Finding new leads for your B2B company can be challenging, and you need to leverage every opportunity to fill your sales funnel with qualified prospects. Utilizing paid social media is a smart way to present your products and services to an interested audience and generate qualified leads.
Discover the top paid B2B social media strategies and best practices your B2B company can implement today. We’ll also cover how to select the best social channel(s) for your goals and the steps you should take to build your paid social strategy.
- What is Paid Social for B2B?
- Getting Started with B2B Paid Social
- How Paid Social Can Benefit Your Business
- Which Channel is Best for B2B?
- 7 Steps to A Successful B2B Paid Social Campaign
What is Paid Social for B2B?
Paid social is advertising your business on social media platforms with sponsored content. Beyond organic posts that feature imagery, videos, and other compelling content, paid social is an efficient way to get your marketing messages in front of even more people, maximizing leads. It’s crucial to any demand generation program and B2B social media strategy.
Getting Started with B2B Paid Social Media
If you’re looking to build a paid social strategy, the first step is creating your social profiles on each platform you plan to use—if you already have accounts, then optimizing them to ensure they align with your brand, audience needs, and goals.
Next, you’ll want to develop a budget for your campaign; marketing agency experts can help ensure you’re spending your money wisely by building an effective target audience and strategy. Create your paid posts with compelling copy and graphics, and design a landing page for your targets to convert.
Finally, keep an eye on your posts once they’re live! You’ll want to measure impressions, clicks, and conversions, optimizing pieces and parts of your campaign that appear to be working best. Is one ad getting all the traction while another is ignored? Boost the successful ad and turn the other off! Marketing is all about finding and optimizing the right mix.
How Paid Social Media Can Benefit Your Business
Virtually all consumers—about 94%—use social media, and about 50% use it to research products or services they’re considering buying.1 That’s a substantial portion of your audience not only actively using social media platforms but using them to make purchase decisions. Not to mention, 85% of B2B marketers stated they saw results from paid social media efforts within the last year via our 2023 B2B Marketing Mix Report. With that information alone, your metrics of how many potential leads you have on social media should show you the benefits of implementing a paid social strategy for your B2B company.
While free social is a necessary and cost-effective way to generate brand awareness, paid gives you the benefits of additional reach and lets you target the exact audience you want to see your content. Paid also gives you more metrics that you can use to shape and optimize your strategy in the future.
Which Paid Social Media Channel is Best for B2B?
We wish there were a simple answer to the “best” channel, but there are so many factors—your business type, your audience demographics, your specific services and products, and more—that make choosing the right paid social platform a strategic decision. Let’s review your options to see what paid social channel is best for your business.
LinkedIn Paid Social
There’s a reason that 89% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for lead generation,2 and that’s because it’s so effective. This LinkedIn-specific lead generation advice will help you maximize your strategy’s overall success.
LinkedIn Ads
Choose between video ads, text ads, dynamic ads, and carousel ads to get whatever content you want and target it for the audience of your choosing.
Sponsored Content
They may look like regular organic posts when potential leads are scrolling through their feed, but LinkedIn Sponsored Content allows you to pay to put ads in front of your audience with the content you want them to see.
Boosted Posts
If Sponsored Content isn’t right for you, a less expensive option is to boost your organic posts to help them get a wider audience (and hopefully bring in new leads, too!).
Message Ads
Get right into the inbox of your targets by paying for Message ads with the message of your choosing—it will help you connect with your leads in a customized, unique way.
Lead Gen Forms
With fewer clicks and less information to input, shelling out the money for pre-filled Lead Gen forms allows your potential customers to connect with you faster and easier.
Facebook Ads
Like LinkedIn ads, Facebook offers paid ads like images, videos, text, carousels, and more. You can customize your content, use personalized dynamic ads, and collect lead information all on the platform. Your ads will appear in users’ newsfeeds, blending in with their other viewable posts but with a small “sponsored” tag on the post.
Twitter Ads
Twitter also offers ad services, and you can customize your campaign size around your needs and budget. The same format of ads you can get on LinkedIn and Facebook, like images, videos, carousels, and more, are all available—plus, you can purchase takeover ads, a premium offering that will appear at the top of your leads’ timelines.3
YouTube Ads
On YouTube, you can show a video ad or display a small text pop-up ad in the bottom corner of a video. However, their targeting and retargeting features allow you to pair your ads with related topics so you can ideally capture the most relevant leads, which is more important than getting your message in front of people who may not be a good fit for your business.
7 Steps to a Successful B2B Paid Social Media Campaign
You’ve learned the importance of implementing paid social and the distinctions between each platform. Now it’s time to get started with seven steps to ensure success with your B2B paid social strategy.
1. Prioritize One Social Media Platform to Start
For B2B companies, typically, LinkedIn is the best place to start, as it generates twice as many leads as other social platforms.2 But you’ll have the best idea of which platform(s) to use when you review your organic metrics and see where you’re finding the most success for your business.
2. Determine Your Goals and Desired Outcomes
You won’t know if you’ve succeeded unless you first understand what you’re trying to do—so set goals for how many leads you hope to generate in a specific timeframe so you know if you’re on track once you get going.4 Make sure your content helps drive you toward the outcomes you want to see.
3. Establish Your Target Audience and Budget
There’s no correct answer for how much you should spend or how long you should let an ad campaign run; it all depends on how effective it is for your business. But whether you calculate it on your own or with your B2B marketing agency, it’s crucial that you decide beforehand whom you’re targeting,4 how much you can spend, and how long you’re going to let your ads run.
4. Research and Find Inspiration in Successful Campaigns
The best campaigns come from creativity, experience, and industry best practices. Collaborate with your agency to combine your brand’s unique value propositions with their proven expertise.
Pro tip: look to big, trusted brands for inspiration for your ad’s messaging and CTA, visuals, and overall user experience.
5. Leverage Remarketing Campaigns
Remind your audience about your brand with a remarketing campaign, which shows your ad to people who have already visited your website. These ads are an effective way to re-engage and continuously move prospects down the funnel. Remember that this audience is already familiar with your brand, so your message can be more specific and tailored.
6. A/B Test Your Ads
What’s better than running one ad? Running two (or more), of course! Rather than relying on just one strategy, create a few similar ads, making sure only to change one element—either the CTA, headline, image or something else—and run an A/B test on your ads to see what performs best for your audience.5 Then, use your results to optimize your ads and keep finetuning them in the future.
7. Measure Your Results
Finally, the most important thing to do after you go through the effort of building a paid social media strategy, creating your ads, running them, and testing them: see how they performed by measuring your results with available metrics like how many people viewed them, clicked on them, and converted to a lead after seeing them.
Keep the Paid Social Cycle Going
Paid social media isn’t a strategy that you can set and forget. It’s an effective method of B2B marketing that requires constant supervision. Once you get started with these best practices and see results, you can continuously improve upon each campaign—doing more of what’s working. It’s all part of creating a paid social media plan that evolves and grows with your business—and if you need help, reach out to a B2B marketing agency to get the most leads for your efforts.
Partner with the Paid Social Pros
When you’re ready to implement effective paid B2B social media strategies for your company, look no further than the experts at Sagefrog. We’re here to help you bring a cohesive plan to your business’s marketing efforts, and we can tailor our strategies and best practices to your specific needs.
Learn more about our B2B social media marketing services and how we can help your business thrive. Ready to get in touch with Sagefrog today?
1. GWI, “How effective are ads on social media?”
2. LinkedIn, “LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms Playbook”
3. Zapier, “How to advertise on Twitter”
4. Sprout Social, “Paid social 101: The basics of running effective ads”
5. Hootsuite, “Social Media Advertising 101: How to Get the Most Out of Your Ad Budget”
