Tips For Running LinkedIn And Facebook Ads As A B2B Company

Tips for running ads on Facebook and LinkedIn for B2B

Introduction to social media marketing

A few years ago, nobody would imagine that social media would have any significance in business. Social media remains to be an interactive medium that no business can ignore.

Social media doubles as a platform for sharing and conversation. Despite the fact that social media started as somewhere where uses could keep in touch with one another despite their location and distance, it has become a great medium for employees, investors, customers, and professionals to connect and communicate with one another.

With such a platform, social media marketing becomes a great strategy that any marker can embrace and reap enormous results.

Social media plays a significant role in the distribution of B2B content. The growth in the number of internet and social media users in the past years is an indication of the worth of social media in modern marketing.

According to Statista, there has been a significant increase in the number of social media users around the globe from 2010 to 2016. If the past statistics are something to go by, it is estimated that there will be over 3.02 billion users by 2021 as shown in the chat above.

There is an increase in the rate of social network penetration globally.

For instance 71% of the internet users in 2017 were social network users and it is expected that that number will continue to rise. A year back, in 2016, LinkedIn users increased by over 19 million, from 414 to 433 million users.

According to recent research, 59% of Twitter users access social media platforms for consuming news content. With the growth of social media, in terms of content consumption, and base size, as a B2B company, you have a large customer-base to target.

So what can you do with the increased number of social media users?

Having a large social media user base is one thing, and succeeding from it is another. If you do not understand the potential of the growth in social media users, it can be a task to achieve any significant results with social media marketing.

Apart from social media helping you connect with your ideal audience, it can assist you:

Create awareness of the services and products that you are offering.
Generate qualified leads via the connections you build, as well as help you speed up the leads generation process through promotions and events.
Attract visitors to your company’s website, or any other online sites you may have.
Build and maintain a strong relationship with your existing customers and the prospects. This helps not only in improving your products or services but also in getting more information about your customers and prospects.
Office direct advice and services to your target audience, as well as get reliable feedback from them. Such an approach is useful in tracking your business’ success.
To reach a large number of social media users, as your audience can share your content with their friends, connections, and followers via diverse media platforms.

What it takes to succeed in social media marketing

Probably, you already know that it social media advertising has many benefits and it is a significant part of the B2B content marketing process. In spite of this, you may not know, or have the time to create an ad content that improves the performance of your marketing campaigns. You need experts in social media marketing to help you with all your ads and that is where we come in – we will use several tried-and-tested approaches to help you have positive results with your next campaigns.

Irrespective of the large social media user base, it is not given that you will succeed in B2B social media marketing. This is attributable to the fact that the medium is a bit disorganized – you will have to put all the right pieces together.

You will need to:

Have an actionable strategy. The right social media strategy should focus on reaching the appropriate audience and have the ability to align with your marketing needs.
Understand what social media platforms to target
Have a clear marketing plan for each of the social media platforms you decide to use

Social media platforms to target

Many individuals have turned to the online route – some to market their products and services, and others to search for products and services that solve their current problems. With such a scenario, any properly designed social media campaign is likely to have significant reach, especially if targeted appropriately.

You can use a variety of social media platforms for advertising such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+, among others. In this post, we focus on how to run LinkedIn Ads and Facebook Ads successfully and profitably.

LinkedIn has slowly become a spearhead in B2B marketing. Regardless of the scale of your business, you can achieve great results with LinkedIn marketing. HubSpot carried out a research and found out that the average LinkedIn B2B marketer in the U.S drives a conversion rate of 6.1% through LinkedIn Ads. Such is a high rate in comparison to other marketing approaches such as the use of Google AdWords whose average conversion rate is about 2.58%. On a global scale, LinkedIn ads have a 9% conversion rate. LinkedIn success in B2B marketing is attributable to its efficiency and precision in targeting making it possible to acquire qualified leads.

Why use LinkedIn Ads

There are concerns among a large number of B2B marketers regarding the role of social media in lead generation. The recent changes in Twitter and Facebook’s algorithm have affected the rate of organic reach of social media posts on these platforms. Such changes should not be a call of stress, leveraging media platforms such as LinkedIn appropriately can offer you great results in terms of leads generation and in driving traffic.

What are the other benefits of using LinkedIn for your social media marketing?

LinkedIn is one of the largest social media platforms with a business focus. While not everyone may be here, at least about 560 million of them are, and this is a large number of business professionals to target. With the appropriate marketing approach, you can gain a significant share of the users here.
LinkedIn has a high percentage of active users: LinkedIn has more than 433 million users registered on this platform. According to past statistics, every second two new members join the site. An estimated number of 106 million unique users access the site on a monthly basis. Each day over 40% of the users of LinkedIn visit the platform.
A wide variety of tools that make your marketing easy: LinkedIn offers you useful and refined tools that you can use to improve your success rate in building your network, and advertising, in general.

For example, you get access to premium apps that make it easy to connect with the appropriate audience. Second, the platform has low chances of spam hence, you are assured of interacting with the right category of individuals. In addition, with LinkedIn, you can show and share rich content, such as videos regardless of the device you are using since it has better mobile apps and slicker desktop apps.

Connect with companies’ decision makers: LinkedIn offers a platform where B2B companies can access decision makers, opinion leaders, and senior level influencers in any company easily. It has an estimated number of 40 million decision-makers, 10 million opinion leaders, and 61 million senior-level influencers. The implication is that, unlike other channels of marketing, the sales process when using LinkedIn is much smaller and faster. You do not have to keep waiting to be connected with individuals who can decide whether your offers serve the customers’ needs.

Types of LinkedIn Ads

Whether you are targeting influencers or executives, LinkedIn makes this quite easy with its different types of Ads:

LinkedIn Advertising Partner Solutions
Self-service ads

The self-service ads are a do-it-yourself option of creating ads on LinkedIn. It allows you to dig deep into the campaign manager and create an ad all by yourself. You can comfortably schedule campaigns, target your audience, and get statistics on the number of clicks on your ads. Nevertheless, it takes much experience and expertise to create a self-service ad.

LinkedIn Text Ads

LinkedIn text ads resemble the Bing or Google search ads. With these, you can create ads with images, descriptions, and killer headline to entice users to your website or company page. The LinkedIn text ads are available on the desktop at the right rail of the news feed. They are great for use in B2B marketing in that they draw users’ attention.

Some benefits of using the LinkedIn text ads include:

It is easy, and fast to start with the text ads
You can work with a budget of your choice
There are B2B filters which make it easy for you to choose the appropriate audience for your products or services
You can track the success rate of the ads
You have the option of using the model that you prefer – cost-per-thousands impressions, or cost-per-click.

Video Ads

Video ads combine motion, sound, and sight to describe products and services, and in storytelling. People are likely to relate much well with sensible video ads. Over the years, there has been a change in the approach to how people consume different types of content. A lot of inclination is seen in the way people consume video content. A research by Cisco indicated a likelihood that over 82% of the internet traffic in the years to come will be from video. The implication is that more businesses are likely to spend a lot on video ads as shown below.

The fact that the expenditure on video ads by 2021 will be around $22.18 billion according to the eMarketer means a lot for B2B marketing. It is an indication that video is an overarching aspect of consumer brands. In addition, it implies that there is a demand for video consumption within the B2B segment.

As such, you can take advantage of the LinkedIn’s video ads to jump onto the bandwagon. With these ads, you distinguish your brand while at the same time creating more awareness in an approach that interests most customers and prospects.

LinkedIn Display Ads

LinkedIn Display Ads offers you a great platform to reach your target audience especially for an environment that is not cluttered. These types of ads are suitable because they can combine different media such as images, text, videos, and audio. With such an approach, it becomes easy to deliver your ads to your exact audience, earlier within the buying circle.

Often, LinkedIn Display Ads stand out for use in strengthening your brand, reaching out more leads (influencers, decision-makers, and professionals), creating more eye-catching and interactive ads, and ensuring that your ads appear more on LinkedIn pages.

Dynamic ads

Dynamic ads offer you an appropriate way of showing customized content dynamically based on the activities of your audience. For example, if your ad falls under job search and related activities, through dynamic ads, your ad will be shown to users looking for jobs within your industry.

Dynamic ads offer you a great platform to build relationships and deliver messages that matter to your customers and prospects.

These type of ads capture users’ details hence, are a suitable approach to drive additional traffic to your company website, or even a landing page. You can use these ads to make people see your landing page, receive more responses on your messages, decide who sees your ads, and customize your call-to-actions, as well as get increased company page’s traffic.

While there are diverse LinkedIn ads that you can use to get outstanding results in your marketing efforts, it requires an expert in B2B LinkedIn marketing, as there is much that needs to be done to ensure that your ads serve the right purpose.

Working with us saves you the need to worry about the success of your LinkedIn ads campaign as we know what it takes to create and run a successful social media campaign.

LinkedIn Advertising: A Systematic Guide

Advertising on LinkedIn requires you to have an account and a company page. While, getting started with LinkedIn advertising appears to be easy, it requires you to know what it takes. Here is an overview of the things you need to advertise in LinkedIn successfully.

Create a campaign manager account: This platform allows you the option of managing and optimizing all your LinkedIn ads. It comes with useful features like dynamic visual reporting, ability to ascertain the demographics of your ads’ clicks, the capacity to evaluate the performance of your campaigns.

Decide on which type of ad to use: It is advisable to combine sponsored InMails, Text Ads, and Sponsored content in your campaign – it allows for maximum reach and impact.

Design the ad: A lot of creativity is needed here especially when it comes to the images you use, the headlines, and the ads’ copy.
Ad targeting: This step allows you to choose your audience. You can target your ad based on aspects such as people’s skills, job functions, school names, company, and location.
Create a budget and schedule for the ad: Here, you decide the model and how much money you are willing to spend on your ad. You can choose to use the cost per send especially on Sponsored InMails where you are charged when the messages are received. Another option is the cost per impression where you are charged when your message is viewed. Alternatively, you can opt for the cost per click model.
Measure the metrics of the ad, and refine it where possible: you can rely on clicks, impressions as well as amount spent in measuring your campaigns. In addition, the level of interaction with your content is a great way of measuring the success rate of your ads.

The figure below is an example of an ad campaign representation showing the number of impressions, clicks, social actions, and amount spent.

How to make your LinkedIn ads work well

There is much difference between the creation and running of LinkedIn ads and getting the most out of the ads.

Here are a few LinkedIn ads best practices to help you achieve the best from your ads campaign:

Facebook Ads

Facebook is known to be a great resource for B2C marketing. However, any B2C marketer can use this exceptional tool for brand awareness, as well as for prospects’ engagement. In addition, Facebook offers a great platform where you can find fresh customers, give them promotions, as well as offer exceptional remarketing creative hoping to incite affordable conversions. In spite of this, for multi-touch B2B marketers, the skeptics remain, especially for the case of industries that have sales cycles extending past a few months, or even those with a niche clientele.

If you are one of those B2B marketers holding on to the belief that Facebook, which is the world’s most popular social media platform, translates to an echo of the chamber for just social news, you need to think again, as you are losing great business growth opportunities. With the appropriate knowledge of the fundamental components of B2B Facebook advertising, you can successfully land the right prospects, as well as achieve your campaign goals with ease. However, it takes much expertise and experience to achieve this, but you do not have to fret since we will help you create a Facebook ad campaign that will yield positive results.

Types of Facebook Ads

With Facebook Ads, you will achieve any of the types of objectives for your campaign including brand awareness, consideration, or conversion.

The awareness objectives focus on building the awareness of your brand, or even increasing its reach.
The consideration objectives aim at boosting traffic to your website, boosting the rate of engagement, and encouraging communication through Facebook Messenger, lead generation, video views, or apps installations.
Conversion objectives: the focus here is to create online conversions, make catalog sales, or even drive foot traffic.
Audience considerations: Facebook has a high popularity among people of different demographics and this makes it easy to target your ads.

Facebook offers you different types of Ads that you can use including:

Photo ads
Video ads
Carousel ads
Slideshow ads
Collection ads
Messenger ads
Lead ads

With Facebook ads, you have:

The capacity of sending all your contacts direct to your CRM
Leveraging all the available text space
Monitoring your relevance score

Facebook audience targeting

Despite the fact that Facebooks are cost effective, and a great way to create awareness for your brand, a majority of small business owners (62%) reportedly are not reaching their target as they hope. Such statistic can be attributed to lack of proper audience targeting but

Facebook ads have the potential of reaching millions of people in different parts of the world. Even though it can be quite tasking, at the initial stages, getting the hang of things, it is worth all the effort once you manage it.

When creating any Facebook ads, you should focus on ensuring that you understand your audience, and create an appealing ad copy. Effective identification of your audience affects the cost of the ads, your return on investment, as well as the effectiveness of the ad in general. It is worth spending a little time to have an accurate definition of your targeted audience.

Facebook offers you a few traits to help you in defining your target audience, such as gender, age, location, language, interests, behaviors, life events, education, job title, income, and political affiliation.

Narrowing your audience based on such traits offers you a high probability of reaching the right audience and increases your probability of getting results, as opposed to a case where you show the ads to just anyone.

How to create an outstanding ad copy

Just like any other type of advertising, your Facebook ad should be creative and quality, if you are to achieve a high return on investment. How then do you create such an ad? Learning the art of persuasion is important in advertising. According to Rober Ciadini, the ability of a marketer to convince, and convert any audience depends on the six unique principles including reciprocation, social proof, commitment and consistency, scarcity, authority, and liking.

Using such principles can help you create a Facebook ad that not only grabs the reader’s attention but also persuades him or her to click the ad.

You can achieve this by focusing on:

Your headlines – make them memorable, clear, short, and precise.
Placement - make sure that the ad is optimized
Images – your imagery should be eye-catching and vibrant
Value proposition – your readers need to see what is unique in your offers, products, or service.
Call to action – your CTA should be action-oriented; use clear verbs that aim at driving action

Study your competition

You need to understand who your competition is, and what they are doing when planning on any ad campaign. You do not want a case where you are creating similar ads, or ads that everybody sees often. You need to be different and this is only possible if you understand your competitors including what they are offering – it offers options of outdoing them.

Track your ads

Creating an ad campaign that you cannot measure is a waste of time – how will you know whether it is successful or not. For this reason, make sure that you track all your ads; it is necessary for improvement purpose.

We can make Facebook ads work for you;

In spite of the fact that Facebook ads are cost-effective, not many B2B companies are leveraging their worth. In addition, the majority of the individuals do not know how to tweak such ads to their advantage, by targeting the right audience, creating quality and creative ads, or even outdoing their competition.

We have a solid understanding of how Facebook works, the diverse types of ads that can work for your case, and with a few optimization strategies, you can rest assured of Facebook ads that engage, create awareness, generate leads, and improve your ROI.

Bottom Line

Succeeding in Facebook and LinkedIn advertising for B2B requires an effective combination of the right strategy, plan, a clear understanding of both platforms and your prospects. In addition, it takes much experience and expertise to run successful B2B social media ads. We got you covered - We have experience creating successful LinkedIn and Facebook Ads for B2B companies in different sectors.

We, therefore, understand what it takes to create a winning ad campaign. We will help you come up with clear objectives, define your audience appropriate, and format the ad in a way that helps you grab your prospects’ interests and convinces them to take action.