Facebook & B2B – not always an instinctive combination most companies consider
If you work in the B2B world, you probably know your way around Twitter and LinkedIn upside down and blindfolded. But there’s another platform you might be missing out on, so it’s useful to challenge pre-conceptions and go back to basics:
• What platforms do your target audience use?
• What are your objectives for social media?
Let’s consider who uses Facebook:
• In October 2020, there were 45.94 million Facebook users in the United Kingdom (Statista)
• 88% of B2B companies use Facebook (Social Media Examiner)
• LinkedIn is the second-most popular social media platform used by B2B marketers, ranking only behind Facebook. (Statista, 2019)
Your target audiences will be using Facebook just not always for business purposes. So now might be the time to rethink your social media strategy and reflect on the potential benefits of incorporating this channel.
So what objectives would having a Facebook B2B presence achieve?
1. Credibility and Protecting your Brand Reputation
Social media profiles rank in Search Engines, therefore, having a Facebook presence will increase the likelihood of your company being discovered in organic searches – whether that’s your website or social media channels.
Similarly people often search on Facebook to companies and businesses. Not having at least a presence on Facebook may lead to some people questioning your credibility.
Plus, if you have a maintained presence on Facebook, this also gives you an opportunity to actively monitor competitors, as well as support partner businesses and associates.
2. Brand awareness
Having a company presence on Facebook provides an excellent opportunity to increase brand awareness with both consumers and other businesses.
With a significant number of the general population using Facebook regularly this presents an opportunity to highlight your business publicly – without any intermediary. Perhaps this might be an overview of what your business does or more granular and locally focused – your corporate social responsibilities.
Facebook is a very powerful financial marketing tool and used by many Financial Advisers and companies to reach their ultimate customers and clients. This also presents an opportunity B2B businesses to position their Facebook page as a source of credible information and services to support advisers or other clients’ businesses.
3. Increasing engagement
Organic engagement on Facebook is much easier to achieve than on LinkedIn company pages. Significant, appropriate engagement on Facebook as the company, will strengthen relationship with other businesses, foster brand loyalty and provide an opportunity to share more of a personable perspective of the business.
One of the unique elements of Facebook in comparison to other social media channels are Facebook Groups. If created properly, these groups can establish communities of people united by a common purpose. For businesses, this creates an controlled environment where you can support users and/or cross sell or promote products.
Facebook Ads micro targeting
Once a Facebook page is established with quality content and some engagement, you can then have the world of Facebook Advertising at your fingertips.
Facebook’s micro-targeting features will allow you to reach your exact target audience. Using Facebook ads businesses can get their messages in front of the people who are most likely to want your products or services.
Targeting options include:
• Demographics, job titles, behaviours, interests.
• Using existing customer email marketing lists (with permission, of course)
By installing the Facebook Pixel on your website you can take targeted advertising to the next level – providing a guaranteed way of reaching a much warmer audience. Adding this simple piece of code means it is possible to retarget users who have visited your website and / or taken a specific action. For example, you could retarget people who have registered for a webinar or event.
Similarly this will allow you to then create “lookalike audiences” where Facebook identifies people similar to existing followers / clients. All of this means you not only have highly sophisticated targeting but also ensure you get the best value out of your advertising spend.
So going back to our rationale: if your target audience are on Facebook and you want to create brand awareness, foster engagement with your business and have a targeted way of using social ads – then without any doubt, you should have a presence on Facebook!
If you want to know how to transfer your marketing strategy across to Facebook and establish a content planner – get in touch, we’d love to help.