Before we talk about B2B Facebook advertising, let’s understand what the platform is all about. After that, we can dive into understanding how to optimize B2B Facebook advertising for the best results.
Facebook isn’t predominantly a business platform. Primarily, it continues as a social network of leisure. After all, most people use this social network to connect with friends, look up current news, and keep in touch with their interests and social circle. This user preference always leads marketers, especially B2B marketers, to believe that B2B Facebook advertising is a fruitless activity.
Most B2B marketers will talk about the low click-through rates of B2B Facebook advertising efforts. They’ll tell you about the high cost per click and show you how they just rather stick to Google Adwords. B2C marketers, on the other hand, are great fans of this medium. After all, Facebook allows them to offer discounts that often act as deal breakers for buyers. Moreover, they get the opportunity to push products based on buyer preferences and even retarget buyers with pending cart items. Sadly, these tactics aren’t useful to the B2B scenario owing to the differences in buyer behaviour and purchase process.
While most of this is true, B2B Facebook advertising is not a dead-end either.
Why? Well, even B2B companies are made up of regular people. People who probably are avid Facebook users. Moreover, these are people whom you can find and target via Facebook ads. The best part about B2B Facebook advertising is that it lets you categorize profile searches based on criteria such as the industry they hail from, the company size, type of services, or even job titles.
B2B Facebook Advertising Algorithms
Marketers know that Facebook’s ad targeting system is nothing short of miraculous in the B2C scenario. Such ads bring tangible returns. While B2C ads get positive results, this isn’t entirely true for B2B.
Usually, selling to B2B customers requires an in-depth knowledge of the prospect’s interests, needs, probable problems, and pain points. Sure, Facebook’s systems are incredibly sophisticated. However, B2B demands an even more in-depth evaluation than Facebook’s policies can provide. While this may seem incredibly depressing, don’t worry. By adding in target user surveys, you can deliver effective B2B Facebook ads to the right people.
Understanding Facebook’s advertising algorithms are essential. However, marketers are also afraid of algorithms changing continuously. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would overhaul its algorithm to favour more user-generated content instead of ads. Since the change, users will see more activity from friends and family; and less activity from brands. Consequently, Facebook’s ad prices saw a record-breaking increase of almost 122%. This was the highest spike in cost in nearly 14 months. As a result of this algorithm overhaul, paid and even organic ad reach has taken a hit. Consequently, ad costs are skyrocketing.
On a platform that historically offered even the smallest of budgets with some advertising scope, this has led to lots of confusion. While you may be worried about the future of your B2B Facebook advertising efforts in this scenario, don’t worry. There is a way around this – optimization.
Optimization is the key by which marketers can sustain the revenue they generate without increasing overall budgets. In simple words, optimization allows you to get the most out of each dollar that you spend on sending out your message. Facebook ads management and Facebook ad analytics become the most efficient when optimized.
Factors That Impact B2B Facebook Advertising Costs
Given how premium the price of Facebook ads has become, it is necessary for every marketer to understand which factors affect the same. First things first, basic demographic differences such as country of target group, audience age range, location, ad placement, word choice, and even gender may affect the end cost. Moreover, by evaluating these factors, you can aptly predict a suitable budget for an impactful B2B Facebook advertising campaign.
Let’s take a look at the other factors that impact B2B Facebook advertising costs.
Industry
Obviously, it goes without saying that the industry of your Facebook ad targeting will have a massive impact on costs. Given how large most B2C target groups are, the ad cost for such advertising endeavours is comparatively lower. On the other hand, B2B markets usually make ad costs go higher owing to their niche nature. All in all, the industry that your organization belongs to, will have an impact on the end cost of Facebook advertising. Even within the B2B scenario, the core industry that you are advertising to will make a difference. For example, a women’s wear brand may incur lower advertising costs than some complicated mega water-treatment systems used solely in large set-ups.
Core Objective
As is the case with most marketing and sales activities, the core objective of a project dramatically influences everything else. This includes costs too. Even B2B Facebook advertising costs.
At the end of the day, the objective of the online ad campaign has a huge impact on determining the cost. Engagement that demands a stronger buy-in on behalf of the customer, usually, will cost more. Actions such as downloading an app, signing up, providing multi-layered opinions or info are all activities that will cost higher to advertise. On the other hand, post engagement in the form of a like or comment will cost significantly lower as it requires less attention from the audience.
In Facebook advertising, core objectives are usually broken down into three main types:
Brand Awareness and Reach: This objective mainly focuses on generating interest in your brand, product or service. In the case of these types of campaigns, creativity and copy are customized to appeal to new customers.
Consideration: This objective spans a variety of types such as app installation, engagement, video views, traffic, messages and lead generation. Here, the focus is on targeting customers who are already aware of your brand. Even if you gear these to new customers, you’re hoping that they will perform some action related to the ad.
Conversion: This objective includes conversions, catalogue sales and even store visits. The result of such objectives is that your prospect or customer successfully associates with your brand as desired.
Time of the Year
As is the case with most other advertising platforms, the holidays are an expensive time even for B2B Facebook advertising campaigns. When the fourth quarter rolls out, ads costs skyrocket. Moreover, your campaigns will clash with other businesses vying for the attention of the same customers.
Most B2B sales don’t have a direct connection with most commercial holidays, so this may not be such a big problem. However, remember that when you choose to run a B2B Facebook advertising campaign will have a significant impact on the overall cost.
How to Optimize B2B Facebook Advertising Costs
Now that you know what factors are likely to affect B2B Facebook advertising costs, we can talk about the next logical step – cost optimization. Optimizing your advertising cost ensures that campaigns do the most possible with the least resources spent. Here are some pointers that will help you in optimizing B2B Facebook advertising costs.
Pick the Campaign’s Objective
As is the case with any other marketing activity, having a clear objective helps in streamlining everything else. This is also the case with B2B Facebook advertising costs. In most cases, B2B marketers employ either branding campaigns or direct response campaigns on Facebook. Direct response campaigns want people to take a particular action – download something, sign up somewhere, purchase something, and so on. Branding campaigns want to bring in more visibility for the brand’s content. Such campaigns don’t focus on the clicks; they focus on the bigger picture – brand exposure.
Moreover, Facebook ads for e-commerce or even B2B companies benefit from the social media giant’s intelligence. Facebook knows which users are more likely to click on an advertisement link and which users aren’t. It knows who might actually install your app and who might not. Additionally, Facebook ads distribution happens in such a way that ads will most likely reach the right audience.
Pick the Appropriate Bid Strategy
On Facebook, there are two types of bid strategies available. Primarily, these strategies act like tools that control costs and keeps you from exceeding your budget. Just like budgets help you control the overall spending on a project, bid strategies help control the overall spending on a campaign. Buying ad space on Facebook is usually of two types – Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM) and Cost per Click (CPC).
With a CPM bid strategy, the risk is a little higher. In this scenario, your team pays for impressions, as opposed to clicks. So, in the off chance that the creative and copy isn’t compelling, it’s like virtually putting money down the drain. On the other hand, the CPC bid strategy is slightly less risky. Here, your team is sharing the risk with Facebook on equal footing. Here, you pay for the clicks you receive. So, simply crafting a compelling advert is enough for Facebook, and they then distribute it to the right audience.
Pick the Right Target
First things first, nothing can beat the quality of a custom-mined data list of prospects that fit the bill perfectly. The little extra time and effort investment that goes into such services are genuinely worth it.
When it comes to Facebook, targeting your ads to a custom audience surely brings in better results. Every B2B organization has a set of attributes that make a prospect, profile or customer desirable for advertising. These attributes can be anything like being a subscriber to your newsletter or even having browsed for relevant services or products. When plugged into Facebook, this list is analyzed and then matched against Facebook profiles. By doing this, you can build a stronger audience for your campaigns.
Once this step ends, Facebook’s intelligent analytics will generate a larger user group that is likely to respond to your advertising efforts. These users ‘look like’ the people you wish to gear your outreach efforts to. Additionally, if you choose to tap into this wealth of profiles, you have ready access to a list of prospects most likely to convert to users.
Moreover, when you remember to hyper-segment and narrow down your target audience, it cuts down on competition from similar brands. You’ll save yourself the hassle of competing for the attention of viewers who are shown similar ads from your competitors.
Create Compelling Ad Communication
Advertising, in general, is only as effective as it can attract attention from the right people. When the Copy team sits down to write an ad, the aim is to write something so compelling that it automatically cuts through the clutter to grab eyeballs. After all, on a platform where your customers don’t expect to be solicited for anything, asking them to act requires well-written, persuasive ad creative. Only compelling ads have to potential to attract even the most distracted among your audiences.
So, how should you go about crafting ads that can really attract the attention of those you want to connect with? Here are some pointers that help in crafting compelling B2B Facebook advertising copies.
Spark Curiosity Among Your Target Group
Surely, every marketer knows this by now. A little intrigue or curiosity can bring in so many rewards in the marketing scenario. Actually, humans have this ingrained biological impulse that demands that anything that evokes curiosity must be interacted with.
Instead of writing something uninspired and straightforward like ‘Buy our XYZ product’, go for something like ‘XYZ’s users have one thing in common – increased sales’. So, instead of focusing on dry, informational ad creative, find a creative yet impactful way of showcasing your offerings. Incidentally, such ads have the power to bring value to your product by positioning it as something valuable and easily available.
Blend Into The Natural News Feed and Timeline
As we’ve specified before, the changes in Facebook’s algorithm have made ads seem very intrusive. After all, if people are on Facebook to interact with family and friends, a jarring ad in the middle of that is repulsive. Remember, that most of your users are on the platform with another motive. To avoid antagonizing or getting too in-their-face, make sure that your ad is designed to fit naturally into the look-and-feel of the news feed.
Usually, marketers and advertisers use stock photos for creating ads. These pictures are usually great since they do their job, but in recent times, this won’t cut it. Customers have become smarter at identifying ads and conveniently skinning them. So, to avoid them ignoring you, include pictures that look natural. By choosing an image that looks like something a known person might share, it helps in creating a positive first impression among your target group.
Talk About Emotions, Not Your Products or Services
There is a great deal of psychology involved in successful marketing. Needless to say, our emotions motivate how we choose to behave in many situations. Moreover, after this behaviour takes place, our brains justify it with logic. Additionally, many theories show that people tend to associate some personality traits to brands that they would usually associate with actual human beings. So, if you are trying to look at persuasion by pitching product features, we’ve got bad news for you.
Features are great and surely have value for prospects, but they appeal strongly to the logical part of the brain. Sadly enough, this appeal isn’t enough to drive action from your prospects. Instead, focus on the more emotionally-appealing alternatives.
Set up Facebook Pixel
Facebook Pixel refers to the few lines of code that you can insert into your website to track access data and conversions among your clients. Facebook Pixel helps you track the clients and visitors to your page, down to their individual Facebook profile page. However, that’s not all, Apart from that, it also collects a wealth of other valuable data, answering questions like –
- Where do your clients live?
- What is their median yearly income?
- How many kids do they have?
- How much do they spend on purchases on an average?
- What purchases have they recently made?
All in all, Facebook Pixel is incredibly useful when it comes to getting detailed information about your visitors and prospects. Additionally, it also helps you retarget people who have visited your website and performed an action such as adding an item to the cart. To top it all off, this extension allows brands to track ads that are performing exceptionally well, and which yield the best sales results. So, in short, it helps you decide where to put your money to reap the maximum rewards.
Design Simple Landing Pages
Just grabbing a prospect’s attention via B2B Facebook advertising is not enough. There is a lot more to do before you can call a prospect yours. One of the most critical steps is designing a very simplified, yet compelling landing page that can convey the value of what your brand offers. Landing pages are crucial for organizing and engaging with your inbound leads. So, to capitalize on this phenomenon, designing valuable landing pages is important. Here are some guidelines to help you get started:
Spark Curiosity Among Audiences
We’ve said this before, and we’ll say it again, curiosity has the most power when it comes to converting audiences. Even when designing landing pages, this rule still applies. Make sure you don’t reveal way too much about the product, service or offering. However, make sure to leave them with some highlights and benefits.
Stay Away From Distraction like External Links
External links are great when it comes to adding value to what you claim. However, it is not always a great idea to pepper landing pages with links to other pages. This phenomenon is sure to lead prospects away from your website landing page, causing leaks in your sales funnel. Such leaks are sure to lower the conversion rates. So, design landing pages in such a way that there are only two ways a prospect can exit – by closing the page, or by signing up for your offer.
Run Tests on Video Format Content
Videos are generally considered to be more engaging as compared to text format content. Since videos are in the audio-visual format, they are way easier to engage with and have a more significant impact than a simple blog post. However, the very same engaging factor may end up serving as a distraction, leading to lower landing page conversion rates. However, in some scenarios, videos help in increasing landing page activation rates. So, it is necessary to test out your video format content constantly.
Moreover, this is something that’s consistent with all your Facebook ads – testing. The fact of the matter is that Facebook ads are a little like playing darts in the dark – you’ll fail most of the time. However, when you keep testing out different strategies, you’ll eventually find a few that work.
The Bottom Line: Making B2B Facebook Advertising Successful Every Time
Now that you understand how B2B Facebook advertising works optimizing your budget will be a breeze. However, there is still one crucial piece missing from the puzzle of successful returns on your ad campaigns – good quality, reliable data.
Surely, your marketing team works hard to discover and connect with the right kind of people regularly. However, their main job is to create content and achieve marketing goals, not running around verifying and unearthing high-quality customer data. Firstly, they aren’t qualified enough to understand exactly what to look of for, and secondly, they don’t have the expertise to undertake this professionally. Since you can’t think of employing a successful B2B Facebook advertising campaign without a robust data list, it is best to outsource this need to a professional.
BizProspex is a manual data mining company specialized in CRM data Cleaning, CRM data appending with over six years of experience catering to B2B clients. Our highly skilled, well-trained, and experienced team can help you with custom-mined data lists for all your B2B Facebook advertising campaigns. Thanks to our patent-pending processes that assure manual verification, be rest assured about the quality of your customer data!
Reach out to know how we can help your B2B business grow!