How To Win With Facebook Ads For Your B2B Business

Meta, or Facebook Ads, are an underutilised way of targeting B2B customers.

Using this platform, companies can target potential customers from different angles, forming an integral part of an overall SEO and PPC strategy. With their dynamic bidding and extensive demographic targeting options, Meta is a great platform to niche down and target specific buyer personas for a better ROI.

In this article, we’ll look at how best to utilise Facebook ads for B2B and how to get the best possible ROAS (return on ad spend).

Understanding the Potential of Facebook Ads for B2B

Facebook ads for B2B marketing can be challenging. You need to strike the right tone between friendly and informative. People on Facebook aren’t generally looking for this type of information at that exact moment, so direct engagement needs a different approach to platforms like LinkedIn.

However, Facebook ads can be an incredibly powerful tool for B2B sales as they continue to be the top-performing social media platform in 2024. Using Facebook continues to be a strong way to generate brand awareness and lead generation as you can connect directly with key decision-makers and industry professionals.

How to use Facebook Targeting for B2B

Facebook allows you to reach a wide range of people and its targeting is more advanced than most of its competitors, letting you niche down further into the desired demographics.

Meta’s Business Suite provides targeting options such as job title, interests and industry, alongside the traditional social audience information like age, gender and location.

You can also target based on behaviours and interests, meaning not only can you find the right professionals but also ones that actively engage with industry-related content. This means you can ensure your content reaches stronger potential leads who are more likely to convert.

B2B Facebook Advertising Example: SEMrush

SEO platform, SEMrush, is a good example of how to target effectively using Facebook Advertising.

Using a mixture of images and videos in its ad set, SEMrush is quickly and easily identifying with marketers looking for an easier way to do monthly reporting. In a few short words, the platform identifies itself as an industry leader, addresses a pain point and provides a solution.

It’s an effective way to reach both on and off-duty marketers and provide them value in a way they’ll remember.

Setting Clear Objectives for Your Facebook Ads Campaign

Defining clear goals is the first step in any marketing campaign. It allows you to shape your overall ad strategy and ensure campaigns remain focused and effective with clear KPIs in mind. Whether that goal is B2B lead generation, conversions, or brand awareness, the ads should always align with your overall marketing goals and their sales funnel placement.

How to Set Measurable Goals for Facebook Ads

In B2B advertising, the SMART approach should guide campaign planning. I.e. are your ad goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely?

By clearly laying out what you want to achieve, you ensure goals are metric-driven and realistic. This keeps your campaign direct and allows you to continually monitor and refine its ads based on its performance data.

Facebook Ad Targeting: Choosing the Right Demographics

Facebook’s extensive ad targeting options are highly valuable to B2B businesses. Some of the key options outside of regular demographic choices include custom and lookalike audiences.

Facebook custom audience: An uploaded list of email addresses, usually taken from your CRM. This option is ideal for retargeting potential leads and supporting strategies further down the sales funnel.

Facebook lookalike audiences: These are based on custom audiences and users who have previously interacted with your content. Taking their information, lookalike audiences target new customers with the same values as existing ones. This is ideal for brand awareness campaigns and supporting top-of-the-funnel content.

Why is Facebook audience segmentation important?

Segmentation allows you to reach the correct people and maximises the impact and success rates of your Facebook advertising, providing greater ROI.

With specific targeting, you can address specific needs and pain points in your target audience to increase your ad’s relevance and promote engagement.

How to create audience segments on Facebook

As well as your lookalike and custom audiences, you can use Facebook’s insight tools to give information on the type of people already engaging with your business’s content.

Look at the most common factors between them, whether that’s age, industry, job title etc. and use these to inform demographic choices and shared interests. Make sure to regularly check these lists and refine them to hone in on your specific target segment.

How to Create Compelling Ad Copy and Creatives for B2B Advertising

In B2B advertising, particularly on platforms like Facebook, you need to be snappy and to the point. Like our SEMrush example above, address a pain point, provide a valuable solution and demonstrate industry expertise.

Keep it clear, concise and focused on the specific benefits of your B2B or B2B SaaS product. A strong CTA (call-to-action) is an important part of this and should provide exact information on what the user will achieve by clicking through.

For example, “learn more” doesn’t provide any information or a compelling reason to click through. However, “access the report” or “download our guide” is action-driven and provides further context that encourages conversions.

Alongside this, a strong infographic or professional visual that demonstrates value further emphasises your professionalism and overall ad cohesiveness. People are predominantly visual, and Facebook ads using images or videos get the highest engagement rates.

Leveraging Facebook’s Ad Formats for B2B Success

To get the most out of Meta’s Business Suite and Facebook advertising, you should create multiple ad sets and use the most appropriate ad formats that will help achieve your business goals.

Some of the most common Facebook ad formats include:

• Boosted post: Capitalise on a Facebook page organic post that’s doing well by putting an additional budget behind it to enhance its reach.
•  Image: Single visuals that can be used to highlight a key concept or feature.
•  Video: Informative interactive information like product features, user testimonials or how-to’s.
•  Carousel: Provide a variety of images and links to advertise multiple products or services.
•  Lead Gen forms: Collect user information and add them to a mailing list or CRM.

Use any legacy data available to see how users engage with your content and the type of ads that receive the most interaction. You can also utilise multiple ad sets to test different options and formats to see which are most effective. By doing this, you can then monitor results and adjust ads accordingly to increase your ROAS (return on ad spend).

Budgeting and Bidding Strategies for Facebook Ads

Like any other PPC campaign, budgeting and bidding are a key part of reaching the right audience members who are most likely to engage and convert.

The type of Facebook bid available varies depending on ad format, but can be broken down into three distinct “types”:

• Spend-based bidding: This is based on the maximum value you can achieve from your full budget. Usually, this is decided by volume (usually for brand awareness campaigns) or value (high-value conversions, for example).
•  Goal-based bidding: Set a cost or value you want to achieve. This is usually based on ROAS or cost-per-result (whether that result is impressions, clicks, downloads etc.)
•  Manual bidding: Control bids yourself and set caps to ensure you don’t go over your intended spend.

The amount your business wants to spend should be determined by your desired ROAS. But Facebook ads take time and tweaks to fully optimise them. Monitor your campaigns and start with a conservative budget before building on your most successful ad sets.

There are A/B test options to see which content resonates most with your audience, which informs where to funnel your budget for maximum effectiveness.

Measuring and Optimising Your Facebook Ads Performance

Tracking actionable insights is paramount to a successful and effective Facebook ads campaign that provides the best ROAS.

Track your KPIs continually and adjust your campaign accordingly to increase your chance of hitting the most relevant users. These key metrics usually focus on engagement and conversion rates and the quality of the B2B audience they’re reaching. Monitoring this allows you to pinpoint the most successful ads and the differences in their demographics, targeting and ad content for further refinement.

Meta ads also offer A/B test options. This allows you to see which content is resonating most with your audience, which informs where to funnel your budget for maximum effectiveness.

Staying Ahead of the Competition

To stay ahead of the competition, your business needs to stay up-to-date with Meta’s ever-changing ad features. As a competitive ad platform, Meta regularly adjusts its bidding strategy types and optimisation options to improve its targeting across Facebook.

Subscribe to any relevant Meta Business Suite email lists for updates, follow industry blogs, and attend relevant webinars to understand how best to utilise the platform.

Standing out from the noise is difficult, but the better you understand Facebook, the better you can tailor it to achieve the goals you want.

For example, using Meta as part of their overall SEO and PPC strategy helped Drive Fuze stand out from the competition and achieve a 4:1 ROI.

Here’s how: Common Ground utilised Facebook to educate users on what a car subscription is. This led to potential customers investigating further and eventually, circling back to Drive Fuze as their chosen subscription and signing up. With retargeting and support from SEO and Google ads PPC, they were fully informed about what a car subscription is and why Drive Fuze was the best choice.

Keeping content fresh and informative further supported this. Staying aligned with shifting industry trends allows your business to be reactive, respond to changes quickly, and stay on top of new features.

Conclusion: Winning with Facebook Ads for B2B

Consider carefully where Meta ads best fit in your sales funnel and what objectives you’re hoping to achieve by using them.

With continual monitoring and adjustments, Facebook can be a great way to develop brand awareness and obtain leads via lead-generation campaigns. Maintain a competitive edge with niched-down targeting and custom or lookalike audiences to enhance your ROAS and stay ahead of the competition.

Still not confident? If you’d rather let the experts tackle it for you, get in touch with Common Ground. We can provide support for your PPC campaigns and increase your Facebook success rate with informed value-driven content. Or, if you just want a small helping hand, our resources page has tons of information to guide you to success.