Turning Up B2B Lead Generation Volume with Facebook Ads

Lead Generation is crucial in B2B marketing. They are a source of prospects, and eventually customers by which businesses can increase revenue and grow. While it might not be obvious because Facebook is not a “business” tool like LinkedIn is, you can still leverage advanced targeting techniques and its 1.86 billion monthly active user base. Because of this, Facebook is one of the most powerful tools to use for B2B Lead Generation in order you increase awareness about your products and grow prospective clients.

However, for that to happen, you must optimize your Facebook Ads for B2B lead gen. You can use following techniques to achieve this goal. Here’s how to go about it.

Track Your Conversions by Installing the Facebook Pixel

A good way to optimize the impact of your ads and eliminate waste in campaigns is tracking the leads you are generating. You can do this by tracking your lead conversion metric using the Facebook Pixel.

It’s pretty straight forward, go to the Facebook Pixel tab in your Ads Manager and click the Create a Pixel. Then, choose a name that best represents your business because you can have only one pixel per ad account.

Setting up General Targeting Options

When setting up B2B Lead Generation campaigns through Facebook, you’ll need to come up with a set of demographics information. This might seem really basic but it’s important to mention because targeting your ads to different industries and geographic locations can impact campaign performance. Even the creative to different segments of your customers might be important, as well as gender of your prospective audience.

Precise Interests and detailed targeting options allow you to further refine your targeting. This is available in the “Audience” section of ad set creation. You can use professional filters like job title, employer, industry, company size, degree level, seniority, among many others to effectively seek out the roles who are most likely to submit a lead or purchase your products or services.

Custom Audiences Based on Existing Lists

Facebook allows you to target specific people with its ad platform. This targeting can enable you to maximize the impact of your ad campaigns by marketing directly to a specified section of your B2B market.

In addition, you may always have people in your existing customer database or a lead list who has not purchased yet. Custom Audiences allows you to target these audiences specifically. A Custom Audience is a Facebook ad audience that you create from an existing list.

To create a custom audience, go to Campaigns and find the Audiences button listed under it. Click on the tab and select Custom Audiences, then Customer List. This function lets you upload a CSV or TXT file list of customer emails you’ve gathered, phone numbers or Facebook user IDs.

Facebook then matches this data with information on user profiles, allowing you to target specific people.

Create Lookalike Audiences to Match Your Ideal B2B Customer Profile

Facebook allows you to create Lookalike Audiences as well. Lookalike Audiences allow you to match a customer profile similar to your Custom Audiences. For example, you can create a Custom Audience of existing customers and the Lookalike Audience will target users who match those same characteristics and would likely have a higher propensity to purchase.

We use lookalike audiences quite a bit in our campaigns to find SMB customers for clients because of the expanded reach it gives us.

Retarget Your Ads For Another Opportunity to Convert

Using retargeting would be a great way to drive up conversion rates and increase lead generation for B2B. Prospective clients can always come across the site via press, SEO or some form of earned media. Putting retargeting campaigns into place help keep your brand top of mind to those people while they are in consideration mode.

You can conveniently install a Facebook retargeting pixel on your site, go to Custom Audience and select “Website Traffic” option. You can target your ads to all people who visited certain pages of your website while excluding others. This targeted marketing can help remind the decision makers the reasons your product makes sense and give them another opportunity to engage with your business.

Using Lead Magnets to Get B2B Leads

In some cases, using a Lead Magnet could be a great option to generate leads from a B2B campaign, leveraging offers, incentives, or a free trial. You can provide high-quality content gated content with the submission of an email address to access it.

Lead Magnets can include things like a webinar, eBooks, white papers, checklists, case studies, guides, etc. They can be used to entice a visitor to engage, without singing up as a customer. Providing a simple email capture or something a little more targeted can be a great way to generate B2B Leads.

Many inbound marketing and sales platforms like HubSpot effectively use lead magnets.useful content as tools to harvests leads for businesses. Their strategy is simple, create something unique or useful; offer it to your audience and get valuable contact information and in return

As an example, here is a recent example of a “A Marketer’s Guide to Snapchat for Business” from HubSpot

Just like Hubspot and Salesforce you’ll want to make it easy for the visitors to download the lead magnet from your landing page.  in exchange of their email address, and if required, their demographic data, phone number etc.

Rather than try to get a lead to buy a service or product, create an ad that promotes an offer of a free trial of your product or something else that they’ll find valuable. This is your lead magnet. And it could be a great way to build your emailing list beyond your current customer base.

Bonus: to effectively reach entirely new prospects with your incentives, target your ads based on people’s work categories or major life events. Navigate to the More Demographics button and select your best demographic-defining options in the popup menu that follows.

Facebook Lead Ads for B2B Lead Generation

You can also use Facebook’s Lead Ads using the ad creation tool, like other ads. Facebook Lead Ads give you the ability to gather information from potential customers just like web lead forms. You can collect information like name, email address, phone number as well as customized questions. (e.g “How much do you spend on advertising monthly?”)

If you want to iterate through lead forms quickly, Facebook Lead Ads are a great way to collect the information without building new landing pages and creating tons of copy. The contact forms appear natively on Facebook and Instagram. You can easily use them to sign people up to newsletters for drip marketing campaigns or in a direct B2B campaign funnel.

I know, this was a ton of information, but, given everything form the ability to target via demographic information, precise interests (e.g. job title), and leveraging lead magnets, Facebook gives you all the necessary tools. You will be able to generate tons of B2B leads, find scale, and do it efficiently. With Lead Ads you can do this even quicker by testing and iterating through forms on Facebook And Instagram natively. With all this, there’s no reason not to build in some of your B2B Lead Generation budget into Facebook.

Have you used Facebook for B2B Lead Generation? If so, would love to hear your ideas in the comments. If your looking for help getting Facebook Advertising for B2B set up, reach out and our team would be glad to help! And, remember to follow Visible Factors on Twitter.