Most people think that Facebook is NOT the place for B2B marketing — which is absolutely false.
While platforms like LinkedIn are definitely a place to grow your business and reach a targeted B2B audience, LinkedIn ads can be wildly expensive…like up to $10 or more per CLICK. Seriously?
Another factor is that no one is really “hanging out” on LinkedIn (unless they’re looking for a job). So for these reasons, I’m often redirecting my clients to think about how they can reach their exact B2B audience with the targeting that’s available through Facebook.
Facebook has always had the option of job title targeting; but the truth is, people really aren’t very diligent about designating their specific job titles in their Facebook profile as they might be on a platform like LinkedIn.
I’ve always been one to search for workarounds and other ways to target B2B audiences without directly utilizing the job title; because in general I have not found the job title designation to be all that effective.
Now— before I dig into the B2B targeting strategy I use the most often, I want you to take a look at the specific announcement Facebook just rolled out on September 14th, 2017… one that makes my strategy more important than ever.
From Facebook themselves—
Facebook equips businesses with powerful ways to reach the right people with the right message. But there are restrictions on how audience targeting can be used on Facebook. Hate speech and discriminatory advertising have no place on our platform. Our community standards strictly prohibit attacking people based on their protected characteristics, including religion, and we prohibit advertisers from discriminating against people based on religion and other attributes.
As people fill in their education or employer on their profile, we have found a small percentage of people who have entered offensive responses, in violation of our policies. ProPublica surfaced that these offensive education and employer fields were showing up in our ads interface as targetable audiences for campaigns. We immediately removed them. Given that the number of people in these segments was incredibly low, an extremely small number of people were targeted in these campaigns.
Keeping our community safe is critical to our mission. And to help ensure that targeting is not used for discriminatory purposes, we are removing these self-reported targeting fields until we have the right processes in place to help prevent this issue.We want Facebook to be a safe place for people and businesses, and we’ll continue to do everything we can to keep hate off Facebook.”
Source: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/09/updates-to-our-ad-targeting/
Essentially what this means is when one chooses to fill out their job title or employer on a Facebook profile, technically you can type in anything. I.E. if I wanted to list my job title as “Cat Lady” (aka my legit secondary job title, and one that I take very seriously!), I could go right ahead and do so… technically then allowing “Cat Lady” to show up inside the Ads Manager as a targetable job title.
This is because much of the job title targeting that has been available through Facebook up until this point is self-reported.
So according to Facebook, because this information is self reported, individuals have been misusing this feature — making apparently inappropriate “job titles” appear as targeting options in the Ads Manager — and Facebook is taking what they deem as necessary steps to rectify this issue.
Until Facebook finds a way to better regulate this, they’re removing all self reported job title targeting from the Ads Manager, effective immediately. That means that a lot of the job title targeting that has been available until now, is at least temporarily no longer available.
In the Facebook Ads world, a lot of people are concerned that anyone doing B2B ad targeting are going to take hit from this update— but that’s so not true (or, it doesn’t have to be) if you understanding the targeting strategy I’ve been using all along.
In other words…. I got your back.
Here’s how I’ve always done B2B targeting with Facebook Ads: Let’s say, for example, if one were attempting to target personal trainers… with the previously-available targeting options, we would simply choose to target people with “personal trainer” listed as their job title.
However, there’s another way to target personal trainers… (and I’ve actually compared these two options side-by-side, with much better results from the trick I’m about to share).
Simply— I target by things like credentialing organizations, professional associations, etc.
To find these, I just Google ’em! Then I’m able to develop a list of organizations, like “The Personal Trainers Association of America,” that only a personal trainer or someone working to become a personal trainer would “like” on Facebook (in theory).
This strategy gives us a direct path to target the personal trainer industry and niche regardless of the specific job title designation on their Facebook profile.
So, bottom line — now that Facebook is removing this ability to target by job title, we can still target our B2B audiences by going after the associations and organizations that the individuals with these job titles would likely be following.
Easy peasy.
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