- Holly Smith-Williams
How To Get Results From Facebook™ B2B Ad Campaigns
[In the accent of a cartel gang member]
“You must be crazy man! B2B advertising on Facebook? You ain’t never gonna win.”
You've heard it - you might have even tried it. I bet you failed too, right? Because the world of B2B advertising on Facebook can bring you great riches and grow your business, but if you don't know what you're doing - you may as well kiss your ad spend goodbye.
I ain’t gonna lie - B2B advertising on Facebook is tough. You need to be either an ads genius or a little bit crazy - either way, you need balls of steel and be willing to go all in.
I'm not talking about driving a bit of traffic to your website, or even getting a touch of brand awareness - I'm talking about HARD LEADS. No fluff. I get people who want to do business with you.
These are names, emails and phone numbers. They need your business and are putting their hands up.
You’ve heard the tales of someone spending £5 a day on FB and making a return of £200,000, right? Wrong. Not in the world of B2B!
B2B leads are always going to cost. You have to work out what you are willing to pay per lead and whether that's realistically achievable on Facebook. If you know that you are going to convert 10% of leads into customers and that a customer is worth £3,000 - what will you pay to get a good Return On Investment? I would also say that leads are generally cheaper to acquire on Facebook than they are with Google Adwords.
If you are already using Adwords, you can leverage a mixture of Adwords and Facebook. This is where you will retarget certain website visitors on Facebook - making your Facebook marketing a lot more cost-effective. Even though you will have the main cost still acquiring cold traffic from Google and if you are in an expensive industry/niche, those clicks are going to be pricey.
Another tactic is to start your advertising on LinkedIn and retarget on Facebook. Again, you will have your bulk cost on LinkedIn.
Each client is different, but I will always use direct response copy and test, test, test.
What you think might work for your B2B audience often doesn't. Driving cold traffic on Facebook is not a branding exercise (unless you have the luxury of being a well-known brand already). It's all about identifying the pain and offering a relevant solution.
Once we find a creative winning combo (that will still require time), that's when the nail biting starts.
To get a B2B campaign working well and churning out regular and predictable leads, I will use a combination of campaign objectives and awareness to get the desired results.
My preferred approach is to use a conversion objective with an audience of around 1,000,000 at the Top Of Funnel (TOF). I will then retarget traffic that has viewed but not taken action with a different creative message in a retargeting stack - often interspersed with blog articles to add value.
For a conversion campaign, the event pixel requires 50 triggers per ad set, per week in order for Facebook to properly optimise for the desired action.
This means waiting.
You need to give your campaign at least 7 days before making any decisions - and this is tough in Facebook time.
You may not see much action. Or you may see a flurry of leads pour in, and then - nothing. It's starting to look expensive. There's no consistency. Panic!
This is when most people bail. They get nervous. Their palms start to get a bit sweaty. They haven’t got the balls or the know-how to make it work, so they run away “Facebook doesn’t work”.
I can tell you that you need to wait. Sit on your hands. Don't change a thing. This is what we call waiting until your funnel has cracked. This is when Facebook finds its groove and starts delivering. Leads start getting cheaper and you can now scale your campaign to see more of the same results.
Have you got what it takes?
If you need an expert to start making Facebook ads work for your business, request a FREE strategy call with me and let's talk!
Or find out more about Facebook Lead Generation HERE.