I came across this report on Nielsen Online which highlights Facebook’s growth in global audience numbers. I was a bit surprised when I read the following statement:
“…Facebook whose greatest growth has come from people aged 35-49 years of age (+24.1 million). From December 2007 through December 2008, Facebook added almost twice as many 50-64 year old visitors (+13.6 million) than it has added under 18 year old visitors (+7.3 million).”
I guess I was surprised because the general sense I seem to get from many b2b marketing groups is that FB is still just for college kids -when in fact the fastest growing audience seems to be a pretty common b2b demographic.
So, here’s a quick example of how it can work: Let’s say you qualify leads based on BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Time line) criteria, you may recognize that an influencer and perhaps even decision maker (authority criteria) are predominately male from 35-49 in age (your Sales team can help validate this info for you if you don’t already have it). From there, you can start building out a targeted campaign within Facebook by location, age, sex, education, and company name as means of reaching this audience type.
Even though this demographic filtering technology is still young, it might be far less expensive then trying out a highly competitive Adword campaign, by comparison. By digging around for some of your competitors on Facebook, you can gauge whether this may be the case.
What’s more, it’s not uncommon to experience a fair amount of false-positives with some of the more general keyword terms in a PPC campaign, even when you have a kick-ass landing page and high quality score. Long Tail terms aside, by mixing Facbeook’s demographic based ad approach to your online marketing strategy, you could expose your B2B brand to an ever growing internet population that may result in some real ROI.
