Facebook Ads are going to drive more leads for your business in 2017 than any other paid channel. You’ll need to have the right strategy and execute with agility and precision, but right now there is a massive Facebook opportunity for inbound marketers. An opportunity that if you take advantage of now, will pay off for years.
Technology changes fast but that doesn’t stop us from missing big shifts. This is because they never happen all at once, but every once in awhile you can catch a glimpse of change in motion. Right now, this is the case with Facebook.

Facebook’s growth has been tremendous — and I don’t just mean the number of people who have a Facebook profile. Its most exciting growth has come from its network:
Facebook (desktop/mobile): 1.18 billion daily active users, as of September 2016.
Instagram: 600 million users, as of December 2016 — with 50% of all users following a business.
Facebook Messenger: Over one billion monthly active users, as of July 2016.While those are a big numbers, it’s just the visible part of the iceberg. What’s fascinating is the amount of time people spend with this network. In May of 2016, Zuckerberg announced that globally users spend 50 minutes a day on average with Facebook properties. That is head and shoulders above any other tech property — and almost as much time as people spend eating and drinking each day.
But Facebook marketing has always had reach. You know it can provide that. What’s new is a subtle shift towards solutions that benefit B2B, midmarket companies.

Why Should I Advertise on Facebook?

Mobile Marketing Silver Bullet

According to research from Google B2B buyers have increased the amount of mobile research they do by 91% year over year throughout the B2B purchase path. Facebook has cracked the code on mobile marketing.
This is important because as consumers have shifted to mobile over desktop so have B2B buyers. They now do more research, reading, and work on their phones — and spend time on the Facebook app/Instagram/Messenger.
With Facebook you can now reach these people with slick ad units like Lead Ads that promote your event or white paper and allow users to sign up with just a few clicks.
Facebook’s Lead Ads eliminate the need for users to fill out a form by using pre-populated data and cut out the landing page step, both of which skyrocket conversion rates and actually make the mobile ads effective for B2B marketers.
The news and information site theSkimm used Facebook Lead Ads to attract new subscribers for its daily newsletter, seeing a 22% increase in lead quality at a cost per acquisition of just $1-2.
If you have a longer sales cycle, you need to influence decision makers wherever and whenever they do research. That means you need a strong mobile strategy. Right now that strategy can simply be Facebook paid and organic.

The Best Ad Technology Available

Facebook offers some of the most powerful, innovative and advanced ad units and targeting. But they present it in a way that makes it easy for marketers to execute. Ads are built around your goals, which makes getting started simple for inbound marketers. Let’s dive into some of their best tech for B2B.
Targeting: Facebook puts heavy duty technology to work to help you reach and connect with the most valuable people for your business. Most marketers start by targeting Friends of your existing users, visitors of your website, or people in your CRM lists. These options can be very powerful but what may be most effective is Facebook’s audience expansion tool Lookalike Audiences.
Lookalike Audiences uses machine learning to help find you valuable potential customers who are similar to those who visit your site or are already in your CRM. So you can upload a list of your most valued customers from your CRM and have Facebook hunt down similar users based on their rich data.