Get More B2B Leads With Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising was once the preserve of the consumer marketer.

Now B2B sales and marketing professionals are using advertising on LinkedIn and Facebook to boost their lead flow.

This is for two reasons:

The B2B buyer spends an enormous amount of time on social media for business. Yes that includes Facebook. Over 70% of Facebook users say they use it for professional purposes. I often hear people say Facebook is for personal use and “my buyers will be annoyed if I appear in their news-feed.” The evidence doesn’t support this fear.

Secondly, social media adverts can precisely target your buyer with the minimum of wastage. This is based on deep behavioural and demographic data that you just can’t get anywhere else.

However an incredible 48% of B2B marketers struggle to actually deploy social media advertising campaigns. So, in this blog I am going to focus on how to use Linkedin and Facebook, to boost your lead generation funnel.

Facebook

Facebook now offers a specific Lead Generation Form advert format.

You don’t need to send buyers to a landing page and risk them bouncing, it all happens in Facebook and it’s frictionless.

It works by using an advert to promote a piece of content such as an eBook. The user clicks on the ad but instead of them having to fill in a form it is pre-populated by Facebook. The user simply confirms the information is correct, they receive the content and the contact details are passed over to you via a CSV file or via API to your CRM.

We are currently building a Facebook lead generation funnel for a client and using a range of targeting options. These include:

• Existing customers. You load your customer email address data into Facebook and you can serve up ads to a proportion of them that it recognises.

• Look-a-like audiences. Facebook will analyse your existing customer data and find new people that have similar demographic and behavioural attributes. This means you can scale up your target audience.

• Target accounts. You can target people working at specific companies and/or with specific job titles, allowing you to take an account-based marketing approach.

There also more content like this on my personal blog: inbound consultant

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