Facebook Advertising Tricks for B2B Marketers

Facebook Advertising Tricks for B2B Marketers
by Paul Dunay

If I could offer you a billboard in the middle of Times Square for little to no cost for you to advertise your company would you do it? One of the great things about the Facebook is that it provides you access to a large audience of over 550 Million people worldwide at a very low cost so why not take advantage of it.

After 9 years of Search Engine Marketing – I think it is safe to say any keyword you are going to buy is maxed out when it comes to the Google AdWords auction process. In 2001 when Google AdWords was just announced – I was buying and converting potential prospects into leads for pennies on the dollar with keywords like Globalization, eCommerce, Interactive Marketing (I was in a consulting firm at the time). This is why today on Facebook seems so familiar to me – while the buying process is less about keywords and more about precise targeting – the costs seem awfully familiar.

So let’s go through 3 Tricks to Maximize a Facebook Advertising purchase for B2B Marketers

Trick 1) Place specific Job Titles into the Likes and Interest field. This way anyone who has mentioned their job title in their profile is now a potential recipient of your ad. Go big and go broad with the Job Titles. Facebook doesn’t care how many you put in there; they will go find you the profiles that contain them nonetheless.
Trick 2) Put the 20 top companies you want to target into the Workplaces field. Facebook unlike Google works off of the “or” operand not the “and” operand so you can use this to your advantage by placing as many of the companies you want to target into the Workplaces field and thereby target the employees of all of those firms.
Trick 3) Run your Facebook Ads using Friends of your Page – if you want to widen your fan base why not try targeting friends of the people who already like your Page. If they are friends perhaps they share a common interest and one of those interests could be your company. Best of all when appears; inside the ad it will personally name your friends who already like your Page giving it the credibility and hopefully the “like” ability you are looking for.
There are tons of ways to target folks on Facebook. I have even seen people target down to the single individual level – “NanoTargeting” as it is called. I suggest you get your feet wet with Facebook Ads by building your Fan base on your company Page. This will give you a feeling for how the self service system works and perhaps even try some of the tricks above for your initial ad buy.

Also pay special attention to the metrics that Facebook is providing to you from your advertising buy because you can compile a buyer persona by running an ad for 30 days and a minimal investment. A persona will tell you what their favorite movie was, what their favorite music was, what their favorite TV show was, what their favorite books were, even their average age, gender and marital status. Great stuff to know and great data you can use to refine you next Facebook Advertising buy!

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Mapping Content to the Sales Funnel AND Buyer types

by Paul Dunay

You often hear about the concept of mapping content to the sales funnel (especially in B2B Marketing) but it’s not so common in practice. I will self confess that I have ignored this one for a while. The other version of this is the mapping of content to your buyer types and this too is one I have ignored for a while … until now!

Ok so I took a look at my sales funnel and started to take the content my team produces and map it against the funnel – for simplicity sake I like to use Awareness to Consideration to Purchase as my 3 major stages of the sales funnel.

For Awareness I like to use broadly appealing content that can be shareable (the new KISS as I like to call it – Keep it Shareable Stupid). This would include eBooks, Research, White papers, etc. Not all of these have hooks for gathering download information (that’s just not acceptable these days). We use 2 distinctions – Premium content and Non Premium content – the latter being free and the former being behind a registration page.

For Consideration I like to use more in depth tools like webinars and live/virtual events – derived from the lists of folks who downloaded and have been interacting with us on a particular topic. These are typically better than the broad brush webinars because we can have a real consideration discussion that includes such things as use cases, ROI modeling and even self funding ideas.

And then for Purchase I like to use case studies, customer references, press releases on new wins etc. This gets to the final decision makers desk and helps out the sales force immensely since they can never seem to have enough of these in their toolkit.

So then I flipped to another chart where we started to map the content we create to the buyer types and for simplicity sake I like to use End User, Influencer, and Buyer/Executive as my 3 major buyer types.

What we realized pretty quickly was the content we were using to attract Awareness – was the same content we would use to attract End Users (now I always hope to get an influencer or a buyer in there) but in reality when we look at the leads we are nurturing we are seeing more end users which is ok since we have a ton of end users in the 200,000 customers we have!

For the Influencers – we like to use the same content we have for the consideration stage – webinars, live events, virtual events and so on. Here is where we see more influencers show up to get the detailed info that they need to make a recommendation for a major technology purchase.

And finally for Buyers/Executives – we see we need the same type of content we need for the purchase end of the funnel – since they have the recommendation from the end user and influencer but they need evidence that this is going to work and that they are not the first person to buy which is why case studies, customer references and new win stories really help speed the sales process.

What’s been your experience with mapping content to the sales funnel or buyer types? I would love to know.

“I believe FaceBook is a once in a century communication tool” Paul Dunay

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