How to make the most of Facebook’s additional B2B targeting options
Back in August 2022, Meta launched additional B2B targeting audience segments globally, enabling B2B marketers to reach key decision-makers across small, medium and enterprise businesses.
With powerful targeting segments combined with the massive scale of Facebook and other Meta apps, advertisers will be able to focus their marketing strategies towards the most suitable demographic of B2B users for their business.
More B2B Marketing Benefits
As we know, driving growth and business transformation is heavily reliant on the ability to reach customers across the digital landscape. Now, with over 200 million businesses and nearly 3 billion people using Meta’s apps daily, B2B marketers have even more efficient tools with which to drive business-to-business engagement.
The new targeting segments will make it much easier for advertisers to establish connections with their most suitable customers using interests, job titles and roles to identify the ideal targets.
New Facebook Ads Targeting Segments Explained
According to the official Meta article on the new B2B segments, the new Facebook audience segments are broken down in the following way:
IT decision-makers: A B2B audience segment that targets ads to people who are IT decision makers based on their job titles.
Business decision-maker titles and interests: A B2B audience segment that targets ads to people who are business decision-makers based on their job titles and interests.
Business decision-makers: A B2B audience segment that targets ads to people who are business decision-makers in engineering/IT, operations, HR, strategy or marketing, based on their job titles.
New active business: Admins of engaged businesses that were created in the last 6, 12 or 24 months. This means you can target your digital marketing at new active businesses, with ads directed at the administrators of engaged businesses created in these timeframes.
What are the sizes of the B2B audiences in the UK?
The below figures are considered of targeting people aged between 18 and 65+ who reside in the United Kingdom, all figures based on estimates.
IT decision maker audience – 13,300 – 15,600
Business decision-maker titles and interests – 31,300 – 36,800
Business decision maker audience – 31,300 – 36,800
New active businesses – 227,300 – 267,400
If you use this targeting criteria alone, you can see the audience numbers are, for the most part, fairly small. Unlike years ago, Facebook’s auction-based bidding system favours broad targeting. Essentially the algorithm should be smart enough to avoid the same set of people and allows for machine learning to seek out the right people.
There are caveats to this. Big audiences generally work well when selling a product or service that has broad appeal. If your product is local/aimed towards a niche market, don’t discount a more specific audience. However, it is important the audience is not too small to ensure it is effective.
As mentioned, Facebook automatically try to find the people likely to get you the result you want to optimise for, so consider combining targeting within your audience group using other relevant targeting criteria.
Will Facebook’s new segments improve my business advertising?
Of course, Facebook is not LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a professional platform for career success and so active users will usually have updated work information.
So, a big part of whether the Facebook update will be a success and mean your ads to get in front of those specific decision makers, depends a lot on what an individual has shared on their personal profile and what Facebook defines as their interests.
We would always advise- be patient and experiment. Then refine and test again. The audience may be hitting the mark, but your messaging may not resonate quite as well as you hoped.
Facebook is already very effective at delivering to B2B audiences and arguably offers better algorithm optimisation and cost efficiency than LinkedIn.
Aside from a wealth of existing B2B targeting demographics and job titles, the platform has features such as use of messenger to allow customers to chat directly with customer service teams for instance, whilst conversion/ lead generation campaigns can be easily administered through Facebook’s robust internal advertising system.
Why is beneficial to target new active businesses?
Having audiences segmented by timeframe means you can further fine-tune your digital strategy to better suit your objectives. Of course, it depends on your service or product. For example, you may be a database marketing company where it is beneficial to get in front of pages admins of newer high- growth businesses, who are looking for contacts to market to.
Like any digital campaign, there are multiple variables, aside from audiences, such as budget, creatives and remarketing strategy, that all play a part in securing success.
Disruptor Media is a digital marketing agency, who help sustainable and challenger brands with powerful and responsible marketing.
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