an even more valuable tool.
When it comes to any successful marketing campaign, you can pretty much guarantee that it began with the identification of a target audience, research into where they live online and the kind of things that float their boat.
Thanks to Facebook, they have created a way that marketing experts like ourselves are able to capture the attention of your customers in an arena that appeals to pretty much everyone. Our campaigns start from as little as £325 + VAT.
Contact us today to find out how we can help you to make Facebook a successful lead generation tool for your business.
