Social networks, a generic term that’s used indiscriminately, has a strong B2C connotation and is nothing more than a way of sharing your life with your friends? Let’s get away from the obvious for 5 minutes and think of social networks as a means of BtoB collaboration and interaction between individuals, regardless of their geographical location.
We generally form an image of social networks based on the way we use them ourselves! And most of the time in B2B, we think that Linkedin, the professional social network, is the best way to communicate with our target audience and thus engage our prospects. I won’t deny it, the targeting possibilities are precise and fine-tuned on Linkedin, but the costs are not negligible…
Once you’ve defined your personas, as we saw in a previous article(Targeting in B2B: What about B2P?), you then need to identify the “places” where they’ll be “wandering” the web for inspiration, information and networking.
Facebook, the other BtoB network
And if my number 1 persona were a 35-year-old male sports fan, where would I go to promote the benefits of my solution or services? Display on the L’Equipe newspaper website on Mondays, you think that’s stereotypical? And yet…. Facebook isn’t just useful for targeting individuals. Aren’t we all individuals first and foremost? In general, all social networks contain a set of groups where your personas can be found.
Are you targeting self-employed workers, for example? Many Facebook groups exist and bring together your community, so your personas are well represented on Facebook – you just need to know how to find them.
If you’re a service provider, it’s a good idea to provide quality content to generate leads. However, it’s advisable to diversify your content. For example, if you direct the prospect to a landing page rather than to a Facebook Lead Form, you’ll generate fewer leads, but they’ll be more qualitative.
If you’re an e-commerce site, you can use Facebook product dynamic ads (FDPA) to remarket to prospects who haven’t converted.
It’s also a good idea to use Facebook to work on an audience pool of sleeping customers, a kind of nurturing in disguise, or prospects with a contract due soon. You can also work on a look alike audience of your own customers to increase the reach of your Ads… As you can see, the possibilities are numerous.
Tailor your speech to your personalities
You need to adapt your message to your personas and define objectives: reach, awareness, engagement, traffic, conversion. These objectives are just as important as lead generation objectives, since by aiming to increase your reach, raise awareness or increase the number of comments, you are gradually building the path your leads will take to come naturally to you.
Finally, on social networks, you have to stop trying to sell at all costs, and start by… helping. You need to impose a change of organizational culture internally, and put aside your sales pitch in favor of an expert one. Publish tips and tricks, launch debates, etc… in short, interact with your personas!
I hope you now have a better understanding of how to use Facebook in B2B, and we can go even further! Don’t hesitate to ask me any questions you may have.
