We’re all in (responsibly, of course) on our Facebook ads, because they work. Facebook might not be your first thought when you think of B2B marketing (ahem, LinkedIn and Twitter), but your B2B audience is on there. What are they doing on Facebook?
They’re checking out photos of their nieces and putting a heart on the photo of their colleague’s new puppy.
Our audience has nieces and friends with puppies. That’s why Facebook works for us (and will work for you too). We’re running awareness and conversion campaigns to an audience Facebook has helped us build.
We have 160 ads that have surfed the Facebook algorithm, and we’re watching companies like Slack, Asana, and Monday crank up their awareness using the platform.
The question is… what does a Facebook ad technique for B2B actually look like?
→ What type of campaigns should you set up?
→ Can you send minions into the Facebook abyss to do some selling for you?
→ How can you use the audience you’ve already spent money building?
We’ve rounded up 7 Facebook ad techniques to help you get started with your B2B strategy, including some from our very own Facebook Playbook.
#1: Brand awareness campaigns that lead to your articles (without an opt-in)
Of course you want the conversion on the first click. You’d prefer someone to click your Facebook ad and buy your highest-tier product without hesitation. Wouldn’t that be a beautiful marketing world?
Unfortunately, that’s not how the Customer Value Journey works. The Customer Value Journey is 8 steps that take your customer avatar from first finding out about your brand to becoming a promoter of your brand. It’s not until the sixth stage of the CVJ that they even buy your high-tier products.
And this makes sense.
You can’t walk up to somebody in a coffee shop and ask them to be best friends. Post-pandemic, we’re still wondering when it’s acceptable to shake hands or hug somebody we just met.
Facebook can definitely be used for making money directly from an ad, but it also has a place in that first stage of the CVJ—awareness.
Create brand awareness campaigns that promote your articles. When your customer avatar clicks your Facebook ad to read the article, they get brought directly to it. There’s no opt-in or funny business. Inside your article you’ll have CTAs to subscribe to your newsletter or grab your lead magnet. But, even if someone doesn’t take you up on that offer, you can now retarget them.
Use brand awareness campaigns to:
- Create more brand awareness for your business (have Facebook find your ideal audience for you)
- Start building relationships with your customer avatar (without asking for an opt-in in return)
- Retarget Facebook → website visitors with subscriber opt-ins or low-tier offers
#2: Let your customers do the talking for you
Coming up with ad creatives to avoid ad exhaustion is exhausting. In your hopes of not exhausting your audience, you’re exhausting yourself and your team as you try to create more and more ads to show them consistently.
That’s where user-generated content comes in. User-generated content comes from your happy customers. It’s the photo they take of their revenue after using your SaaS tool or the video of themselves showing their audience how organized their marketing funnels are after working with your agency. It’s the testimonial you asked them for and they happily provided.
We added a carousel of DigitalMarketer Certified Partner testimonials to this Facebook ad:
Don’t let user-generated content get lost in the feed. Use it in your ad creative.
As much as your audience needs to see branded content—they also need to see customers talking about your brand. It’s easier for someone to believe you’re great at what you do when somebody else tells them versus when you tell them.
That’s just the nature of human psychology.
Add user-generated content to:
- Your brand awareness campaigns as social proof that other people are using your products (and loving the experience)
- Your opt-in campaigns (to show that the opt-in is worth it)
- Your conversion campaigns (add user-generated content that’s specific to the problem you’re solving with that conversion)
#3: Have your employees be the voice of your brand
Just like user-generated content creates higher engagement and conversions, employee-generated content gets more shares and engagement too. In comparison to brand-created content, employee-generated content outperforms.
This doesn’t mean you’ll ditch all of your brand-created content. It just means that you’ll add user-generated content and employee-generated content to your Facebook ad creatives.
You can have your employees make videos about new features, showcasing why you chose to add it, how it works, and what the results of that feature are. (Remember the marketing foundations of Before and After States for these ads!)
For example, we had highlighted our employees to promote the 2020 T&C 360i Virtual Summit. In this Facebook ad, you’ll see Bethany Coan, our Programming Manager of Events:
Think about that.
Use employee-generated content to make ads for:
- Brand awareness that talk about the Before and After States of your customers
- Opt-in campaigns explaining the value behind the lead magnet, newsletter, etc.
- Conversion campaigns that have the employee walking the viewer through the experience of using your product
#4: Chatbots via Messenger for Facebook users interacting with your brand
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could clone yourself and be able to have mini-versions of you roaming the web and building relationships with your customer avatar?
The inventor of the chatbot thought the same thing.
With chatbots, you can send out automated messages based on someone’s interaction with your brand. If they comment on a post, like a post, or click through on your ad, you can send a bot out to message them (via Facebook Messenger).
This bot can ask the user what their pain points are, if they’d like to opt in to a lead magnet that solves that pain point for them, and if they want to talk to your sales rep.
Don’t sleep on adding bots to your B2B Facebook marketing strategy. Here’s an example from Drift of what chatbots can say to your Facebook audience:
Check out these bot experts:
#5: Use Facebook in the rest of your marketing strategy
If a particular ad does well in an ad set, you have to ask—why?
- Was it the color of the CTA button?
- Was it the offer?
- Was it the copy?
More importantly, you need to ask how you can bring that ad to your other audiences. If that ad is proven to work really well with your Facebook audience, bringing it to your email subscribers, social media followers, articles, and paid search ads can create marketing results that make you look like a certified genius.
Taking a holistic approach to marketing is the key to a successful omni-channel presence. Your marketing channels can work together, feeding each other with important data. This is one of the few times it’s appropriate to double dip (Super Bowl parties are not!).
Here are a few ways to use what you learn from your Facebook ads in the rest of your marketing strategy:
- Take your ads with the highest engagement and turn them into blog posts
- Use your high-performing ads as organic posts on your social media channels
- Turn the ad copy into email subject lines
#6: Turn your subscribers into a Facebook custom audience
You know that list of people who have already told you they’re interested in what you do, but haven’t bought yet?
Instead of staring at that list in disdain, wondering when these people will FINALLY take you up on your offer, show them Facebook ads for your products.
You can add your subscribers to a Facebook custom audience. Then, you can make ads specifically for where they are in the Customer Value Journey. You’ve already turned these people into subscribers, but now the goal is to get them to convert (stage 4 of the CVJ).
In our case, these ads are going to be for our low-tier products like one-off offers or our DigitalMarketer Lab Plus membership. We can give our subscribers a special discount, like a 14-day trial of Lab:
Here’s how you can upload your email list to your Facebook Ads Manager.
Show these leads Facebook ads that:
- Tell them about your latest offer
- Tease launches about products they’ve shown interest in
- Give them exclusive discounts or access because of their subscriber status
#7: Turn your customers into *another* Facebook custom audience
In the same way that you make a custom audience of subscribers who haven’t converted yet, you can make an audience of customers. For these customers, you won’t show them the same ads that you would your subscribers.
In this case, you’ll focus on selling them your high-tier offers. For example, we run ads to our customers for the DigitalMarketer Certified Partner Program and Traffic & Conversion Summit.
