Corporate, formal and professional. These are adjectives that are usually associated with business-to-business (B2B) marketing – and not usually associated with Facebook, the ubiquitous global social media network with more than 1.47 billion daily active users (and counting).

However, more than half of today’s B2B decision makers are digitally-literate millennials. These upcoming decision-makers overwhelmingly spend more time on Facebook than any other social media channels, and not just to message friends and like cute cat videos – but to look up information about products and service providers.

Utilising Facebook as a key marketing channel, B2B marketers can increase brand awareness and visibility towards these key B2B decision makers.
 

But… what about LinkedIn?
With its captive corporate audience and established reputation, LinkedIn is often the “default” social media channel of choice for B2B marketing purposes. However, LinkedIn audiences are not as captive as Facebook audiences: on an average daily basis, people spend 50 minutes on Facebook but only a mere 2 minutes on LinkedIn.

Facebook marketing also delivers superior results: 65% of the marketers that we talked to for our Future Content Survey said that Facebook boosting was the most effective paid promotion method they’ve used, while only 29% said that LinkedIn sponsored ads were effective for lead generation purposes.

That said, we’re not suggesting that you abandon LinkedIn altogether – in our experience with clients, we find that LinkedIn is still robust and effective in generating at least twice as much click-throughs to corporate landing pages when compared to Facebook and other social media channels. Instead, we recommend adding Facebook to your existing marketing channel mix to increase audience engagement and brand awareness among B2B decision makers.
 

Capitalising on Facebook
The beauty of Facebook for B2B marketers lies in its versatility: there are a variety of ad options that you can design and choose from, such as canvas ads, carousels, videos and lead ads. Utilising this variety of formats can help break tedium and add visual interest to existing B2B marketing content, which makes them more engaging for your audiences.

StoreHub, a company headquartered in Kuala Lumpur that specialises in point-of-sale solutions, is an example of a B2B success story on Facebook. By using Facebook ads in their marketing campaigns, they increased their sales conversion rate by 3.3 times, paid 53% less per lead and achieved 74% more efficiency in lead generation.

Tech companies are far from the only beneficiaries of Facebook versatility: in our early work with a client in the construction sector, a well-executed social media graphic obtained over 2,500 likes, comments and shares – which translated to more than 25% audience engagement by the 8,000 plus followers of the page at that time.
 
All aboard the Facebook train
We are in a digital age where most B2B decision makers increasingly use Facebook to product research, read reviews and get a general sense of service providers’ offerings before making their decisions. As B2B marketers, let’s take advantage of what Facebook has to offer and be where our customers are.
 

To learn more about our latest content marketing survey findings, email hello@3degrees.asia for a complementary copy of our Future Content Report.