Facebook is no longer just a social media channel anymore. It has become a way of life for most of us. To put things in perspective, the first thing people do after waking up is, hop on their phones and scroll through Facebook. With 1.93 billion people logging onto the social media platform daily, Facebook presents an opportunity for businesses to connect with their consumers.
With over 44% of executives using Facebook, it provides B2B businesses scope to be seen by the decision-makers or conversation starters of their target company and increases the probability of generating leads and sales from social media.
Yes, LinkedIn and Twitter are the go-to platforms for B2B marketing but Facebook also makes for a good channel.
Two-thirds of Facebook users across all countries report visiting a local business page at least once. This means potential customers are already looking for you. And, if you want to tap into its potential, posting according to your whims and fancies won’t work. A strategic Facebook content marketing plan is necessary to make you stand out from the crowd.
Hence, further in this article, we’re going to learn about Facebook content marketing for B2B businesses.
What is Facebook content marketing?
“Content marketing can be defined as the creation and distribution of meaningful insights, perspectives, and best practices that are valuable to a specific audience. The aim is to retain existing clients including doing more business with them and to attract new high-quality clients.”
Bruce Rogers, Chief Insight Officer, Forbes.
Facebook content marketing refers to the practice of creating and pushing out relevant content that builds credibility with the consumers by maintaining a consistent Facebook presence. You can market your business on Facebook in different ways using:
- Facebook Ads
- Business Pages
- Facebook MarketPlace
- Facebook Groups
Why should you use Facebook content marketing?
Here are 4 main reasons in terms of statistics to show you the importance of Facebook content marketing:
- 2.91 Billion people across the globe use Facebook
- Over 90 Million businesses use Facebook
- 1.93 Billion users are active on Facebook daily
- 17% of users join Facebook to connect with brands
A solid Facebook content marketing strategy will not only help create a brand presence but also build a loyal community of consumers.
How to get started with Facebook content marketing?
Coming up with creative content and posting it on Facebook is only half the job done. The other daunting task is to ensure it is being seen by the right people. And, when you have a proper content marketing strategy in place, then both of the tasks become simple.
Let’s look into how you can leverage all the features of the social channel and create an effective Facebook content marketing strategy as a B2B SaaS brand:
1. Set SMART goals
Without goals, you are going nowhere in your business. Setting goals might seem simple but it is often an overlooked factor when it comes to creating content marketing strategies.
Having goals keeps every aspect of the business in check by helping you analyze if all of your efforts are going to bring in desired results or not. Hence, setting content marketing goals aligning with your business goals is crucial.
Increasing likes and comments might trick you into a sense of achievement but, these vanity metrics aren’t much of anything. Tangible goals look something like: increasing website traffic, driving new customers, lead generation, etc.
And, achieving tangible goals will become easy only if they’re set following the SMART framework:
Specific: What do we want to do?
Measurable: How much of it?
Achievable: How do we accomplish this?
Relevant: Is this the right time and are we the right people?
Time-sensitive: When do we want to get this done?
2. Determine your audience
To connect with people interested in your brand, you first need to understand who you want to speak to? In the ocean of 2.93 Billion people, you need to cut through the noise to find your target audience.
And, for that, you need to understand the demographics of Facebook touch users to analyze who your target audience is from that wide segment of users.
Facebook’s built-in audience insights tool will help you find the following information on Facebook users:
- Age
- Gender
- Education
- Location
- Language
- Relationship status
- Past purchasing activity
- Facebook usage
This is a good starting point for defining your target audience on Facebook. But we do recommend adding other parameters like their challenges, solutions they are looking for, purchase power, and more, to create strategic content.
3. Optimize your Facebook page
You can achieve all of your Facebook content goals by doing only two things: 1) Bringing people to your page, and 2) compelling them to stay and interact.
And, to bring people to your page you have to have a good-looking Facebook cover image, do cross-promotions and bring in the audience from your other social media channels, and create highly shareable content (informative or entertaining) that people would want to share with their friends.
4. Plan your Facebook content
Now that you’ve figured out your target audience and optimized your business page, it’s time to craft some amazing content that will resonate with your audience.
The rule of thumb is to use the 80/20 rule for creating content. 80% of the content should inform, educate and entertain while the rest 20% helps in promoting your brand, or the product or service you offer.
Another important thing here is Facebook’s algorithm favors engaging content and decreases the reach of self-promotion posts.
Posting content on Facebook should be with the purpose of either educating or solving consumer pain points. And, it can be achieved by following these steps:
- Stunning Visuals: 37% of marketers consider visual marketing to be the most important form of content for their business next to blogging (38%). Get creative with visual branding including quotes, memes, charts, infographics, etc., to make your content visually appealing.
- Video Content: Facebook algorithm favors video content posted directly on the platform. Now that doesn’t mean you need a professional videographer to create video content. It can be created using just a mobile phone. To add to it, Facebook favors Facebook lives more than any other video content as it gets watched 3x longer than any other video content.
- Compelling writing: Whether it’s writing a blog post or just a caption for social media, the writing has to be compelling enough to make the user keep reading until the end. Add CTAs, provide value, tell a story, etc and keep your audience hooked to your content.
tip: You can use Grammarly as a spell checker, Hemingway editor to check the structure of your sentences, and Mindmap to brainstorm your content ideas. Happy creating quality content 🙂
5. Creating a Facebook content calendar
Creating a content calendar is an important aspect of content marketing. Content marketing means putting out planned content and without a content calendar, content can’t be planned and organized in a strategic way to lead to your business goals.
So to stay on top of your Facebook content marketing strategy, you need to have an effective content marketing calendar. This calendar should include details on what you intend to post when, which format you will push the content through, what time of the day it will be published, what CTA you’re promoting, what link will it include in the post, and so on.
Now that the content is created, when to post is also a matter to delve into. Hootsuite says the best time to post on Facebook is at 6:15 AM and 12:15 PM PST on weekdays. But we do recommend experimenting with different time slots to see what works best for you.
If you don’t know how to create a social media marketing calendar, read this post.
6. Interact and engage with your audience
Once you’ve gotten comfortable using a Facebook business page and have started creating consistent content, the next step is to focus on engagement. There are several features through which you can engage your audience on Facebook.
- Facebook groups
With 1.4 billion people using Facebook groups every month, it’s a free tool to connect and engage with the target audience.
You can always create a Facebook group of your own or join the ones that your consumers have created and keep them updated with what’s new and keep adding value to their lives by providing member-only bonuses. Alternatively, you can also share valuable content with them on these groups to start conversations.
It increases customer loyalty and trust in your brand.
For example, Contensify too has a group of startup founders that we share marketing tips on regularly:
Founders also make use of this group to introduce their startups along with deals and discounts:
- Facebook chatbot
With over 20 million messages being exchanged on Facebook Messenger, if you’re not using it to connect with your audience, then you’re missing out.
To engage your audience on Facebook, you need to be engaging too. People love it when they get quick responses from the companies, so roll your sleeves up and respond to every message you receive.
It gets daunting to reply to every single message as you grow. That’s where Messenger chatbots come to your rescue. Sending quick automated messages to a customer query will help in retaining customers and also build a rapport with them. Help yourself out and set up a Facebook chatbot for your brand.
7. Maintain brand consistency
Maintaining brand consistency is a non-negligible aspect of your Facebook content marketing strategy. Having uniform visual branding throughout will help you stand out and become memorable. Hence, it is important to use brand colors, fonts, and aesthetics while designing your visuals.
8. Leverage Facebook ads to promote content
Facebook’s algorithm favors posts from users’ friends and family. Due to this, sometimes it becomes difficult to stand out from the crowd.
You might have crafted the perfect post with amazing visuals and compelling captions, but, not everything you post is going to reach your audience. You can only hope that it does. Here’s the data depicting the low reach of organic posts:
For pages with fewer than 10,000 followers: 8.18% organic reach
For pages with more than 10,000 followers: 2.59% organic reach
Instead, what you can do is boost a post a little to bring it in front of the right eyeballs for the post to pick up the pace. And, this can be done using Facebook ads.
Facebook advertising is paying for a content piece to show up to the right target audience. It aims to garner the attention of the right people at the right time.
9. Track your success
Tracking and measuring the data obtained from the posts is a surefire way to know what worked and what didn’t for your business.
Analyzing your data doesn’t only mean checking what’s working for your business. It’s also about keeping track of things that aren’t. Looking into your Facebook page insights is a great way to see what type of content your audience likes to engage with the most or finds value in; this helps you streamline your resources accordingly.
Examples of great B2B SaaS marketing on Facebook
Here are three examples of brands who found B2B content marketing success on Facebook.
1. Salesforce
Facebook likes: 603,394
Salesforce focuses mainly on connecting with C suite professionals; one such example is an interview with its CEO. Salesforce uses Facebook to promote the new launches and make product announcements.
The B2B business utilizes Facebook for its PR purposes and showcases the company culture through philanthropic efforts. The thought leadership and authority-building content have led to the successful marketing of this B2B business.
2. Shopify
Facebook likes: 1,653,587
A B2B business garnering 1.6 million people’s attention is huge! But, how did Shopify do it? By focusing on the audience more than its products. Shopify features a variety of content focused mainly on aspiring entrepreneurs.
The content includes case studies, success and failure stories of entrepreneurs, tips and best practices, etc, that are needed to thrive as a business. It aims to provide value and in return gain the trust of the audience, enough for them to use Shopify to sell their products and services.
3. MailChimp
Facebook likes: 262,427
MailChimp being the most sought-after email marketing and automation platform uses Facebook in a fun and friendly manner. It publishes content featuring marketing advice, case studies, reports, etc, that are helpful to both B2B firms and new businesses.
MailChimp also uses Facebook as a news distributing platform by sharing it’s many initiatives including it’s podcast ‘The Jump’
Conclusion
There is no one size fits all Facebook content marketing strategy.
You need to create one suiting your brand, its values, and goals. And, creating a Facebook marketing strategy is not a one-time thing, it needs constant tweaking to match up to consumer expectations.
If you go into creating a content marketing strategy for your business by knowing all about its mission, vision, and values, then you are in a great position to create content that has an impact on your audience.
Just remember to analyze and tweak your Facebook content marketing strategy based on how it performs.
Or better yet, reach out to us today, and let’s create an impactful content marketing strategy for your business on Facebook.
