If you’re in media and have tested different media channels, you’ll quickly notice that each presents a unique user behavior or engagement. Search vs. display network, Google vs. Bing, Facebook vs. LinkedIn, do we even run on Instagram? All are valid questions you need to ask yourself when establishing goals of a client. To focus on one, in particular, we’ll explore how to make Facebook Lead Gen forms work for B2B campaigns.

Without incorporating the following into your campaign, you may struggle to drive relevant B2B leads on Facebook. We have seen a lot of success working with LinkedIn’s targeting for ABM, CRM lists, and other advanced targeting. We mapped out successes of LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms in a former blog post. The challenge became how to match those successes on Facebook. There are a few ways to ensure success for B2B brands on Facebook Lead Gen Forms.

Disclaimer: Platform targeting on Facebook is powerful when it comes to B2C audiences and takes behavior and contextual targeting into consideration but don’t bank on it coming anywhere near relevant for your advanced B2B needs.

CRM Lists

Always ask the client if they have any prospecting lists or any type of industry database email addresses in a CSV file. Hopefully, these lists will be a couple hundred thousand contacts to be able to run off of initially. You will want to separate all the targeting options in this post into separate campaigns or ad sets (although eventually, Facebook plans on only allowing budgets to be set at the campaign level, so it will be good to get into the habit now in anticipation).

The CRM lists will be the tightest and most relevant targeting so you should bid most aggressively towards this segment and the CPA will be lowest among net new audiences.

What if the client doesn’t have an email list or you don’t have access to any CRM data? Starting from scratch will be a bit more difficult, but your best bet will be a combination of the next two.

Remarketing

When you first set up Facebook ad campaigns, you should put a pixel on your website. We always recommend putting event tags on each button or conversion point so it will allow you to avoid serving ads to website visitors that have already taken action on your site.

This will be your top performing campaign overall with the highest conversion rates and lowest cost per form completion. Customize your messaging for users who have already engaged with your brand and you will see returning visitors starting to complete lead gen forms at a high rate.

Lookalike Audiences

The best way to create net new audiences to scale your reach on Facebook is to utilize their lookalike audience capability. The platform lets you decide how large you want the lookalike to be between 1% and 10%, with 1% being the closest to the original list. Usually, 1% will start at creating over 1 million contacts closest related to whatever it’s working from. Take advantage of all your targeting methods above. We rarely ever go further out than 3% as it starts to dilute and starts to bring in too much unqualified fringe traffic.

Create lookalike audiences based on:

  • Any CRM lists
  • Website visitors
  • Website converters

Platform Target Qualifications

If you run lookalike audiences, it’s a good idea to look through the platform’s detailed targeting. Lookalike audiences can open up the targeting a bit too much sometimes and a remedy for that is the function to INCLUDE people who match at least ONE of the following. Narrow down the audience by adding job titles, interests, page admins, industries, etc.

All in all, Facebook lead gens forms have been high volume converters for many of our B2B clients driving a good first touches communication as well as information gathering platform. It is a powerful channel to consider even for B2B audiences. Head over to our Paid Social services page to get more information on our approach!