Facebook is a platform for people to connect with friends and share pictures of their dinner, right?
It’s definitely not a place to advertise your tech company because who’s going to be interested in that when they can use the platform to stalk people they went to school with?
In actual fact, Facebook can be a really powerful place to advertise your brand.
Unlike LinkedIn, which is most B2B companies’ go-to for advertising, it allows you to seamlessly raise awareness for your brand in an authentic and semi-organic way – and the majority of tech brands are wising up to this.
According to research by the CMI, 86% of B2B marketers consider Facebook to be a crucial part of their marketing efforts.
So, if you’re not using Facebook ads to reach potential leads, there’s a high chance you’re missing out on new customers and revenue. Though the social network wasn’t initially designed to help you connect with decision-making professionals in certain job roles, its incredibly powerful targeting options make it a must-have in your marketing mix.
Here are a few key ways you can use Facebook ads to generate leads.
1. Brand Awareness Campaigns
Let’s face it, there are so many tech brands out there with new ones popping up pretty much by the day.
On top of this, people are fickle – especially when it comes to new technologies. They’ll see a shiny new brand promising them the world and will have no qualms about jumping ship from their old provider.
This is good and bad news for you.
On the one hand, it means you have to work a little bit harder to keep customers sticking around (which is why customer experience is so important). On the other hand, it means you have the potential to poach customers from other brands – the only hitch is they need to know about you first.
Luckily, Facebook ads are great for generating awareness around your brand – because no one will buy from you if they don’t know who you are, right?
According to research, people need seven touchpoints with a brand before they’ll consider parting with their cash. By continuously showing up in your prospect’s news feeds, you’ll spark intrigue and boost your authority.
Amazon Web Services uses eye-catching graphics and information about how their product can help B2B customers with their Facebook ads.
2. Target Specific Job Roles
Selling a tech product or service is completely different to selling B2C. The decision process is far lengthier and there tends to be a number of gatekeepers that need to approve each step of the buying cycle.
With Facebook ads, you can use the in-depth targeting options to reach people in specific job roles within a company. Say, for example, you are selling a product to marketers, you can filter your ads so they only show up in the feeds of marketing managers.
You can also choose to target prospects based on their:
- Employer
- Industry
- Office type
- Location
Targeting your leads in this way is a good place to start, but you can take it one step further too.
You can combine targeting options so that you’re not only targeting people with a certain job role, but you’re also targeting people with that job role and an interest in a certain publication, event, or rival company who sells a similar service.
Krit targets startup founders with this ad.
3. Target Mobile Devices
There’s a huge misconception that baby boomers are the ultimate B2B target audience. In fact, it’s millennials you want to be getting in front of. The vast majority of decision-makers in businesses have been millennials for a number of years now. This group is making more B2B purchasing decisions than anyone else, but marketers have been slow to pick up on this.
Which means you can swoop in and get ahead of the game by targeting mobile devices with your Facebook ads.
Research shows that over 40% of B2B buyers use their mobile during the buying process but most tech marketers only dedicate 3% of their budget to mobile marketing. It sounds crazy, but you don’t have to make the same mistake.
Of course, you don’t want to just stick with mobile ads, but you might want to consider the way B2B buyers move between desktop and mobile devices during the purchasing process. The great thing about Facebook is that people are logged into the app regardless of the device they’re using, which means you can provide a seamless series of ads that reach them where they’re spending the most time.
4. Personalize As Much As Possible
People buying B2B products or services face a harder decision than those buying B2C goods. Not only is there no emotion involved because they’re usually buying for their employer, but the price points tend to be way higher which makes it more tricky.
You can tackle this issue head on by injecting as much personalization as you can into your Facebook ads.
This doesn’t mean creating ads for specific people in specific companies (although Facebook’s targeting options are powerful enough that you can target one single person), but instead creating a different ads for different segments of the market and different positions.
For example, you might product one set of visuals and copy for marketing managers who like a specific publication and another ad set for buyers higher up in the chain. You can also target people who have clicked on a previous ad of yours with another ad that welcomes that back or dives into more detail about your product.
Outbrain partners with marketing expert Larry Kim with this ad so that they can target people who are fans of or know Larry Kim.
Facebook Is Gold For Generating Leads
If you thought that Facebook was out of the question for generating B2B leads, think again.
The powerful targeting options let you serve ads to specific people in specific job roles, which means you can reach those who are making the buying decisions. Just make sure that you leverage all of the in-depth targeting options Facebook has and play around with different combinations to see what works best for your business.
