Facebook Ads for B2B: How to Create and Optimize Campaigns That Convert

Are Facebook ads for B2B ideal for marketing? The short answer is yes! Facebook has a wide array of functions and is suitable for essentially any size of marketing campaign, whether it be B2B or B2C. 

As one of the top platforms for digital marketing, Facebook should be high on your priority list. Many businesses have made it big from Facebook advertising in the past, and different vertical markets will continue to flourish steadily into the future. 

In this all-inclusive guide, you’ll learn how to create your own B2B ad campaigns on Facebook and optimize them with a winning action plan. By the end, you’ll have the means to market your B2B business on Facebook through a complete understanding of the following:

• Facebook ad campaign types, such as brand affinity campaigns, lead generation campaigns, and conversion campaigns
• Reaching specific audiences through research and analytics
• How to utilize custom audiences in Facebook’s ad manager
• Importance of mobile optimization
• Ad placement

Let’s get moving.

Key Takeaways

• Facebook ads are effective for B2B marketing, offering wide audience reach and diverse campaign types, making it a key platform for increasing brand awareness, generating leads, and enhancing conversions.
• The article outlines a comprehensive guide for creating and optimizing B2B ad campaigns on Facebook, including audience targeting, ad creation, lead generation, and the importance of mobile optimization and ad placement.
• It emphasizes the necessity of experimenting with different ad strategies and utilizing Facebook’s analytics tools to refine campaigns for better targeting and higher conversion rates, highlighting the platform’s versatility for B2B marketing objectives.

Do Facebook Ads Work for B2B?

Absolutely. Facebook ads do indeed work for B2B companies, and it’s not just for consumer-based services.

According to one 2021 survey, roughly 69% of all B2B marketers use Facebook. That same poll found that marketers conclude that Facebook ads are the second most important platform in their field (second only to Linkedin ads). 

Why You Should Use Facebook in Your B2B Marketing Campaign

Running a B2B Facebook advertising campaign has several benefits, including increased brand awareness, traffic creation, lead generation, and higher conversion rates.

Brand Awareness

As a B2B company, one of your primary goals should be to build brand awareness. It’s how other businesses find you and is fundamental for creating profitable relationships between you and your clientele.

Unlike the direct targeting of Google ads, Facebook ads are received by a much wider audience. While a broader scope isn’t as effective at turning a profit from conversions, it does allow you to be found by more audiences. From here, you’ll begin to see massive leaps in brand awareness.

Traffic Creation

Facebook ads can also help increase your website visitors and create a steady traffic flow to your designated landing page. The trick here is not to link people to your Facebook page but rather to take them directly to your main website. 

Using Facebook’s extensive audience targeting lets you find Facebook lookalike audiences to your existing customers and invite new prospects to your B2B business. This will, in turn, raise brand awareness and lead to more conversions.

Generate Leads

Facebook is packed with useful information, demographics, statistics, and personal information, such as hobbies, likes, dislikes, etc. 

With Facebook lead ads, finding and connecting with a Facebook audience network is a cinch. You can use the information you pull to create email listings for distributing newsletters, discounts, and ads to potential prospects. 

You’ll learn more about Facebook ads down below.

Higher Conversion Rates

Facebook ads may not be as efficient at converting prospects into customers as Google ads, but they do have their merits when it comes to turning a profit.

Facebook-oriented conversion campaigns should take prospects directly to landing pages (as opposed to other intermediate links). These landing pages should be ready-to-purchase product pages or free trials for whatever your business is selling.

That will allow you to optimize your conversion campaigns and save money while also increasing conversion rates.

So, there you have the advantages. Are you ready to get started with developing a creative advertising campaign? Read on.

Creating a B2B Facebook Advertising Campaign

Now that we’ve discussed some of the pivotal points of Facebook marketing efforts, it’s time to put them into action and implement them into your marketing tactic. We will discuss targeting B2B audiences, creating Facebook Ad Leads, ad placement, and optimizing your campaign for mobile.

Targeting Your B2B Audiences

The first step to drawing prospects into your marketing funnel is determining and targeting your audience. Just because you aren’t necessarily marketing to regular consumers doesn’t mean you can skip this step.

Finding businesses that benefit from your services requires a similar brand awareness strategy as a B2C business. This step is not about getting another company to buy your stuff, nor is it even about revenue generation, for that matter.

Your goal is to find core audiences, increase brand awareness, boost traffic, and amplify engagement. 

One of the main reasons B2B businesses are lagging behind B2C businesses on Facebook is that many companies often overlook this crucial part. 

Here are three easy steps for targeting the right B2B audience:

Research Your Target Audience

Your first step is to research your targeted audience. Since you’re primarily marketing toward other businesses, it’s in your best interest to tailor your research within your company’s associated fields.

Do insight checks on comparable businesses and to whom they sell their products or services. Take note of who their target audience is as well. Understanding the B2C audience you are marketing towards is just as principal to your campaign as your audience.

Several marketing tools make this process easier, but you can also use Facebook’s built-in reporting feature, Facebook Pixel. Of course, the disadvantage to this type of research is that you have to put up test ads before you can get these insights.

Create Targeted Ads

Once you’ve got an idea of who your target audience is, it’s time to create some ads. Facebook’s ad manager is an all-in-one marketing tool that allows you to create, manage, and keep track of your Facebook ads.

With this, you can choose which audience you want to market to and tailor your ads to your marketing efforts. For example, if you’re looking to target a broader audience to raise brand awareness or a niche one for better conversions. 

Experiment With Ads

You’re likely not going to run an ad campaign on Facebook to its maximum, optimized capacity on your first try. The trick is to experiment and make the necessary adjustments you require to optimize your ad set. 

Since Facebook advertising can get a bit pricey, running your ad campaigns in short intervals of three to seven days is recommended until you really get the formula down.

Use the provided insights tool to keep track of progress and see if you’re hitting your marks. Try to make adjustments in any area where you fall short and focus on those that do well.

Facebook Lead Ads

Leads are the means for prospects to find your business. In short, lead ads enable your company to expand its customer base, collect contact information, and convert traffic to sales. 

The great thing about Facebook lead ads is that customers never have to leave the platform to give information. Before this built-in feature, there was a lengthy process of marketers trying to draw potential customers to their website where they would prompt them for their data. 

Of course, it was neither efficient nor particularly effective. 

Besides streamlining the process, Facebook leaders also let people autofill data. That makes it even easier for a prospect to input their information, meaning it’s more likely for them to do so.

How Does Generating Leads Help a B2B Business?

Generating as many leads as possible opens the window for more opportunities than you would have had otherwise. Other businesses who interact with your B2B ad show their interest has been piqued by your services and may convert to customers down the line.

Prospecting with Facebook

Unfortunately, many prospects turn out to be bad fits. That means many prospecting efforts result in low-quality leads unlikely to turn into conversions. It’s akin to panning for gold; you’re likely to find anything but a coveted nugget without the right approach.

Facebook is a viable solution to this ineffective process as the site’s intuitive targeting features make it much easier to reach target audiences and generate quality warm leads for your sales team.

The Facebook ad manager is constantly learning and improving through data-driven efforts. Consequently, it produces an advertising user experience that is much better for both marketers and consumers.

How to Create a Facebook Lead Ad

There really isn’t a special process for creating a Facebook lead ad, as it follows a similar procedure to making any other ad on social media platforms.

Your first step is to go to your Facebook ad manager page and select the “lead generation” option in the campaign marketing objectives field. 

As with all Facebook ads, you’ll be prompted to indicate your target audience, budget, and goals. Do any research necessary and follow the process as standard. Keep track of insights once your ad is up and implement adjustments as needed to nurture leads.

There is one thing different about a lead ad: the form. It’s a call to action that either brings customers to your website or creates a pop-up instant form for users on Facebook. This form is where customers can input their information to show their interest.

As noted before, using an instant form that allows prospects to give you their info without having to leave the site is recommended. Doing so avoids the risk inherent to relying on potential customers going to another website.

Facebook Ads vs. Google Ads

So should you use Facebook ads over Google AdWords? Well, that depends on your business needs. Each of the two marketing tools provides a similar service but targets different audiences.

Facebook ads effectively reach a broader audience and build brand awareness. If you’re looking for more direct conversions, you might want to go for Google ads. Google works by targeting customers who are ready to buy based on average consumer buying habits.

Each platform has its data-driven learning software and multiple tools for attaining analytics on your ads. Google has more free tools than Facebook, such as Google Analytics and Google Trends, but these can be used regardless of whether you use Google advertising.

The price range may vary on either side, though Google AdWords is likely to be more competitive, depending on your niche. The upside to using Google is that you pay on a pay-per-click basis as opposed to Facebook, which will use your entire designated budget whether necessary or not.

Both have perks and downsides to using, which you should review carefully before making a conclusive decision.

Ad Placement

Ad placement is a crucial aspect of your online advertising campaigns. 

It refers to where on Facebook your ads show up and determine how visible your B2B business is to your target audiences. Poorly placing your ads can lead to decreased engagement, reduced visibility, and fewer conversions.

To properly gauge where you should implement your ads, you need to understand where your ads can appear. Here is a list of places on Facebook you can embed your ads:

• In the right column
• News feed ads
• “Instant articles”
• In-stream videos

That said, you might be wondering where the best placement would be for a B2B business. Your best bet is to put them in news feeds and the right column. Any other option is riskier and won’t be as visible to prospects.

Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages to these two options.

New feed ads are more popular and have a broader reach than other options. The downside is that they’re more expensive and highly competitive.

On the other hand, right-column ads are much cheaper and smaller but come with a caveat: they can’t be seen on mobile devices.

Choosing where your ads are situated takes consideration and research on where most of your target audiences are viewing your ad. 

Optimizing Your Campaign for Mobile

One report predicts that the mCommerce (mobile commerce) volume in the United States alone will hit more than $400 billion in 2024, double what it was in 2021.

While this is merely a projected estimate, it is supported by concurrent upward trends and could potentially meet or surpass these expectations.

Whether you believe this or not, there’s no denying that mobile commerce is skyrocketing and already places a massive role in modern eCommerce. That should be a clear indicator to optimize your campaign for mobile devices.

To make the most out of Facebook ads for B2B, optimizing your campaigns for mobile and desktop users is best.

How To Create a Mobile-Friendly Campaign

Fortunately for B2B Facebook marketers, Facebook ads make it easy for you to tailor your campaigns to mobile users.

The trick to utilizing these features effectively is understanding the mobile user:

Mobile users tend to scroll by vast amounts of content in quick succession. That’s just how social media works. Such is why you’ve got to create eye-catching visual advertising to captivate someone who would glance over your ad otherwise.

But just because you’ve got their attention doesn’t mean you’ve got it for long. Your ads should be quick, easy to comprehend, and let viewers know immediately what you’re about. Video ads are more effective when they’re short and can be viewed without sound, so keep that in mind as well.

If you do this right, the next step is to bring engaged prospects to an equally mobile-friendly landing page that can potentially turn them into customers.

Optimizing Your B2B Campaign

We’ve discussed the components you need to run a B2B campaign. Now, it’s time to ensure that it’s fully optimized. 

Doing so requires tons of experimentation, research, and analytics, but it’s well worth it once you nail down the perfect campaign.

Here are a few additional tips on how you can optimize your B2B programmatic advertising campaign:

Choosing the Right Campaign Type

As a B2B business, you’re probably going to run one of the five following campaign types: 

• Brand-awareness campaign
• Traffic campaigns
• Lead generation campaign
• Messenger ad campaign
• Conversion campaign

You’ll likely run these campaigns at different stages of your B2B business’s operations. 

In the first stage, your goal is to get your company’s name out there. You’ll probably spend the majority of your ad spend budget on brand awareness, which is necessary if you want to go on to the next steps of marketing to Facebook audiences.

The next step is to generate traffic through various traffic campaigns. These campaigns go a step further from brand awareness campaigns and seek to bring physical traffic to your website and media, though many of them may not be customers.

Lead campaigns are for when you want to take it a step further after building up enough brand credibility through brand awareness campaigns and having a steady flow of visitors from traffic campaigns. Now, your goal is to initiate engagement with Facebook users and attain valuable data from them.

Messenger campaigns are ad campaigns where users are brought to Facebook messaging and can directly contact your company with inquiries or otherwise. These initiatives indicate high user interest and are more likely to turn into conversions.

Finally, conversion campaigns are meant to push conversions and drive sales. You should only run this type of campaign once you have a sizable following and are confident it’ll bring in enough sales to be worth the time, money, and effort.

Optimizing Your Audience Targeting

Previously we discussed the importance of targeting the right audience for your B2B business, and you may have found that it differs from B2C audience targeting. 

Combining targeting options on the Facebook ad manager is the most effective way to reach prospects. In addition to using basic information such as gender, location, age, and demographic details, you’ll also want to pay attention to these key insights:

• Job title
• Employer
• Industry
• Office Type

These elements will further help you reach your designated audience and allow for a more in-depth strategy that doesn’t leave anything out. 

Personalize Ads

With Facebook’s analytical tools, you can access consumer data in your industry. You can then take this data and convert it into personalized ads that target users in a more direct approach. 

Personalized content drives more leads as viewers can relate to it with a higher degree of intimacy. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be generalized in the slightest (you’d have to create a sizable number of personal messages if you did), but it should be relatable to specific groups.

While B2C marketers have fully taken advantage of this in recent years, B2B marketers are still a bit behind (which may play in your favor since there is less competition).

Utilize Facebook’s Lookalike Feature

There’s no reason you should use your existing customer base to your advantage. 

With Facebook lookalike audiences or custom audiences, you can create “lookalike audiences” based on the demographics of your existing customers.

So what’s the advantage of having lookalike audiences? Well, based on analytic-based similarities, people who share a demographic likeness are statistically more likely to have the same interests.

As such, they’re more likely to buy the same products. That reality goes for businesses, too, which bodes well for those in the B2B industry.

Furthermore, using lookalike audiences makes the research process more convenient since you’re referring to your figures for most of your investigation. Moreover, it’s an excellent way to save extra time and money.

Custom Audiences

If you want to create a custom audience on Facebook, you can transfer existing customer information to Facebook and create a lookalike audience based on their image. 

Custom audiences will typically be shaped by CRM data, a database of past interactions your company has had with customers. 

Not only will this information make the custom audiences feature on Facebook more effective, but it’s foundational for your company’s growth.

Have Appealing Landing Pages and a CTA

As with most digital marketing efforts, all hyperlinks should lead prospective customers to an appealing landing page that is easy to navigate, has valuable information displayed on the forefront, and is complete with appealing visuals.

To make your company’s services even more enticing, you can also consider taking customers to a free demo, trial, or sample page, which will, in turn, lead to higher-quality prospects. The objective is to create traffic that converts for your business, which will run much deeper than having a pretty Facebook ad.

One other crucial element you’ll want to consider incorporating into all of your custom Facebook ads is a CTA or call to action. While this sounds simple, prompting people to check out your product or service is psychologically more likely to trigger clicks.

Conversions Come from Experimentation

Trial and error will play an influential role in your Facebook marketing experience when you’re just starting and don’t have expansive custom audiences to draw from. However, if done right, the process of building experience can be a rewarding endeavor.

To find the marketing strategy most suited for your business, you’ll have to experiment with ads, so you can use analytics to determine what works most effectively for your company’s sales quota. 

Ultimately, there’s no universal solution that works for all businesses. Given that, you’ve got to find a strategy that best fits your goals.

Final Thoughts

If you’re just getting your feet wet in Facebook marketing, keep going. Facebook marketing is relatively cost-effective and has amazing tools B2B campaigns need to be successful.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a B2B or B2C business. Either way, Facebook is a valuable asset to important marketing elements such as increasing brand awareness and generating leads.

FAQ’s

Here are some commonly asked questions about B2B Facebook ads from around the web.