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Here’s twenty things I’ve learned from helping 15+ B2B tech companies (from seed stage to post-IPO) scale using paid social:
1. 55% of all Americans use FB or IG every single day of their lives, and we’ve found that includes 55% of decision makers in pretty much every B2B sub-vertical.
2. FB+IG targets best algorithmically. If your market size is too small (Rule of thumb: Under 200k TAM), FB’s customer-finding algorithms don’t work as well.
3. With a small market size/TAM (like you only target senior accountants at large enterprise companies), you can still use FB+IG as a tool to assist your sales team with account based marketing (ABM) tactics, but it’s not a growth driver like it would otherwise be.
4. If you do have a B2B audience with the right TAM, we find that FB performs better than any other growth marketing channel. We've made a chart of most major marketing channels here: https://medium.com/rightpercent/how-do-you-prioritize-marketing-channel-testing-at-a-start-up-b9db2ce4ef17?source=collection_home---6------3----------------------- (B2B channels are on the right).
5. The three keys to getting scale from paid social for a B2B company are:
a) B2B Specific Creative
b) Audience/Conversion Signals
c) Funnel Flow Optimization/Sales & Marketing Alignment
a) B2B Specific Creative
b) Audience/Conversion Signals
c) Funnel Flow Optimization/Sales & Marketing Alignment
6. B2B Specific Creative: To respond to ads, your ad creative has to immediately show your ad applies to the business decision maker, like this ad below:
7. Unlike in B2C, you almost always need as much text in your image as the FB algo allows.
8. You can often get text into your ads - and get great results - using a tool like http://placeit.net .
9. Almost all SaaS products look the same, and you can only get so far showing pictures of laptops with charts on them. It’s worth testing metaphorical and abstract images often.
10. Audience/Conversion Signals. Like with most FB advertising, you can get the best results at first by using a lookalike built from a qualified seed audience.
11. Just as important as the audience is the conversion signal. Does a B2B business optimize on leads, or something further down the funnel? You have to test.
12. Optimizing on leads can be dangerous, because you can accidentally drive low quality leads. Ex: The Facebook Audience Network placement will drive tons of fraudulent leads who will happily fill out a form on your site all day long.
12.a Or your creative could be giving people a totally different impression than you expected.
13. Optimizing downfunnel is optimal, but often hard because sign up takes place over a long time or goes to a sales team. There’s ways around this - offline conversions, making custom events, etc. You should aim for at least 30 conversion events a week per ad-set though.
14. Facebook Native Lead Ads can be an amazing option, especially if you have a strong sales team to call leads with. Total cost per closed deal is often lower just getting content leads on FB with the lead form and closing them with the sales team.
15. Funnel Flow Optimization/Sales & Marketing Alignment. If customers convert to your product without sales touches, then the key to performance is going to be your onboarding process and follow-up.
16. Good FB ads work with this process by driving to the right landing pages (or Native Lead Forms if you set it up as part of an account creation process via API). The right creative can also prep people to take the right actions down the funnel.
16.a Funnel set-up will affect your FB conversion events drastically. Require a credit card up front? You'll get less FB conversions, but they will be higher quality. You can also set an event to fire only if customers answer qualifying questions in the funnel correctly.
17. Facebook ads can also be a valuable part of the retargeting process when people bounce from your funnel.
18. If your customers need sales touches (as with most B2B), it’s important to prep them for what leads from Facebook are like. If your sales team is used calling inbound leads, they might not close FB leads efficiently.
19. FB lead quality is in between inbound and cold. Our recommendation is to either split out a separate sales team to focus on them (so they can get a team’s full focus) or to give them to your outbound team, if you have one.
20. You can use Zapier or other integrations to drive leads directly from Native Lead Forms to your sales team - as well as doing fancy things, like filtering based on quality or geography, setting up round robins, etc. Sales team strategy can lead to a 10x difference in CPAC.
Thanks for reading! My company, http://rightpercent.com , focuses only on scaling B2B tech companies. If you’re looking at growth options for B2B companies, shoot me a message at [email protected] and we can talk shop.
