If you listen to marketing myths, being a B2B marketer is a drag. Sometimes it feels as if we’re bogged down with legacy myths: Content marketing can’t be entertaining; B2B brands can’t have personality; and social media advertising doesn’t work. The good news is, these are just that—myths. Let’s tackle that last one here: Can social media advertising work for B2B and feed the funnel? The answer is yes.
The Great Social Media Platform Debate. When you think about the big three networks, Linked In is perceived to be the most relevant for B2B marketers. However, there is an important fact we’re overlooking when we think about B2B advertising: Our business life and personal life are merging into—just life. That means your customers are open to seeking applicable content wherever they are in the social media sphere—assuming it’s relevant of course.
According to Pew Research, 71% of adults are on Facebook and 28% are on LinkedIn. 70% of the users log into Facebook daily, whereas only 46% are daily users on Twitter and just 13% wake up logging into LinkedIn. It’s really no surprise that many B2B companies we work with are seeing conversion rates increase from social networks other than LinkedIn.
Social Media Advertising Is Changing. If you’ve tried social media advertising before and were disappointed, try it again. There have been big changes over the past year. For example, Facebook and Twitter now have the ability to target job titles, seniority and size of company. With improved targeting and more than 1.4 billion people using Facebook and 316 million using Twitter (as compared with only 97 million on LinkedIn), it’s a good bet that you’ll be able to hit your target market at a lower cost (Statista 2015).
While custom and lookalike audiences aren’t necessarily new, they’re helping B2B advertisers on Facebook target existing customers and find new ones, in ways that few other channels are capable of. Custom audiences allow you to segment existing customers (i.e., whitepaper downloads, expired trials, demo users) in order to hone and focus your message to exactly the right people. Lookalike Audiences lets you upload existing CRM data that represents your best customer and helps you find users with similar online behaviors to target and bring into the funnel.
To top off all of these great changes, the reporting in both Facebook and Twitter has improved dramatically so you have a better understanding of what is and isn’t working. Although you’ll want to make sure that you’re tracking each of your advertising efforts in your preferred analytics platform, the analytics available across many of these platforms offers more insight than ever. Understand your audience and better tailor your ads for higher conversion rates.
Social Media Advertising Impact. With traditionally longer sales cycles in B2B, advertising can feel challenging to track. When you’re trying to justify budget (and build a case) for social media advertising, this can be a huge hurdle. As social media advertising becomes table stakes in the standard digital marketing portfolio, it’s important to come to the table with proven strategies. Here are a few tactics that will help drive success:
• Combine relevant and highly targeted campaigns to build awareness, create interest and illustrate need.
• When your customer is ready to get serious about choosing a vendor, bring them back to your product or service with remarketing to ensure that you’re top-of-mind at the micro-moment that takes them from a browser to a buyer.
• Create content customized to each audience segment to ensure maximum audience engagement.
• Track and measure. Establish what success looks like for your company in conjunction with benchmarks, build out tracking schemas and evaluate success.
• Test, test, test. Try new platforms, try new ad creative, try new tactics (video?). Strict testing methodology and high quality content will lead you to social advertising success.
Finally, it’s important that marketers keep an open mind about social advertising. Ad technology is changing rapidly. Shifting customer behaviors, like increased interest in video and ever-increasing personalization will leave you breathless if you stop trying new things in the market. Keep testing, trying and experimenting with new ad technology. You never know what effort will bring you the next big deal.
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Ian Mackie is director of social advertising at PointIt, one of Seattle’s largest independent search marketing firms. You can reach him at ianm@pointit.com.
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Submit articles for the Social Media Forum to larrycoffman@frontier.com.