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How to Create a B2B Facebook Audience

For many years, LinkedIn has been known as the ultimate B2B (business to business) platform, with the platform allowing you to connect with employees and business partners, introduce your company to your potential customers and attract star talent to join your team. LinkedIn is used by many businesses and professionals, from entry-level professionals to experienced recruiters and even company directors.

If your target market is business professionals as opposed to direct consumers, you’ll want to be using LinkedIn as a platform for your B2B social media campaign. With that being said, Facebook probably isn’t likely to be on your list of platforms to run your social media campaign on, however, it should be!

Facebook shouldn’t be seen as a B2C or B2B platform, but rather a business to ‘people’ platform instead. After all, business owners are people and people use social media, whether it’s during working hours or in their own time outside of work. As a digital marketing agency, we have seen some of our B2B clients performing better and receiving more conversions through Facebook than LinkedIn.

In this blog, we take a look at the benefits of using Facebook as a platform to target businesses through the use of paid social (Facebook Ads) and how you can create a B2B Facebook audience within the platform.

Targeting Through Facebook

Targeting Job Titles on Facebook

Facebook Ads allows you to target a wide range of users anywhere in the world that might fit into the category of your ‘target audience’. Your target audience is anyone who is likely to benefit from your product or service or would even know someone who could benefit.

Through Facebook Ads, you can really drill down on who you’re targeting through the option to target exact job titles. As an example, if you are an HR Consultant looking to target those interested in your services, you may benefit most from targeting company directors or team leaders who are in charge of managing subordinates.

However, we do advise adding multiple job titles through this feature to target all possible job titles within your criteria, as many business owners may have the job title of Director, Founder, Managing Director or even CEO, for example. Facebook Ads does give you the feature to “expand interests” to show you similar job titles which are most relevant to your target audience.

A managing director in a small business will most likely be the only decision maker but in larger businesses, it’ll be the employees lower down with the initial interest.

Targeting Industries

Rather than targeting individuals, it may be more beneficial to target industries that are likely to be interested in your product or service. Contrary to popular belief, it shouldn’t always be a company director you are targeting, but the department or individuals who are more likely to benefit from your product or service and can pitch you to their line manager or company director.

With this in mind, it can be well worth targeting a wider industry that fits the criteria of your target market, not forgetting that you can drill down even further and also target particular job titles from those industries.

Target Page Admins

While many do not know this, you can target business owners through Facebook Ads by using the detailed targeting section to target Facebook page admins. These page admins are typically business owners who manage their Facebook page and might just be exactly your target audience.

This feature provides an easy gateway to finding those who manage businesses and through the use of Facebook Ads, your campaigns may end up at the very top of these business owners’ news feeds.

This may be a popular method for B2B companies looking at targeting someone in charge at another company, for example, if you are a commercial venue looking to target business owners to hire your premises for corporate events.

Targeting Interests

Interests can also be targeted through Facebook Ads as many users are likely to set this up when they first create their Facebook account. This also means that any content shown to them on their news feed is likely to be of interest to them, which may just well be your social content.

These interests must be relevant to your service and product as well as the industry you are either targeting or part of. A keyword you may like to include within your targeting is “business” as this can support in narrowing down your search to appeal to those who are in the B2B category.

Our Advice for Running Facebook Ads

To really get the most from your Facebook Ads and receive the best results when targeting businesses on Facebook, it can really help to mix and match your targeting options to narrow down the audience viewing your ads. This means that you should put in as much detail as possible to your targeting options by adding location, job title, interests and industries so that your budget is going exactly where you’ll get the most results from.

Facebook Ads is all about testing, so it’s well worth investing in testing out different audiences and variations of your targeting options to discover what performs best and generates the most leads. Testing is an ongoing process and is an excellent method of observing your target audience and their behaviours.

Finally, you will need to make sure you have a good message going out to your audience in order to generate the most leads and to really get their attention. We often see some Facebook Ads not performing as well as they could, which is typically due to the social content message not being quite right. Google Analytics and Facebook Insights should be your best friend, as these can provide information on what type of content runs well with your audience.

What if I Can’t Afford Facebook Advertising?

While this isn’t strictly related to Facebook Ads, Facebook Groups are an excellent way of connecting with other business professionals within the same industry or geographical area. The best thing about Facebook Groups is that it’s a free method of defined targeting and is a way to make new contacts through both B2B and B2C. As an example, a B2B courier service based in Leicestershire may well benefit from sharing content and engaging with other users in the ‘Leicestershire Business Network Group’ on Facebook, and if the courier service specialised in collecting and distributing automotive car parts, then it can help to join a Facebook Group relevant to mechanics and automotive suppliers who can become excellent contacts for the courier service.

Kickstart Your Social Media Campaign

Our social media marketing process ensures that your business gets a social media marketing campaign specifically tailored to your business’ goals. Through the use of Facebook Ads, our paid social experts can make sure your social content reaches your exact target audience for maximum exposure and brand awareness.

Not only do you reach a captivated audience with each offering, but you can also measure the success of the campaign by having social media tracking analytics in place. When done correctly, this tactic can help engage customers and potential customers and help create new sales and greater brand awareness.

If you’re interested in how your business could benefit from expert social media marketing to boost your social media presence or have any further enquiries, please do get in touch.