How to Build Successful B2B Facebook Campaigns

Let’s face it, building a profitable Facebook campaign is hard. Building a profitable B2B Facebook campaign is even harder.

Fortunately, after building countless B2B Facebook campaigns, I’ve figured out what it takes to create and manage a profitable B2B Facebook campaign. It’s not easy, but the results are definitely worth it.

Setting Up Your B2B Facebook Campaigns

The hardest part of building a campaign seems like it should be the easiest—you need to set up your campaigns.

When it comes to B2B Facebook campaign, everything comes down to how well you know your ideal demographic and audiences: age, sex, likes, job title, company name…it all matters.

With Facebook, you can target to almost a creepy level if you know enough, so learn as much as you can about the companies and clients you would like to target. Look at your current customer base and the best type of customers and duplicate everything you know about that audience.

Once you really know who your target audience is, it’s time to get started. If you have never run B2B Facebook campaigns before, go to business.facebook.com and click on Create Account. Set up a Business Manager account. Within this account, you will need to set up billing and contact info.

Next, set up or connect your business Facebook page to your business settings section of the business manager account account. You can do this in the pages section of the business manager account, on the top right you will see a drop down to either create or connect the page.

While you are doing this, if you had an ads manager account, connect that to your business manager account in the same area. Now, in your Business Manager section, you can click into your ads manager account, this is where you will set up the account.

Creating Your First Campaign

This is where the fun begins and the most important parts begins.

Begin by clicking “Create Campaign”. In here, you will build audiences, ads, set budgets and goals for your campaigns so be ready for these.

Now, follow these steps:

1. First, chose your objective. I typically have found that B2B campaigns do best when set to optimize for “Conversion”, since this typically is a lead from your website for you to contact! If you have another goal in mind, select that.
2. Next, name the Campaign something clear about what you are targeting in this campaign. Now click Continue.
3. In the Ad Set, it’s a good idea to name it based on your ideal audience. For example, if you target 30-55 yr. old Sales Directors of companies over 300+ employees name it something like “30-55 Sales Director, 300+”.
4. Now, if you selected “Conversion” as your goal, select the pixel that you set up on your conversion. Lead is typically the main type of conversion goal. If you haven’t done this, here is a quick guide on how set it up.

Not too bad so far, right?

Setting Up Your Ads

Now for the fun part, where you actually get to create some ads.

1. Since you probably haven’t built any Custom Audiences, don’t worry about choosing an audience for now, just move onto location.”
2. Under location, you can target by geographical location down to street addresses. Select your ideal areas and also exclude areas you want to avoid.
3. Next, select your ideal age range, gender and language. This should match the age range, gender and language you identified in your ideal audience.
4. The next part is very important, add in all targeting based on the audience targeting you created before starting. In here, you can either type in what you want in the search bar or click on “browse”. Under “browse”, you can use all the drop downs next to each section to target people down to very detailed items. Once you begin selecting items, the Suggestions tab will give you additional items you can target. In addition, as you add in the Detailed Targeting you’ll notice the Audience Size on the right side get larger. The potential reach is how large your audience will be. Estimated daily reach is based on your current budget you have, which you can still edit, and tells you how many people you will probably reach each day with ads. I recommend selecting one type of audience setting like job title or company name, etc.
5. Now, you may want to add in some exclusions to narrow the audience. This can be extremely important if you need to define your audiences further. For example, you can now overlay how large the company size is or people who make over $100k.
6. If you notice, there is a checkbox to allow you to expand interests based on Facebook’s suggestions. This typically is a good thing, unless you have a very limited budget. In that case, avoid this option until you can expand.
7. Next, you can connect people who like your Facebook page or other types of interaction with your Facebook.
8. I would now suggest saving this audience, and title it something similar to your Ad Set name reflecting what is in the audience.
9. At this point you have an audience but need to select where you place your ads. B2B world is a little different. I would not suggest putting it on Instagram, except for retargeting ads. I would start by only placing it on Facebook, not Instagram, Audience Network or Messenger. Next to the Facebook placement targeting there is a drop down, Feeds & Instant Articles is the best placement for B2B Facebook campaigns. If your budget allows, you can also do right column placements.
10. Now you can select by device & operating systems if you do have a preference, but typically B2B Facebook campaigns perform best on either computers or all devices.
11. At this point, you set your budget. Your budget is an average per day and typically it will spend every cent of that each day. If you have a defined time period for your campaign, you can also set a lifetime budget. Or, you can set a start and end date if you don’t want it to continue running. This approach is typically used for one time sales, promotions or limited time affairs.
12. Leave the Optimization on the Conversions selection since it will adjust to help get the best conversions for your budget.
13. If you would like you can set a shorter or longer Conversion Window, 7 days is typically okay for B2B campaigns since sometimes it can take a few days to get through your page and them to submit your lead form.
14. Lastly, I would just use the recommended settings on Bid Amount, When you get charged, Ad Scheduling & Delivery Type. Now click Continue.
15. The right type of ad for your business really depends on your business. This would be an entirely different article but I will give suggestions.
    1. For example, a high funnel audience is typically more broad, use brief videos and straight to the point image ads. In general, it’s best to hit on pain points and how your business can solve their issues. For ads like this, it is important to have something compelling and interesting in the first 5 seconds of a video. Not many people watch past that unless it captures their interest.
    2. For remarketing audiences or people who have interacted with your company, you can provide further, in depth ads and videos with more information and details. The video should still be under 2.5 minutes.
    3. For lead nurturing, give in depth information & videos about your solutions.
    4. At all levels, give more compelling images and videos that the people can relate to and connect with.
16. Now hit Place Order. Once you do this, you can then create variants of the ads to test each type. Testing is crucial so test many audiences in different ad sets. You can now add more Ad Sets with different audiences & ads to match your different types of customers, levels of interaction with your company & more.
17. After you’ve started to get clicks on your ads and build some custom audiences, you can go into your audience tab in the top left drop down and build “Lookalike” audiences. These allow you to have Facebook build audiences based on people who look like your customer lists, conversion pixels, people who like your Facebook page and more. Typically these become some of our top audiences.

Now, watch the campaigns closely and shut down what doesn’t work and increase budget on what does work.

Conclusion

When you get right down to it, setting up effective B2B Facebook campaigns is a lot of work, but I’ve seen B2B Facebook campaigns deliver amazing results for my clients.

By the way, if you’d like help setting up a B2B Facebook campaign or want a second set of eyes on an existing campaign, let me know here or in the comments. I’d love to help.

Have you tried creating B2B Facebook campaigns? What was your experience with them?