If you wanted to advertise your B2B product or service on social media, should you try Facebook marketing is a question that we are often asked.
Here are some thoughts as we get started with 2015 and wish our readers a Very Happy New Year !
- B2B purchasing is for a business purpose: A business purpose could be direct materials and services or indirect materials and services. Direct materials are items that are used in your production and value chain. For example, if you own a bakery your direct materials are flour,sugar etc. In case, you are planning to expand your bakery business through franchises it may be critical to standardize the flour,sugar from suppliers. You simply cannot take a large risk with new suppliers. The bakery business will buy lots of things that are not direct materials, for example, stationery. These indirect materials tend to have many suppliers offering stuff at commodity prices.
- If you supply a special niche B2B product: Assume that you supply a special organic flour for baking and you are looking for bakeries who are potentially interested in starting an organic line of products. Finding such bakeries on Facebook can be far easlier through advertising on Facebook.
- People talk among friends on Facebook: People talk among friends on Facebook. OK some people talk a lot more than others, but if someone supports organic food you can be sure that they have liked some organic food pages and Facebook is correctly able to identify them. By targeting the bakery industry and organic food interests you should be able to reach a fairly narrow and focussed audience of potential B2B customers.
- What if every business can buy my B2B product? If you believe that every business buys your product – you have a market segmenting problem. For example, while every business uses cleaning products – frequently it is the facilities cleaning contractor who buys the window cleaner. So you might need separate market segment offerings and campaigns on Facebook that offer compelling solutions to a) businesses that clean their own premises and b) who hire a contractor.
- Narrow Focussed Market Segments Critical: If you want to see some good results with B2B Marketing on Facebook it is critical to define your market as narrowly as possible.
- Demographics-Work: Look carefully at the Demographics-Work section of the Facebook Ad Set Audiences and you can narrow down industries,level of people you want to target.
- Interests – the best through Facebook ! Interest targeting has really great possibilities on Facebook. In an earlier post we had discussed about how effective it is to use Facebook for recruiting drug trial participants. Patients with a serious condition and their care givers are likely to discuss on Facebook and when they see a drug trial opportunity – you can expect a positive response and participation.
To summarize, B2B Marketing on Facebook can be effective when you are able to narrowly segment your target market by industry, interests and behavior. About StratoServe Digital Marketing Services.
