Why your B2B company should be using Facebook Ads right now

We dive into the world of paid advertising with Michele Raffaelli, Brew Digital's Paid Media Manager. In this episode, we explore the untapped potential of Facebook ads for B2B marketing, offering strategies to target niche audiences effectively. Michele shares expert tips on optimising ad performance, from choosing the right ad formats to refining audience segments for maximum engagement. Whether you're a seasoned marketer or new to the world of paid media, this episode provides valuable takeaways to enhance your digital marketing strategy. Tune in to learn how to harness the power of Facebook and LinkedIn ads to drive growth and engagement in your campaigns.

Don't forget to check out our Brew Digital LinkedIn for future Marketing Hack livestreams and visit the resource hub on our website for even more content to take your marketing to the next level. 

Auto-generated transcript

Tom Inniss: 0:26

Hello and welcome to another episode of Marketers of the Universe. My name is Tom Innes and I am the Content Marketing Manager here at Brew Digital. Today's episode we are taking a look at paid ads, and this series, if you don't know, is the Brew Digital Hack series. This is audio taken from the live video that we ran over on our LinkedIn page, where we bring in people from across the company to talk about their relative area of expertise.

Tom Inniss: 0:56

Today, debbie Gakitan Jardin de Oliveira is interviewing Michele Raffaelli, our paid media manager, about Facebook ads, linkedin ads, the differences and similarities between the two and the considerations you need to make when you are running them Separately. If you don't typically read the show notes, firstly, bit rude, but also I do encourage you to do so today because I will be popping a link into the show notes to our free tool that is available on the resource hub brewdigitalcom forward slash resources to help you manage your paid ads. Yeah, I will be back at the end to read you out, but the next voice you hear will be that of debbie's. I hope you enjoy it.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira: 1:44

Hello everyone and welcome again to another episode of Brew Digital Hack Series. I have to say and I know I say this all the time I am very excited about this episode, but there's a really, really good reason for it. Number one this actually touches on what I do social media. But we're going to look at the other side, which is basically paid media and, more importantly, for somebody that works primarily with a lot of clients on B2B, we're actually going to talk about a B2B advertising tool that could be very powerful, but yet not a lot of people are doing it right. So what is it? And, of course, you can you know by the title of this episode it's about Facebook ads. So we are here today to talk about how this powerful tool can offer better targeting, lower costs and serious potential from growth. But again, it has to be done correctly, and who is here to help us talk about how to do it correctly is no other than my colleague, michele. Hi, michele, I'd love for you to do your introduction and say hi to all our audience.

Michele Raffaelli: 3:00

Hi Debbie, Hi everyone. Thanks for inviting me and having me today. My name is Michele. Starting from the beginning, my career started in sales and retail sales and after 10 years I crossed the frontier and I moved into digital marketing where, for the past 10 years, I've been between B2C and B2B, between B2C and B2B, experiencing all the platform available and welcoming all the new platform that, over the years, have came.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira: 3:32

So, michele, I have so many questions to ask for me today. Facebook is a channel that I am very accustomed to, especially before joining Group Digital, the Adaptivist group, but it was because I was primarily within the B2C world, so it's so interesting for us to actually talk about Facebook in the context of B2B. I'm going to go ahead and ask you my first question, which is why do so many B2B companies underestimate Facebook ads?

Michele Raffaelli: 4:07

I think the main reason is the fact that, in their experience, what they've seen was mainly B2C ads across the last five to 10 years. What's important to remember is that when we target our decision maker, where do you think we find them? Out of the working hours, for example, they are on Facebook. All the demographic with the age that we are trying to reach, they are active monthly user on Facebook. So why they are underestimating it? Because they haven't seen enough of it. What they are missing out is the fact that they will find the people that they're looking for on Facebook.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira: 4:59

Okay, that's a very good point and we're in. You know and I think we touched on this on, you know, previous episodes we're in. You really get. You really need to know and understand, like, where your audience is beyond working hours, and I think you make a very good point there. Michele, for somebody that does a lot of, like you know, content engagement within LinkedIn and LinkedIn is known as the go-to B2B platform I really want to know, with your opinion, what would you say is how is Facebook compared to LinkedIn and where do you see the difference lies within paid media?

Michele Raffaelli: 5:41

The differences that I see between the two platforms, linkedin and Facebook, are mainly in the type of content that you can post. When you're on Facebook, you tend to share privately more day-to-day updates. Rarely you will see on LinkedIn what you have had for lunch today or how beautiful day it's outside. That's becausein tends to be a bit more professional space, which is fine. This means also that the placement there are a bit more expensive, because the options to reach your ideal customer profile is more competitive.

Michele Raffaelli: 6:23

But the same person that is there is also on Facebook and that's where you can reach them with multiple types of ads. You can reach them with the same type of similar type of content, but, most importantly, you can reach them with a cheaper cost. At the moment, the cost is something that you will notice immediately when you start comparing your activity in the two platforms. But what you need to remember all the time is that digital marketing today is more complicated and you will need more touch points than you used to, so you can't go live on one platform only and expect to have the same results. You will need to follow these people to nurture their journey, depending on the campaign type you decide, but most importantly, follow them through different touch points, showing them different types of content, in order to achieve what's actually your main objective.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira: 7:25

Mm-hmm, and Michele has already given us a little teaser of something that we will discuss later on, which is the campaign type and the objective that you really have to think about when you start doing your ads of like. Why consider Facebook ads? I'd love to know as well. Like you know probably some businesses out there, they do use Facebook ads in their business, as in B2B realm and ecosystem as well, but things are not necessarily working out as they hope for. Michele, what do you think is? You know the common big mistakes that you see people do, or the businesses do, or marketers do when running their Facebook ads?

Michele Raffaelli: 8:17

One of the most common mistakes we see within competitors, within some clients running their Facebook ads, is limiting their audience in the wrong way. Using not detailed enough targeting can be a waste of money. Not many companies nowadays have enough budget to just go broad and try to reach everyone. So the first mistake to avoid is to not narrow your audiences. Have in mind exactly what's the audience that you want to reach and what's the objective that you want to achieve. Once you have clear ideas of these two elements, then you can start building and preparing your campaign. But never forget to have the right audience.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira: 9:10

Amazing and again we're going dialing back to the importance of audience when it comes to marketing, regardless of the channel that we are talking about. It's really like getting to know your audience and like having a very clear understanding of that objective of yours, which is importance, objective of yours, which is importance. So, oh, wow, I did not notice, but we actually have some questions here, michele. So you know, before we jump through the last question for this segment, there is a question here which is which one do you feel, michele, converts the most between you know, a single ad image, a carousel and a video.

Michele Raffaelli: 9:52

For conversion. Well, we would need another 20 minutes to decide what we consider as a conversion. What I can say is, in terms of engagement, what reach increase, reach faster is a video Always the video generate the highest engagement, which will bring in a second step a video Always the video generates the highest engagement, which will bring in a second step a conversion. So if we want to focus mainly on brand awareness, where engagement is actually important, then I would go and prioritize video images. You can have video assets, video creatives, so you could have like a couple of video ads. Change the headlines and then include always a static one. You will see that the engagement is higher.

Michele Raffaelli: 10:33

When I'm at the conversion level with a static image, I'm just play safe. I can go straight, aiming to conversion with a clear message on a single image. I use carousel, especially for cheaper reason. When I engage with a Carousel, I will spend more time staying on an ad because I do have to manually scroll. So the time I'm spending on that ad is higher and the more I see a brand and read content in the short term will help me remind them of them and come back.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira: 11:10

Okay, there you have it, and I think there's a really good parallel points here that Michele has shared that could also be applied to, you know, organic social, which is, it is true, you know, and we cannot run away with away from it, like how we cannot run away from AI nowadays, which is video, is the one that actually leads engagement. I think conversion is a bigger discussion, as Michele said, but if you are looking for that engagement, whether it is paid or organic, please do consider video and, interestingly, you don't have to do high production video nowadays, anything that is, as long as it's authentic, relatable and offers value to your audience, I think that video would work. Quite a lot Makes sense. Thanks a lot, team. You are welcome. Well, michele did all the job. I just, you know, asked the question. Okay, michele, last question for the series before we end it up. I would love to know what your tips, your biggest top tip, for maximizing Facebook remarketing ads.

Michele Raffaelli: 12:23

Okay, I'll try. Right, my main tip to optimize facebook ads is to have the best audience possible. Always try to aim and create an audience that is big enough to have reach and and and cover the the audience that you want. But remember you should always have an exclusion list which is longer than your actual targeting. So you need to clear and have a very specific audience, because the moment you reach the right people, all the results will come. This one is my Main tip. Oh, I would have lots more, but I know we're on out of time.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira: 13:08

Well, actually we're getting very interesting questions right now and I don't want to pass it through. Let's get the first question from Will Fred Contshow. I hope I'm saying this correctly, but is it not based on the audience? I guess this question relates to the type of ad, michele, and I'd love for you to jump on that one.

Michele Raffaelli: 13:31

It is. But when we play, we play. When we work in Facebook ads, we not always think that we need to please two ends the algorithm from meta and the final user. If we go and exclusively think of the final user, we would do actions that the algorithm wouldn't understand. So we need to give the right amount of the right size audience to the algorithm in order to reach the right user. The middle part of this is with ad variation. So having a right balance between different ad type will help the algorithm to rotate all these creatives.

Michele Raffaelli: 14:21

When I say creatives, I mean the static image, the carousel, the video ad. Those will give an idea on what's working better and they also give opportunity to the robot to understand what interacts better with your audience. Now, once you reach I think the last number was 10,000 impressions, so you run your campaign. Once you reach 10,000 impressions per creative, then you can make your decision. Then you can see, actually, with the audience you selected and the objective of the campaign you decided, which one engaged better, because it's possible that a video ad engaged better with a certain type of audience in the funnel, but with others, the same creative doesn't interact well. So those are things that you need to test as a best practice. You run with all of them and then, of course, you optimize towards the best one.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira: 15:23

And actually shameless plug. We just did a webinar recently and this topic just came up with one of our guest panel, wherein she really, you know, put a lot of emphasis on reviewing and analyzing and changing campaigns. So you cannot just post something out there with your audience and just let it be. It's very important to always revisit, to always reiterate and improve from your learnings. So good point there, Michele, and I have another question here from Eugenia. Hi, are there any tips or tricks to target in Facebook a very niche B2B audience? We prioritize LinkedIn over Facebook because of the powerful targeting options. Eugenia, I would like to say that this is a very good question and you just asked the right people for this right question, because our clients are very targeted and the product that we're selling is quite niche. So I'm sure Michele has an experience of one or two of these.

Michele Raffaelli: 16:33

It is a good question. One thing I would say yes, on LinkedIn you can go as narrow as you want. I think the minimum ideal is 300 accounts, 300 units for an audience, 300 units for an audience. What we did as a trick in Facebook would be import data of our existing customers and generate lookalikes. What LinkedIn is not doing as well as Facebook is the lookalike audiences. They do have a new option which allows you to create and generate those, but Facebook has been doing it for like 10 years at least.

Michele Raffaelli: 17:10

So if your ideal target is within existing clients, you just upload I don't know if I'm going to specific or technical here, but you upload your customer lists, emails or any contact that you have on your account and then use that to create a 1% to 2% lookalike. You see how big is that audience and that would actually give you an ideal, a more niche audience that then you can target, refining it even further if you want to exclude the existing customer or if you want to try to expand it more, depending if you target a specific city, a specific country. All the information that we mentioned at the moment are quite generic. There are some elements that may work in canada, that work different in italy, or they can work in portugal, but in uk maybe they have different things. So, depending on where you want to run this campaign, you can get quite good audience B2B using the lookalikes on Facebook.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira: 18:18

Awesome. And, with that said, I'd love to know from our audience if you found that quite useful. You found that if you find that quite useful because if you did, maybe we should create a step-by-step guide, michele, on how to target very niche audiences, and you know the same as how we have uploaded a facebook ads template. We will again upload a free version of this guide because it is true that you know, when it comes to2B, we play around with more niche audiences than compared to B2C. If you feel like your team needs a deeper dive of paid media, michele here and the rest of the team does a paid media audit. Thank you so much.

Debbie Gacutan-Jardim De Oliveira: 19:01

And for Michele, my wonderful colleague, that was so good. So thank you again for joining me and offering your insights, michele, and, who knows, I'll call you back again for more paid media quiz. And to everyone who joined us, thank you so much and let us know if there's a new topic you want us to know Web dev, design and name it social media. We are here for you. All right, thank you have a good day.

Tom Inniss: 19:37

That's all we have time for today. Thank you so much for listening. We hope you found some useful snippets in our session and are able to put them to use in your own marketing strategy. We run these live sessions over on LinkedIn, so head on over to Brew Digital and give us a follow to be notified of upcoming streams them to use in your own marketing strategy. We run these live sessions over on LinkedIn, so head on over to Brew Digital and give us a follow to be notified of upcoming streams. We love making this content for you and it would mean the world if you could recommend the show to one friend that you think would enjoy listening. Make sure to check out past episodes, subscribe on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcasts, and we'll see you on the next one. I've been Tom and these are the marketers of the universe.

Michele Raffaelli: 20:36

A bit more about me. If you must know, I love high mountains and low CPCs. I love big lakes and small audiences pool. I love pizza and I like pie charts.