Dental equipment manufacturer: You can target dentists, dental hygienists, and other practitioners to market your equipment. You can’t do that on Google, since you don’t know whether the person who is searching on “dentist” actually is one or is just looking for one. People place their professions in their Facebook profile, so all job titles are fair game.
Software or technology start-up: You don’t have the money to hire a fancy New York PR agency or to exhibit at a trade show. So run ads that target the attendees of the show and the magazines that they read.
In fact, for your very best customers, why not make them a landing page that will make the life of your inside sales folks that much easier? Webtrends is a partner of ours, and as such, we’re expanding into the Japanese market. Recently, the President of Webtrends Japan had his birthday, so we made him a customized greeting: See http://www.facebook.com/getfound?sk=app_147021378655774. By the way, this was a couple days before the tsunami hit, not after.
Your clients are not likely to be reading the email newsletters that you send out and are only partially appreciative of the overpriced fruit baskets that you send at Christmas. So why not make a personalized greeting for them– maybe some ads that make their day (yes, Facebook allows you to run ads on their birthdays) or something witty?
Will this drive new sales? Perhaps, if you have it tie with your other marketing channels, operate under the understanding that nurturing takes time, and have great content (especially video). Consider Facebook to be your second email channel. Someone who has freshly signed up for your email list might not be buying today (depends on the average length of the funnel for your particular product), but at least you made a connection with them before they are in the market. And that’s much less expensive than bidding on the PPC keywords when they have decided to buy. They’ll search for your name directly versus a generic search term.
Are you making sure to give credit to the social, display, and other demand generation channels when people do come in on your branded search terms?
The sharpest B2B marketers realize that Facebook is a channel to nurture leads and strengthen bonds with EXISTING clients. The optimization of such channels requires multi-channel measurement to be able to tease out the ROI, social content to drive engagement, and some fortitude (to stomach the fact that these people aren’t necessarily going to convert today, but will when they’re ready to buy).
Dennis Yu is Managing Principal of Webtrends, a provider of social analytics software, as well as CEO of BlitzLocal, which does local online advertising. His team of 40 analysts have run 1,100 Facebook campaigns for global brands over the last 4 years. He studied Finance at Southern Methodist University, Economics at the London School of Economics. If you have any questions, please email him at dennis@blitzlocal.com or visit him on Facebook, twitter, or his blog.
The targeting ability of Facebook is amazing and certain businesses can really take advantage of this type of marketing. It is designed to allow businesses to connect better with their clients as well as see what kind of posts their clients tend to respond to. In using Facebook in this way, it is best to not mix personal and business associates in the same account.
Great post!