Meta (formerly Facebook) recently announced new targeting capabilities that bolster their B2B marketing proficiency.
For a while now, in some cases, Meta has been brushed aside by LinkedIn as the number one platform choice for B2B marketing campaigns. Although Meta has more active monthly users, LinkedIn members typically use the platform for business purposes, making LinkedIn the go-to platform for B2B content distribution. Whereas Meta members tend to use the platform for personal and pleasure.
In this article, discover how Meta has upgraded their targeting capabilities to make the platform more competitive.
Mixing Business and Pleasure
As the largest social media platform with nearly three billion users, as well as extensive, detailed and constantly evolving targeting available to us on Meta; it wasn’t a surprise to see a targeting update that would allow advertisers to specifically target business decision makers.
Meta has now combined their scale with the power of their targeting segments to enable advertisers to put their message in front of the right B2B audience at the right time.
‘Reach key decisionmakers and small businesses with our new B2B targeting audience segments.’
What are the four targeting segments?
These new targeting options come in the form of four segments, that can be added within audience targeting at ad set level.
| SEGMENT | DESCRIPTION |
| IT decision-makers | A B2B audience segment that targets ads to people who are IT decision-makers based on their job titles. |
| Business decision-maker
titles and interests |
A B2B audience segment that targets ads to people who are business decision-makers based on their job titles and interests. |
| Business decision-makers | A B2B audience segment that targets ads to people who are business decision makers in engineering/IT, operations, HR, strategy or marketing, based on their job titles. |
| New active business
(<6 mo, <12 mo, <24 mo)
|
Admins of engaged businesses that were created in the last [6, 12 or 24] months. Note: This reflects three segments one for each timeframe. |
*’B2B targeting one-sheeter’ – www.facebook.com/business/news/business-to-business-targeting
Why not try it out?
Where the nature of LinkedIn’s platform has made them the go-to platform for B2B marketing in the past, this detailed targeting improvement from Meta may well level the playing field. And if this suits your business model, we highly recommend you try it out.
How to implement new Meta targeting capabilities on your existing campaigns
If you have a campaign already running on Meta, that you believe may benefit from the new targeting capabilities, then we recommend that you start with a test-and-learn approach – using a small portion of your budget to test this new audience.
And to make this a fair test, you should avoid using other variables. This means elements like the ad creatives, ad copy, campaign objectives, and landing pages must all stay the same. This way you’ll be able to equally compare the performance between the audiences.
If you find the new audience targeting produces better results (like a higher click-through rate, lower cost per click, more conversions, lower cost per action etc.), then capitalise on the results of this test by either:
- Increasing spend on this audience.
- Testing new ad creatives or copy that will be more specific and relevant to this audience.
Get stuck into Meta audience targeting
When you implement the test-and-learn approach on Meta using these new targeting capabilities, let us know – we’d love to hear how you get on! And if you have any questions about audience targeting for Meta (or any other platforms), feel free to get in touch with our friendly social media experts.