For most B2B marketers, the typical way to think about attracting new prospects is by using some combination of search engine marketing, email outreach and maybe a bit of LinkedIn sprinkled in. While that’s not a bad strategy, there’s one easy way to really ramp it up, and that’s by adding Facebook to the marketing mix.
Wait, what? Isn’t Facebook just for B2C marketers?
While that might have been the case even 12 months ago, that’s no longer true. In fact, Facebook has really been rising in popularity as a B2B marketing tool.
First and foremost, this is because Facebook just has so much more scale than LinkedIn, Just look at the numbers for monthly active users, and you can see the disparity in usage. While LinkedIn has just over 100 million monthly active users, Facebook is now closing in on 1.79 billion monthly active users. This is a huge 10X (or even 20X) difference, a whole order of magnitude larger.
And B2B decision-makers are now on Facebook, so it’s no longer the case that you can brush aside Facebook as just something young millennials are using. You need to be where the decision-makers are, and if they are on Facebook, it means you have to be there.
Secondly, Facebook has remarkably low barriers to entry for B2B marketers. Both small and large advertisers on Facebook can get access to the same suite of products and capabilities, so there’s no excuse not to start experimenting with some of Facebook’s advertising capabilities. It’s easy to put together a Facebook marketing campaign that’s targeted and focused. Moreover, you can tweak the timing of these campaigns to make it very easy to experiment with new messages. If something isn’t working, you can discard it quickly. On the flip side, if something is working, you can really ramp it up.
Over time, Facebook has proven to be considerably more “ad-friendly” than the traditional B2B social media platform, LinkedIn. This, in part, stems from the fact that 95 percent of Facebook revenue now comes from advertising, so the social network is VERY focused on making sure that it’s welcoming to advertisers. For B2B advertisers, that means more ways to integrate their own homegrown data when targeting prospects, new ad formats and new targeting methods.
Finally, Facebook is quickly reinventing itself as a premier video platform, especially with the introduction of Facebook Live (the social platform’s livestreaming option). And, as just about everyone knows now, video is taking over the web right now. If you want to get in front of prospects these days, you have to have some kind of video presence.
So, putting all this together, it means that Facebook just makes so much sense for putting together a B2B marketing campaign. First of all, you get the enormous scale of Facebook’s nearly 2 billion users. Then, you get the low barriers to entry, making it an easy way to ramp up your presence quickly, especially when it comes to highly targeted Facebook advertising. Finally, you get access to one of the web’s foremost video platforms (sorry, YouTube). If your B2B company is not already on Facebook, 2017 may finally be the time to start.
IMAGE: Designed by Freepik
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.