Creating Facebook Marketing Strategy for B2B Business | OneIMS

As a B2B marketer, you must already know that digital marketing has become as crucial as traditional marketing in today’s world. And an essential part of digital marketing is social media marketing.

With a proper social media marketing strategy in place, any business is likely to succeed. And, this is especially true when it comes to the king of all social media sites aka Facebook.

With over 2.6 billion users worldwide and each user spending an average of 60 minutes per day, Facebook is the goldmine for social media marketing for businesses.

There is a misconception regarding Facebook marketing, that it is mainly for B2C businesses and hence B2B businesses cannot benefit much from Facebook marketing strategies. But that cannot be further from the truth, since in a study it was found out that business decision-makers spend a whopping 74% more time on Facebook than the average person. ‘

This can only mean one thing – your prospects are looking for you.

No matter which businesses you are targeting as your prospects – they are on Facebook and you should be too. Having an effective Facebook B2B marketing strategy is essential in this regard since it’ll help your prospect find you and transform your leads into revenue.

READ THIS: Why B2B Businesses Should Use Social Media Marketing

A water-tight Facebook B2B marketing strategy can help you reach a wider audience base, align with other B2B businesses, drive traffic directly to your website, keep the existing audience engaged, raise awareness regarding your brand, create a space for client interactions and discussions through multiple forms of engagement, track your growth and overall performance, study your competitors, and implement full funnel targeting. These are just some of the benefits you can reap as a successful B2B marketer on Facebook.

All you need to do is get yourself introduced to some ingenious Facebook marketing strategies.

OneIms is here to help you with that and we are going to discuss in this article how you can build an effective Facebook B2B marketing strategy.

Step 1: Set-up an Optimized Facebook Page

This might seem quite arbitrary and maybe even unnecessary since most B2B businesses already have a Facebook page, but that’s where people usually go wrong. There is a difference between having a Facebook page and having one that is optimized for your B2B business needs.

It is essential to remember that Facebook marketing isn’t just setting up a page, but it starts with it. If you have set-up your business page inaccurately, no Facebook B2B marketing strategy would prove as useful as it could with a correctly set page.

So, without delay, let us get into some basics of a B2B business Facebook page that you can implement while setting up your own page, or make the necessary adjustments in case you have a page set up already.

• Use a page name, username, and URL that are keyword-oriented, and ideally reflects the work that your company does. For example, an automobile manufacturing business should have the words “automobile” and/or “manufacturer” in their Facebook page name. If the company is named say “Roadworks” then the Facebook page should be called something like “Roadworks – Automobile Manufacturer”.
• Make sure you choose an iconic image for your profile picture, like your company logo, since it will be the first image that your page is identified with. This icon should be consistent across all your social media platforms.
• The cover picture needs to be visually attractive as well as reflective of the services/products you provide. Don’t pick anything too cluttered or confusing. Like, an electricity supplier’s Facebook page could have a cover picture of an aesthetically pleasing, well-lit office space.
• Keep your page description succinct, convincing, and unique to your brand image, since this will appear both in search results and on your page. A B2B business should write something that immediately shouts “value” to the prospect.
• Make sure your page tabs are organized according to the buyer’s priority. A prospect who is curious about the services you provide has no use landing up on your “about us” tab, reading about your backstory.
• Use the call-to-action (CTA) feature that Facebook provides, wisely. If you think your prospect is likely to be curious about certain products or services you can add a “send message” or “learn more” button. Alternatively, you can add the “visit website” or “buy now” button if you want to lead them directly into the buying process.
• Crosslinking is important. Make sure you have linked your page to your other social media sites, email signatures, newsletters, and website.
• Set up appropriate page roles depending on how much access each employee in your marketing team has based on their role. This way you can easily delegate tasks and oversee what your employees are doing without any security issues.
• Lastly, get your page verified with the grey badge that proves the authenticity and authority of your organization and can have a great impact on the consumer’s trust factor. Although this can be quite difficult and not a must by any means, it is advisable to keep it on the vision board for the future, since it makes your business twice more attractive to the visitor.

Remember, that a well-optimized Facebook business page is easily navigable, reliable, and more likely to attract new leads. Once they end up visiting your page, it is the quality of your page that is going to convince them to stay. So, pay special attention to the points listed above.

With a well set up page, we are now ready to look at some key Facebook marketing strategies for B2B businesses.

YOU CAN’T MISS THIS: The Secrets to Facebook Ads: How to Create Outstanding Campaigns

Step 2: Target Your Audience

After you have successfully set up your business page, the next most important step is to decide on a target audience.

This is the single most important factor in every future action you would take vis-a-vis your Facebook B2B marketing strategy, from content posting to advertisements. Knowing who you are trying to speak to is important in deciding what you are going to speak about.

What would make you stand out from the B2C crowd as well as your competitors, is the ability to chalk out the persona of your audience with certain key characteristics that would help you pinpoint them across the globe.

Let us take a look at each of these characteristics and discuss how you can use them to your advantage for Facebook marketing.

• Geographical Niche – This applies if you’re a local business selling to other local businesses. This is a crucial point in targeting a niche audience as it not only narrows down your search for prospects but also decreases competition with other similar businesses operating in other geographical locations. Deciding on where your prospect operates, can greatly influence the language and tactics you can use to reel them into your marketing funnel.
• Interest Industry – Facebook provides a detailed list of industry types to choose from under the “work” section of demographics. This is where you can afford to expand your target market by selecting multiple industries.

However, that is only if your product/service has the flexibility to perform across different industries. For example, a software company that sells account management systems should target multiple industry types where businesses would require software to manage their accounts. But if this same company specializes in manufacturing account management software for only the hotel management industry, then targeting any other type of industry would be fruitless.

• Office Type – Under the demographics section, you can also select the office types you are trying to target. From small businesses to large global industries, Facebook offers the choice of selecting the size of your target company. This is not a place to get over-ambitious and bite off more than you can chew. Only select the size of businesses that you are confident you can serve. This again is great for narrowing down your target audience.
• Job Title – As a B2B business, it is obvious that you are targeting business decision-makers, but even among them there are several job titles.

People placed at different positions within a company are going to make these decisions. For a small company, the CEO is likely to make the buying decisions, but that is not the case for a large multinational company that is going to have its own procurement team which works in collaboration with other departments, to reach a buying decision.

Hence it is important to research the kind of companies you are trying to sell to and pinpoint the job titles of those people who are inevitably going to be involved in the decision-making process. This can be quite a laborious process but it yields great results in terms of narrowing down your target and personalizing your marketing approach.

• Purchase History – Tracking the purchase behavior of your audience is a great Facebook B2B marketing strategy for targeting new audiences. You can easily access this feature if you explore the work demographics offered by Facebook. People who have purchased products and services like yours in the past would obviously be more gullible to your marketing approaches and hence more likely to generate revenue for your company.
• Existing Prospects – This one is probably the easiest and most sure-shot way of targeting a new audience. You just need to find the prospects of your competitors and other industry operators where your leads are most likely to be. These are typically people who follow B2B business pages and events within your niche and engage with the content. These are industry prospects and hence would be the easiest to convert into clients.

It probably goes without saying that you don’t need to get those people interested who are already interested – you just need to convince them regarding your brand. That essentially means, half the work is already done when you’re targeting existing prospects.

Targeting your audience doesn’t only mean growth and expansion in the client base. It also means that you know your client well and that you understand what their company needs, which is a key point in developing a Facebook B2B marketing strategy. If they feel seen and understood as a business, it is highly likely that they would choose your products and services over others.

Step 3: Post Quality Content

With over 91% B2B marketers using content marketing today, your page content becomes everything when it comes to lead generation, audience retention, and revenue production. An essential element of a well-optimized Facebook page for B2B businesses is the kind of content they put out. Your audience is going to decide whether to stay or leave based on what they think of the content you feed them. Reliable content that provides value reflects well on the kind of company you are.

Planning a well-balanced content mix becomes important here. Two popular content mixing rules for B2B businesses that you can follow for best results are given below.

1. The Social Media Rule of Thirds – According to this rule one-third of your posts should focus on sharing ideas from like-minded companies within your industry; sharing stories to interact with followers and build a trustworthy professional relationship with your audience, and promoting your products and services respectively.
2. The 80-20 Rule – In this kind of content mix, 80% of your content is directed towards intriguing, educating, and engaging your audience and the rest 20% is meant to promote your brand.

With a good ratio of content that provides value vs. content that drives revenue, your basic Facebook B2B marketing strategy is all set. Now we need to take a look at some tips which are going to further enhance how your posts perform in the B2B content market.

• Use visuals that attract the eye of the audience and they go on to read the rest of the post.
• Make sure you are posting effective content that is aligned with your buyer’s needs. You can determine this from the demographic details of your audience that Facebook provides.
• It is advisable for a small business page not to post all too frequently and overwhelm the audience. The bigger your page is, the more engagement you will get from each post and the higher will be your click rate. On average, posting 2-3 times a week should be more than enough for a small to medium-sized business page.
• Post at a time of the day when your prospect is likely to be online as well as in the office, making executive decisions. This could be between 1-4 pm on weekdays. Avoid weekends if possible. You can also use Facebook analytics to check when your viewers are usually most active.
• Once in a while, you can take a survey on your page to find out ways of improving the viewers’ experience.
• Keep an eye on what kind of content your competitors are creating that is performing well. You can replicate the format and personalize it according to your brand.
• Post engaging content that compels your audience to ask questions. Also, make sure to post creative and insightful content that touches your audience on both emotional and intellectual levels and makes them more likely to share it.
• Analyze the post insights offered by Facebook to understand which kind of posts perform better, see where your traffic comes from, and what their demographics are.
• Make sure you are using the relevant keywords in the content you are posting. This not only helps your post rank better on Facebook search results but also indicates to your ideal prospect that they are in the right place.
• You can create a content map to keep a track of your goals while planning content.

Step 4: Use Facebook Ads

Since the Facebook algorithm prioritizes posts from the person’s friends list over that of business pages, you would notice that the organic traffic rate to your page is significantly low at all times. This is true even for pages with large followings.

The reason is, as important as the previous steps are, they don’t drive traffic to your page. Having a well-optimized page, targeting an audience, and planning a content mix would help you retain leads once they’re already there, but it is Facebook ads that would get new prospects to visit your page.

Facebook ads are the ace of all Facebook marketing strategies that do wonders for your conversion rates, marketing budget, and return on investment.

Facebook offers several ad campaigns but not all of them are useful for B2B businesses. Hence, as a B2B marketer, it is in your best interest to know which kind of ad campaigns would take your Facebook advertising to the next level.

• Brand Awareness Campaigns – These campaigns are supposed to pull prospects to the top of your marketing funnel. The end goal of brand awareness campaigns is to pique prospects’ interest and make them curious about your brand. Make sure you set a broad audience base for this campaign.
• Traffic Campaigns – These campaigns drive traffic either to your Facebook page or your website. Traffic campaigns can generate revenue, so it is important that you narrow down your marketing list based on particular demographic, psychographic, and industry profiles.
• Lead Generation Campaigns – Facebook lead ads allow companies to accumulate important contact information from prospects directly from their Facebook profiles, without them having to manually insert the same into some questionnaire or form on your website. This information can be used to build email lists, add prospects to your email marketing program, or direct the leads over to the sales team.

RELATED READ: Facebook Leads Ads: How to Acquire Perfect Facebook Leads

• Conversion Campaigns – As the name suggests, conversion campaigns convert leads into clients. These are usually the most expensive ad campaigns and should not be used for lead generation or page visits. Conversion campaigns should be highly targeted towards getting specific prospects to sign up for a trial or demo, or purchase a product or service.

Apart from ad campaigns, there are several other factors that would influence your Facebook advertising game. In the long run, these are the factors that are truly going to make or break your ad campaigns. Knowing certain tips and tricks to further enhance your Facebook B2B marketing strategy can’t hurt. So, let us take a look.

• Budget – You can either set a daily or long-term budget for your ad sets. Setting up a small daily budget is advisable for early-stage B2B clients as it offers a scope for experimentation and revaluation. However, for more experienced B2B marketers, a long-term budget can work too.

RELATED: Facebook Leads Ads: The Practical Guide to Facebook Lead Ads to Grow Your B2B Sales

What you can do for starters is set a relatively short start to end period to see how your ads are doing, before you blow through your entire budget on fruitless Facebook ad campaigns.

• Scheduling – Instead of running ads all the time, it is better to select the option of running ads on a schedule based on the viewers’ time zone. This feature is an added bonus of using Facebook marketing. Since Facebook determines when is the best time for your target audience to see your ad, this is an extremely reliable feature that is only going to make your life easier.
• Ad Placements – Where your ads are placed plays a crucial role in deciding how many people it is going to reach. If you select “automatic placements” chances are your ads are going to show up in obscure corners of Facebook where people are unlikely to see or interact with them. For B2B marketers it is advisable to choose “edit placements” and select only news feed and right column ads for the highest reach. Other types of ad placements do not have much utility for B2B businesses other than creating brand awareness.
• Audiences – Facebook uses audience-based marketing which means this is the most important focus area in Facebook advertising. You can either create a core audience, custom audience, or lookalike audience. We have already discussed how to create a core audience in step 2.

For B2B marketers, creating a custom audience based on customer profile, website reach, or engagement, is advisable. Lookalike audiences, on the other hand, allow you to create new prospects who are demographically and psychographically similar to your core audience.

Step 5: Automate with Facebook Marketing Tools

The upside to Facebook marketing and advertising is that Facebook offers a load of marketing tools along with the option to use external paid tools, thus taking the labor-intensive manual work out of your marketing efforts.

Automating your Facebook B2B marketing strategy doesn’t just mean less effort on the part of your marketing team, but also more accuracy which comes with removing the human error factor. The tools we are about to discuss would make sure that your Facebook page runs smoothly and you get the most out of your ads with minimal expenditure and high returns.

So, without further ado let’s get into the perks of using some of the best marketing tools for B2B businesses on Facebook.

Facebook Pixel

The Facebook Pixel is really a piece of code placed on your website that helps you improve all types of on-site and page actions by optimizing ads, tracking conversions from Facebook ads, building targeted audiences for future ads, and remarketing to people who have already visited your website and taken some kind of action.

It places cookies that track users as they visit your website and interact with your Facebook ads. It is an absolutely essential tool in your Facebook B2B marketing strategy as it,

• provides the necessary information required to create better Facebook ads in the future
• helps target your present ads better
• ensures that your ads reach the ideal prospects who are going to take your desired action
• allows you to get better ROI by improving your Facebook ad conversion rate

You should install the Facebook pixel even if you’re not using Facebook ads just yet. Since it starts collecting the data right away, you would have a definite advantage when you create your first Facebook ad as you won’t have to start from scratch, thanks to Facebook pixel.

Facebook Business Manager

The Facebook Business Manager is the place from where you can manage all your page activities related to marketing and advertising. This includes business tools, business assets, and employee access to those assets.

Any B2B business page on Facebook that is likely working with a team and managing multiple pages should be using Facebook Business Manager from day one. It is a blessing in disguise since it helps manage multiple Facebook pages, business assets, and ad accounts, along with other social media accounts and catalogs, all in one place. This tool is an integral part of Facebook B2B marketing strategy, as it:

• eliminates your privacy concerns by separating your business page from your personal profile
• provides central control over multiple Facebook Ad accounts and pages which eases the process of keeping track of your post-performance and advertisements
• gives the option of securely sharing access with multiple people without giving them the ownership of your page or your business assets, while also controlling the extent of access those people have in the first place
• allows you to build custom audiences for multiple ad campaigns in case your agency needs to run ads for multiple clients or target different types of audiences

All in all, it is safe to say that if you have multiple business pages, a marketing team, advertisements in different time zones, or multiple target prospects then Facebook Business Manager is the first tool you should start using as a B2B marketer. It would make your life ten times easier.

RELATED: How to Create a Facebook Business Manager Account & Give Access to Your Advertiser

PostPlanner

PostPlanner is a Facebook app that automates your Facebook page activity. With this tool, page administrators and group administrators can make the most out of their Facebook marketing efforts by planning and scheduling several aspects of their Facebook business page.

With PostPlanner’s help, you can do a month’s worth of work in terms of planning for posts in only a few hours. It is a pocket-friendly tool packed with tons of cool features that can be used directly through Facebook without needing any third-party application. Make sure you are integrating PostPlanner into your Facebook B2B marketing strategy in order to,

• queue your upcoming posts for long periods of time
• target each post to a completely customizable target audience
• post links as images so as to increase your link visibility and get more click-through rate
• automate RSS feed posting
• access unlimited status ideas with the help of PostPlanner status idea engine which will help you to increase engagement and communication
• find the most viral and trending content on the internet based on any keyword, within your B2B niche market
• create lists for different pages and groups where you can share the same content, without needing to do so manually

There is no doubt that PostPlanner would help you beat the Facebook algorithm and get 510% more likes, comments, and followers, which would mean higher conversion rates. The tool’s own website makes the above claim. So, if you want your page growth to skyrocket with the kind of numbers they mentioned, PostPlanner is the perfect tool for your Facebook B2B marketing strategy.

ChatBot

ChatBot allows you to automate the process of audience engagement over Facebook Messenger chat. The ChatBot – Facebook Messenger integration uses an artificial intelligence program that is capable of conversing with your audience, responding to their particular questions and even providing suggestions automatically.  Integrating this simple tool within your Facebook B2B marketing strategy can greatly ease the process of speaking to prospects individually, thus increasing audience reach and engagement. The ChatBot is capable of:

• providing personalized answers to your clients’ questions in real-time
• ensuring client loyalty by providing trustworthy and quick answers that have already been preformulated
• answering technical questions about your products and services in details
• promoting a special offer or link to your desired audience
• configuring programmed questionnaires suited to your varied commercial survey needs
• saving money of having a team performing the above tasks

ChatBot is an essential tool for B2B businesses since as a B2B company you are more likely to have prospects and clients asking some very specific questions regarding the products and services that they are going to invest money in.

It is only natural that they are going to expect some detailed and quick answers to make their decision-making process smoother and faster. Chatbot can take care of this side of the business until you are ready to speak to the clients personally.

Metadata.io

Metadata.io is built by B2B marketers for B2B businesses and recognized as a Facebook marketing partner. It is the first Autonomous Demand Generation platform of its kind which uses a patented AI engine to automate the most crucial yet repetitive tasks in B2B business marketing.

It utilizes multiple data sources to create a database that includes both present and past business attributes of people. This software is made to analyze your company’s ideal customer profile, build up an audience based on targeted buyer persona, manage all aspects of multi-channel campaigns, and provide a detailed account of revenue generation.

Metadata.io is the champion of all Facebook marketing tools for B2B businesses since it allows you to sit back and relax while it,

• matches email addresses with identified prospective clients
• estimates the size of your targeted Facebook audience who can be converted easily
• creates lists of target accounts and personas after discovering your ideal customer profiles based on their Facebook data
• organizes and executes account-based digital advertising campaigns
• ensures that your marketing investments provide ROI and desired results by delivering qualified leads to fuel sales

Needless to say, no other Facebook B2B marketing strategy is as effective for B2B businesses as metadata.io. However, you have to keep in mind that this is quite a costly alternative to more generic marketing tools. But then again, you are getting way more than what you pay for with this tool.

That is about it for now. The tools we have discussed so far are some of the best out there for automating Facebook marketing processes. But you are in no way limited to just these options since there are a lot of other tools you can find which would serve similar purposes while suiting your budget and personalized business requirements. However, this is a good starting point to start exploring the vast market of Facebook automation tools out there.

You Are Ready

The five steps we have discussed in this article are the five basic pillars of Facebook marketing for B2B businesses. If you closely follow the page setup, audience targeting, Facebook advertising, content creating, and automation guidelines, you are likely to see growth and enhanced engagement on Facebook. As an obvious consequence of a better Facebook B2B marketing strategy, your business is going to benefit through increased lead generation, higher conversion rates, revenue production, and return of investment.

Now that you have learned how to create an effective Facebook B2B marketing strategy, you are ready to take the market by storm. If you need any help developing a workable Facebook B2B marketing strategy for your B2B business, do contact our team of social media experts at OneIMS.