It’s no surprise to anyone that Meta is a powerhouse social media platform. Boasting over 3 billion monthly active users as of January 2024, and being beaten by only Google and YouTube as the third most popular website to exist, it is quite literally one of the biggest platforms you can advertise on in the world.
If you work in paid advertising, whether agency or client-side, you’ve no doubt heard the groan from colleagues when you’ve tried to gleefully suggest that testing some of your down-funnel budget to drive leads on Meta might help increase lead volume. It has a bad rep in the industry for poor quality, wastage, and downright spammy leads.
I thought I’d put that to the test though…and it seems that people are a lot more positive about Meta B2B than you’d expect.
What’s the problem?
For a long time, Meta was predominantly a direct-to-consumer-focused channel, with eCommerce sites rinsing and repeating dynamic product ads, interest audience targeting, and a whole host of other very tailored e-commerce features on the platform.
Meta? eCommerce. LinkedIn? Business to business. Right? Well, it’s really not that simple anymore.
It’s becoming more and more obvious that LinkedIn ad costs are rising to levels never seen before. This isn’t isolated to a single audience or demographic either, it’s across the board. With impression caps rising for the fourth time in as many years, Thought Leadership and Document Engagement ads cannibalising ad spend and clicks, and a more competitive platform, your budget has never had to work harder than it does right now to keep your ads afloat.
Another tried and tested B2B focused social ad channel, Twitter. Sorry – the Artist formerly known as Twitter – X has seen multitudes of advertisers boycott the platform in the past 12 months, for some reason. This has meant that a healthy portion of X ad spend has now moved over to LinkedIn, increasing competitivity further and seeing CPMs in some instances exceed $300.
This was all well and good when the return on investment was scaling with the increases in ad costs, but it’s getting to a point of diminishing returns – and when you can reach a similar audience for a tenth of the cost on Meta, why wouldn’t you start funnelling budget there?
Where’s the proof it works?
It’s all well and good saying that your LinkedIn and ex-X (no pun intended) audiences are on Meta in theory, but where’s the proof? Well, Gartner – who know a little bit about B2B – concluded that more than two-thirds of B2B buyers use Facebook to research and inform their buying decisions. That’s more than YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and even the fabled B2B golden child, LinkedIn.
Well, in true Blue Peter fashion, here’s one we made earlier. We’ve tested it so you don’t have to.
Client 1: Performance Management
We saw CPMs and CPCs creep up pretty significantly in the latter quarter of 2023. This negatively impacted lead costs, qualified lead costs, and return on investment for the channel. We’d always used a small portion of the budget across Meta and were seeing extremely low CPLs compared with our LinkedIn activity.
Across multiple regions, we began pushing budget and scaling our assets on Meta – focusing almost exclusively on prospecting for users in the Human Resources space. Do you know what we saw? CPCs and CPMs drop by around 60-70%, Lead > Marketing Qualified Lead conversion rate increases and return on investment improvements from paid social as a whole.
Client 2: eLearning
These guys had never actively pushed Meta because of poor quality and a bad experience in the past. Understandable, and seems to echo a lot of what advertisers see.
LinkedIn just wasn’t converting though, so we wanted to test expansion onto Meta.
Using the same audience we were targeting for our remarketing campaigns on LinkedIn, we saw a 5x increase to marketing qualified leads for a third of the budget.
Client 3: Ivoclar
Three is the magic number. By activating campaigns on Meta, we saw a 44% reduction in target cost per lead, a 17% overall budget saving, and a 125% lead attainment in just 70% of the campaign flight date.
We a/b tested Meta and LinkedIn against each other, and thanks to the constant refinement of audience targeting, and strong engagement from Meta’s lookalike audiences, we saw the campaigns flourish, and outdeliver their LinkedIn counterparts.
So how do we make it work?
B2B is a completely different beast to Direct to Consumer and eCommerce marketing, and requires a lot more fine-tuning. One of the main reasons for the gulf in difficulty is the lack of a traditional sales cycle, and the sheer volume of individuals that are involved in the buying committee.
According to a recent Gartner report, that number in the buying committee now stands at 11. 11 different stakeholders, all vying for different things – resulting in a very real and tangible decrease in the ability to choose the most appropriate solution of 42%.
Well, we’ve got a few tips on how you can make Meta B2B advertising work for you:
🎨 Have a standout creative
B2B marketers are often bogged down with showing the product, or giving a generic ‘this is the cover of our whitepaper and the title of said whitepaper’ ad to their potential customers.
Go beyond, and it’ll unleash peak effectiveness for your marketing.
We created an in-feed ad to capture attention, and drive click volume for a software and tech start-up. These creatives were followed up with lead-generation ads with similar messaging so the user remembered exactly who the client was when it mattered. What was the result? We more than doubled our monthly lead generation target in our second month of working with them.
❓Ensure your audience is clearly defined
The one thing to remember is that there is a very distinct reason that Meta has such cheaper CPCs and CPMs when compared to LinkedIn. There are a lot more non-relevant users.
Hold on. That’s not what you’ve been saying.
But it’s true. With a fifth of the entire planet using Meta, there’s a huge volume of relevant audiences, but a whole lot more that are a waste of money.
- Re-engage: Focus on using 1PD, lookalike audiences, and site and platform remarketing to drive cheaper ads to the same users you’re remarketing on LinkedIn.
- Job targeting still exists: Although Meta wants to take the wheel and let their algorithm decide who you should target, you can still use some job title targeting and their business-specific audiences to improve the relevance of your prospecting.
⏳ Spend plenty of time testing, and iterating on what does, and what doesn’t work
I’ll never stop preaching about how important a test-and-learn strategy is. It’s one of the cornerstones of any successful paid media campaign.
Creative testing is the biggest and most impactful thing you can roll out on Meta, especially if you decide that you want to move into the broad/algorithmic testing audience approach.
📊 Pass as much data back as you can
Get the Conversions API integrated as soon as possible. If you’re running Lead Generation Forms, or using an on-site pixel or tracking tag, any extra data you can feed your campaigns is going to be immensely valuable to ensure you optimise to the right users.
This can also go a step further, and more to the right quality of lead or conversion instead of just optimising for volume.
🔁 Use it as part of a cohesive strategy mix
As strong a tool as Meta can be for B2B lead generation, I’d err on the side of caution if you want to solely focus on using it for your marketing strategy.
With any paid campaign, you need to not rely on a single channel, and it should be used as a broader audience and customer-first approach. LinkedIn may be expensive, but don’t forget that you need to drive down-funnel pipeline. Just because your lead is 10x cheaper on Meta, doesn’t mean it’ll convert as well as that mega-pricey lead you just saw come in from Capterra.
Who knows, maybe your audience is far more engaged on Reddit than Meta.
With increasing costs on LinkedIn due to greater competitivity, rising frequency caps, and ad formats that often impede you for trying to capture first-party data, Meta offers a relevant, easy-to-access and often successful alternative in your B2B marketing strategy.
Get in touch with our award-winning Paid Media team
If you want to talk through your wider B2B strategy, have any questions on anything that we’ve spoken about, or need support on delivering your paid marketing, get in touch with Hallam today.
