B2B Facebook Audiences: How Metadata Bridges the Personal and Professional

You already know about the power of Facebook because there’s a high likelihood you’re already on Facebook — alongside 69 percent of your fellow Americans and some 2.4 billion other people. You’ve seen the ads. You’ve contributed to someone’s CTR.

But you may not know that a full 74 percent of Facebook users are high-income earners. The network even surpasses LinkedIn, which reaches just 49 percent of users making more than $75,000. And with 74 percent of active US Facebook users checking the site daily, that could translate to a lot of high-quality, high-earning eyeballs on your B2B brand’s campaigns — if only you could find a way to create an audience in Facebook with your corporate email base.

Facebook could be the key to unlocking cost-effective campaigns for B2B marketers if its targeting capabilities were able to connect corporate to personal identities. The fact is, most of us don’t use Facebook in a professional capacity. We don’t update our roles, titles, even the companies we work for. We use Facebook to connect to one another personally, not to network. Almost two-thirds of B2B marketers struggle to target B2B audiences through digital advertising. So even though Facebook is cheap — the average CPC for a Facebook ad, across all industries, is just $1.72 — the real power of the network has until now remained untapped for businesses looking to market to other businesses.

That’s where Metadata comes in, and that’s how our software will change marketing for B2B companies looking to reach their audiences on Facebook. How exactly? We’re glad you asked.

How the Metadata Platform Works

Metadata hosts 1.2 billion profiles in its proprietary contact database. Unlike our competitors, this database pulls from multiple data sources, making its data even richer.

This database includes both current and historical business attributes for people, similar to what you’d see on LinkedIn, plus every single business and personal email address that could be found for any given person, stored along their profile of business attributes. For every person, Metadata has on average 3+ emails to match them by. And finally, we have a way to match corporate to personal email for Facebook targeting.

LinkedIn is designed to be a professional network, which is why it’s great for business advertising. If you want to target people who work for companies of a particular size, for a particular industry, with a certain title, LinkedIn already has that data. Facebook simply does not. Facebook is our personal home, where we often don’t note anything more than our birthday and our gender.

Additionally, simply taking your named account list and uploading it to Facebook for targeting doesn’t produce great results. That’s because the contacts in these accounts will have a company email, which you’re then left trying to match to personal emails on Facebook. The match rate for this tactic is very low — usually about 4 percent. So, most B2B marketers cross Facebook off their list.

As content marketing increasingly becomes a pillar in demand generation for B2B marketers, you might be exchanging company emails for downloadable content. How can you use these emails to reach those people with digital advertising on LinkedIn and Facebook, where most people are connected to their personal emails? Metadata.

Facebook has no idea what business relationships

and attributes might exist for each personal profile.

Metadata’s massive proprietary database houses company attributes alongside personal emails, which means that our customers can go create that audience, then we create a pool of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of email addresses that fit the business criteria that our customer created a segment against, and upload those to Facebook. Each person might have one to thirty email addresses we have on file, we’ll upload every single one to increase the chances of matching. Our match rates tend to hover around 35 percent on average; don’t take our word for it, though. Read how G2 raised their Facebook match rate from around 5 percent to 40-50 percent using Metadata.

Now, if you’re particularly scrappy, you might be saying, but I can and do use Facebook for B2B targeting already. Technically speaking on Facebook, you can absolutely target according to “work.” Here’s a list of everything you can target by in the work category:

• Employers
• Industries
• Job Titles
• Office Type

The trouble is the same that we already mentioned: when is the last time you updated your Facebook profile with your current job title and employer?

You could also use custom audiences to retarget folks who have visited your site, subscribed to your newsletter, or made purchases from you before — but what if you need to tap into a new audience? Or target account engagement? Custom Audiences won’t help. Because B2B deals take longer, it makes perfect sense to use Facebook as a brand awareness and lead nurturing tool. Plus, have we mentioned how much cheaper it can be? Median CPC for Facebook is just $ 0.51, whereas LinkedIn’s median is $5.61. But Facebook’s own targeting just isn’t set up for that. That’s where metadata.io comes in.

One of the core pillars of our platform is data and targeting, and this functionality is the core of that pillar. Think of it as corporate to personal matching. Within the Custom Audience tab of our platform, you can simply create a new custom audience based on a number of attributes, from firmographics to intent topics to exact contact or company lists. Concerned about privacy? Don’t be. You can preview audiences, seeing the group you’ve just built’s title, job function, seniority, and organization — all without personally identifiable information (PII).

Metadata’s platform builds the audience, matching as many email addresses as possible with the business attributes you’ve identified. Voila: you know your audience size Facebook (and we also plug in to LinkedIn!). From there, marketers can shift back to where they’re already comfortable working: in the native platform. Execution can also happen within the Metadata platform, which allows for automatic, multivariate experimentation of your ad campaigns.

Just interested in audience lists? We’ve got a brand-new product for that, too. MetaMatch allows B2B advertisers to build custom audiences on Facebook and LinkedIn using firmographic, technographic, and demographic data from our proprietary database. Simply connect your Facebook, LinkedIn and Salesforce accounts, define your target audience from our database, and create your audiences directly on Facebook/Instagram and LinkedIn. If you’re ready to get cost-effective, high quality leads from your target accounts on Facebook, book a demo today.