The world’s most remarkable business event, INBOUND 2016 unleashed this week with incredible entertainment, keynotes, networking, training and, of course, new tool releases. This year’s big reveal? Facebook for HubSpot Ads, a new add-on that brings the most popular social network full force into HubSpot’s marketing and advertising platform.
While B2B marketers may not think Facebook Ads coming to HubSpot is a big deal, you may miss a major opportunity to supplement your social media advertising. In this article, I’ll be discussing three major topics that will change how B2B marketers strategize in 2017.
Why B2B Marketers Should Use Facebook
With 1.7 billion active users on Facebook, it is the largest and most popular social network in the world. While some think that Facebook is geared toward consumers, it has added elements and features to its ad platform that make it a great option for B2B marketing. Today’s Facebook is capable of meeting all your B2B marketing goals, such as:
Educate audiences and increase brand awareness
Reach decision makers and build out your contact database
Nurture leads through the sales cycle
Pass leads off to sales the moment they indicate sales readiness
Here are a few more reasons why Facebook is perfect for B2B marketing.
Facebook is a Byway to Mobile Audiences
When people reach for their smartphones on the go, they are launching applications, such as Facebook or Instagram, and not going to Google to surf the web. In fact, one in every five minutes spent on mobile spent on mobile is on Facebook, over half of the monthly users are mobile-only. However, while a majority of users are on mobile, there are fewer mobile Facebook ads being created—which means a perfect opportunity to position your products or services to these individuals.
Facebook is the Best for Content Sharing
In the last few years, Facebook has shifted to a content-sharing platform. User-generated content is on the decline, and the sharing of sponsored content, videos, business articles and news reports is on the rise. Case in point: Facebook beat Google as the traffic source for news last year. These pivotal shifts in user behavior mean significant advantages for B2B marketers, who can use inbound marketing to create and share content that will reach and generate greater brand awareness and leads.
Facebook Connects You with Business Professionals
Facebook’s targeting menu has incorporated employer and job title filters since 2014. But today, there’s more targeting options than ever, including company size, function and industry, to help B2B marketers reach and connect with decision makers. While you may not think that professionals use Facebook, a recent study conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation found that people spend at least one hour of their workday on social media. This gives you an opportunity to reach and engage your B2B target audience while they are at the workplace.
Facebook is a Cost-Effective Ad Platform
True, ad cost will depend on many factors, including what type of ad you run and what your campaign objectives are. But Facebook is famous for having one of the lowest cost per click (CPC) rates, with the average in Q2 2016 settling in around 27 cents for the United States.
How B2B Marketers Should Use Facebook Advertising
We dished out the why. Now for the how. Having a Facebook page isn’t enough, and advertising on the platform allows you to target and reach new audiences without requiring a prior connection. While other PPC platforms are often limited to a few options, Facebook gives advertisers many different advertising products and targeting options. Here are five powerful ways B2B marketers can use Facebook ads:
Use Custom Audiences
Facebook’s Custom Audiences feature allows you to find and target Facebook users based on the email addresses of your existing connections. B2B marketers can cross-match their various lead and customer lists with Facebook’s database and target these people with ads. These ads typically convert at a better rate, because the targeted audience has already shown an interest in your brand, which pre-qualifies them, and enables you to create highly targeted ads to guide them to the next step.
Use Lookalike Audiences
The Lookalike Audiences feature allows you to create a new audience based on the characteristics of your current followers or an uploaded custom audience. For B2B marketers looking to increase brand awareness and generate new quality leads, this option can help you find more people who match your best converting audiences.
Target Based on Job Title
Like LinkedIn, B2B marketers who want to target a particular work category can do so on Facebook. WIth this feature, Facebook allows you to target employers, industries, job titles or even work arrangements (for example, telecommuters).
Retargeting
B2B marketers can retarget individuals who previously visited a specific page (or set of pages) on your website with a Facebook Ad. This is a great way for B2B marketers to nurture leads who showed interest in their products or services, or a particular page on their website, but failed to complete the call-to-action. You will need to add offsite pixel coding to the pages you want to track. When someone visits that page, they will automatically be added to a Custom Audiences list. Use that list to create highly targeted, personalized ads based on their prior behaviors and interests.
How HubSpot Ads Makes Facebook Advertising Easier Than Ever
The folks at HubSpot realized early on that there was a disconnect between the marketing and advertising realms. Click data alone doesn’t illustrate which ads work. Marketers need to know how many leads and customers each ad generated to prove ROI and optimize ad spend. With the addition of Facebook, to go along with Google and LinkedIn, the Hubspot Ads tool will provide marketers a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data to make advertising decisions.