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Facebook has become one of the most powerful tools in B2B marketing. With over 2.9 billion monthly active users, Facebook offers businesses a massive opportunity to connect with B2B decision-makers. Anything with that many monthly users is worth pursuing for your brand. It provides a huge opportunity to drive relevance, making it a worthy channel in your marketing mix.
But Facebook isn’t easily impressed. It takes a lot more than simply starting a Facebook business page, posting random content, and hoping for connections to grow organically.
You need to understand the platform to get the most out of your Facebook B2B marketing strategy. You need to be sincere and intentional with your content. You need to be aware of your target audience and cater to their needs.
At every step of the process, it’s essential to create something helpful. It’s all about adding value for your potential clients while building up your reputation and credibility. It helps to interact with users as much as possible, creating genuine rapport and trust.
Like most social media platforms, Facebook rewards people who create helpful content, rewarding them with better relevance scores. The higher your relevance score, the more likely your content will be seen. If you’re just putting as much content on your page as possible, think again. The Facebook algorithm will see it as spam, and you’ll do more damage than good.
In this article, we’ll explore how to create a successful Facebook B2B marketing strategy, giving you the tools you need to take your business to the next level.
Facebook B2B Marketing: 4 Steps To Set You Up For Success
1. Create a Facebook Page That Aligns With Your Business
The first step to your B2B Facebook marketing strategy is to start a Facebook page for your company. Remember, this needs to be a business page. If you create a personal page instead, the platform may choose to kick you off, so don’t try that as a way to reach more people.
You should include helpful information on your Facebook page that a potential client could also find on your website. Fill out your profile as thoroughly as possible, adding business logos or photos as your profile and cover photos. Since the cover photo stays at the top of your page, there’s an opportunity to add some of your firm’s current marketing copy, like a tagline or a CTA.
Facebook business pages include tons of helpful features for audience engagement, like the ability to interact with other users as a brand by liking their posts. You can also save replies with the response assistant to reuse responses (but be sure to tailor them slightly to each comment so you don’t look like a spam bot).
2. Understanding Your Target Audience
One of the most important aspects of a successful B2B marketing strategy on Facebook is understanding your target audience. With this knowledge, creating content and ads that resonate with potential customers is easier. In order to understand your target audience, you need to gather data about their demographics, interests, and behaviors.
One way to gather data about your target audience is to use Facebook Insights. Facebook Insights provides detailed information about your audience, including their age, gender, location, and interests. You can use this data to create content and ads that are tailored to your audience’s preferences.
Another way to gather data about your target audience is to conduct surveys or interviews. This can be done through email or social media. Surveys and interviews can help you get a better understanding of your audience’s needs and pain points, which can help you create content and ads that address those issues. Ads add a lot more value when they’re framed around a specific problem, highlighting your business or product as the best solution. You want to create that sense of empathy.
3. Complete a Competitor Analysis
Spend some time looking at the Facebook pages of your key competitors. In order to make your business as desirable as possible, you need to understand what else is out there. Make sure your page looks as slick and professional as theirs, and ensure your business description sets you apart.
A large portion of your competitor analysis must focus on content reviews. Unpack the different types of content your competitors share, analyzing how it’s been received by audiences. Make sure you make a note of the different content formats they’ve used.
The top questions to guide your analysis include:
- What is their business description?
- Does their profile clearly explain their product or service?
- What are the different content types that feature most on their feed?
- Is all of their content focused on ads, or are they sharing broader content marketing?
- How often do they post?
- How quickly do they respond to comments?
- Have they created a personality for their business, or have they kept it broad?
Take the time to go through the comments and take a look at other engagement metrics like reactions or shares. You are bound to come across some golden insights that will lead to content pillar opportunities for your own business. Moreover, you’ll see the content types that absolutely flop. That way, you can exclude them from your own strategy from the get-go.
4. Flesh Out Your Content Plan
Now that you’ve identified the content that works for your competitors, you can start to build your own Facebook B2B marketing strategy. Start by exploring core content avenues where you feel you can add value. Often, it helps to unpack the problem you’re looking to solve with your business. Identify 2-3 brand messages you want to land on your Facebook page and frame your content pillars around that.
Start by building a basic content calendar for the upcoming month. Make sure it includes a feature from each content pillar every few days. Planning so far in advance may feel intimidating, but don’t worry. You can always adjust it once you get going. It helps to have a basic structure in place so you can plan internal resources and keep your momentum.
6 Strategies To Optimize Your B2B Facebook Marketing Strategy
1. Experiment with different types of Facebook posts
If you’re just starting out or you’re looking to raise engagement on your Facebook page, experiment with the different types of Facebook posts. That way, you’ll start to understand which ones work best for you.
Audiences and social channels are always evolving so you’ll likely always be in a state of “test and learn”. That’s a good thing! Don’t be afraid to chop and change your strategy. One of the best ways to ensure success is to pursue content types that work, without being afraid to drop them as soon as they stop working. There’s a fine line where predictable content provides comfort and consistency and where it turns to boring and mundane.
Content types worth testing include:
- Educational posts: These are posts that provide valuable information and insights on industry trends, best practices, or how-to guides. Educational posts can help establish a brand as a thought leader and attract potential customers who are looking for information.
- Product updates and announcements: Posting about new products or services, upcoming events, or company news can help keep followers informed and engaged. These posts can also help generate excitement and interest around a brand’s offerings.
- Customer success stories: Sharing success stories of satisfied customers can help build social proof and credibility for a brand. These posts can also help demonstrate the value of a brand’s products or services.
- Behind-the-scenes content: Sharing behind-the-scenes photos or videos of a brand’s team, office, or production process can help humanize a brand and make it more relatable to potential customers.
- Interactive posts: Posting interactive content such as polls, quizzes, or contests can help increase engagement and foster a sense of community around a brand.
- Industry news and commentary: Posting about industry news or commenting on industry developments can help establish a brand as a knowledgeable and engaged player in its field.
- Inspirational posts: Sharing motivational or inspirational quotes or stories can help create a positive association with a brand and build a sense of community around its values.
Content formats worth testing include:
- Video: On Facebook, you can do live videos (an especially good idea if someone in your office was a theater or film major). You can also share previously recorded content. There are tons of different types of videos you could make, so focus on the videos that align with your social media strategy.
- Images: People want to share helpful information, news—or just something cute with their friends and family on Facebook. A helpful infographic or a funny meme with a puppy related to your business can encourage people to share your Facebook content. Just make sure your image posts stay brand-focused, even when you’re aiming for something funny and light.
- Links: If your website already has a blog, Facebook presents a great opportunity to gain more traction for your content by linking to your blog posts. You can also share any other helpful links from your website, or curated links related to your industry that your audience might find interesting.
2. Utilize audience insights to create client personas
Audience personas are imaginary people your team creates with the help of a little research. Your personas reflect different aspects of your typical customers or clients, so you can brainstorm ways to reach this audience and pitch your content to them in a more targeted way.
Facebook helps you accomplish this with its plethora of analytics features called Audience Insights. While Audience Insights is part of Facebook Ads, you don’t have to pay anything to use these features. Insights provide information and concrete data about your audience’s demographics and behaviors.
Use this information to tailor your client persona further and develop new content ideas to drive users to your site.
3. Always interact with your potential clients and customers
One of the most exciting elements of social media platforms is that you can talk to people individually, even if they haven’t purchased anything from you yet. So when someone comments on a post or messages you, you always want to respond.
4. Talk to clients one-on-one with Facebook Messenger
You can use Facebook Messenger, a separate app when on your phone, to talk with members of your audience. If someone has a question about a product or service, they can send you a message. You’ll want to download Messenger on your phone so you can answer their questions quickly and thoroughly.
Plus, a lot of people consider talking on the phone a literal form of torture. With Facebook Messenger, you allow people to ask questions in a way that feels comfortable for them.
(And if they enjoy the experience, they just might post or share about you on their personal Facebook page.)
5. Reply to Facebook comments
Reply to every Facebook comment, no matter what. If a customer says a nice thing about your brand, thank them. And if someone says something you don’t want to hear, address their concern. This will build trust with your audience when they see that you aren’t afraid to tackle a customer complaint online.
From a Facebook B2B marketing perspective, a top tip is to like and follow your client’s content.
Facebook business pages work similarly to personal pages in that you can like and follow other people—and you should be taking advantage of these functionalities. Invest in anyone who comments on your page. Don’t harass them to buy your product or sign up for your services, but take a genuine interest in the content they produce.
This shows them that there are real people behind your business, and they may take a greater interest in what your business can do for them.
6. Stay on Facebook for the long haul
With Facebook, results won’t happen overnight. You need to share consistent, helpful content to grow your page. Don’t rush this by spamming the first person who likes your page’s inbox with coupons or information about your product. Let the people come to you, and engage with them politely when they do.
Maximize your Facebook marketing strategy with Clearview Social
Managing social media sharing for your firm requires a lot of work, so pair with Clearview Social, the employee advocacy pros, to work smarter, not harder.
With Clearview, you can create a content queue. Plus, you can email your employees asking them to share your social media post. Since they can easily share in only one click, your employees will be likelier to amplify your business’s Facebook content by sharing across their personal accounts. And with Clearview’s weekly and monthly analytics reports, you can track your earned media value to understand your Facebook marketing ROI better.
If you want to simplify your Facebook marketing, Get A Free Demo with Clearview Social today to see why our clients said Clearview Social “was like a present” when they got it.