How to generate more leads at a lower cost with Clearbit and Facebook

Facebook is essential to your B2B ad strategy

B2B marketers typically focus on LinkedIn and overlook Facebook as an effective channel to acquire B2B buyers, but Facebook has more monthly active users than any other social media platform – more than LinkedIn, Twitter, and Reddit combined. With nearly 37% of the population using Facebook, it’s likely that buyers in your target audience are on the platform.

In addition to having an extremely large user base, Facebook is a much more cost-effective channel than LinkedIn. Robert Bethell, Head of Demand Generation at RStudio generated two times the number of qualified leads at a fraction of the cost ($5-20/registration vs. $50-100/registration) by using Facebook.

With customer acquisition costs increasing and budgets decreasing, Facebook can be a scalable and cost-efficient ad channel to add to your mix.

Overcoming the limitations of Facebook audience targeting

While Facebook offers broader reach and lowers cost, there is one major challenge B2B marketers face when trying to build effective ad programs – native targeting options are limited.

In addition, in 2022, Facebook removed detailed interest targeting options, making it more challenging for marketers to ensure they are reaching the right people. And, increased privacy regulations and recent iOS updates have continued to make smart targeting a challenge.

To combat rising costs and decreasing budgets, marketers need to focus on acquiring only the best-fit leads in their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). As Jonathan Bland, Co-Founder at Omni Lab says “I could have the best creative, the best offer. But if it’s targeted at the wrong person, no dice.”

Efficient marketers today turn to Clearbit to take advantage of the audience size and scalability of Facebook, but with stronger targeting options. As Charlie Liang, Former Head of Demand Generation at Lattice shares, "Clearbit Advertising gives us access to our target demographic on Facebook that we previously didn't have with Facebook's native targeting capabilities."

How to acquire more leads at a lower cost with Clearbit and Facebook

1. Identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Before building or launching any ads, you need to clearly define your Ideal Customer Profile. This ICP definition should be used across your sales and marketing efforts to ensure everyone is aligned on the same targets.

Here’s how to define your ICP in 5 steps:

• Build your data foundation: Enrich your source of truth with accurate and fresh firmographic and technographic data (like company size, technologies used, industry, etc.) for accounts in your database.

• Define your success criteria: Ask yourself what your business is trying to accomplish. If you’re looking to maximize revenue growth you may want your success criteria to be a high annual contract value (ACV). If your main goal is long-term customer retention, you may want to focus on finding companies with a high lifetime value.

• Identify your best-fit customers: Utilizing the data foundation you established in step one and the success criteria you selected in step two, analyze historical data to gather quantitative learnings on your best-fit customers.

• Analyze for shared traits: Analyze your data set for shared firmographic and technographic traits like industry, number of employees, or country, for example.

• Outline your ICP: Based on the shared traits established in the step above, create a silhouette of your ICP

Read the book to learn how to define and scale your ICP.

2. Build an audience targeting a sub-segment of your ICP in Clearbit

To create hyper-focused ads, you’ll want to build sub-segments within your ICP. Your ICP is a jumping-off point, but it is important to refine your audiences and tailor your creative to drive real results.

This can be done using Clearbit’s Data Activation Platform where you’ll have access to over 100 individual and company-level attributes.

For example, your ICP may be B2B SaaS companies in the United States using Salesforce, but for more targeted messaging and offers, you can create different sub-segments. If marketing executives are one of your key personas, you can build an audience to target them specifically.

These audiences in Clearbit identify existing contacts and accounts in your CRM as well as net-new (from a dataset of over 44 million companies and 350 million contacts), expanding your reach.

3. Sync your audience to Facebook to build personalized ad campaigns

Once you’ve built your audiences in Clearbit, you can sync them directly to Facebook. This enables you to create extremely personalized ads that are more likely to convert.

Here are some best practices for creating great ad creative:

• Provide insights in the ad: Don’t save the good stuff for once someone clicks. Give potential buyers thought-provoking and useful information directly in the ad.
• Get creative and don’t be afraid to stand out: Think outside the box. Creative ideas are more likely to pop in the newsfeed.
• Speak to the needs of each segment: Make sure to craft your creative to speak to the challenges of your different audiences.
• Use a content matrix to find topics that resonate: To better understand your buyers, we recommend using a content matrix, like the one below created by Omni Lab.

With a highly-targeted audience and custom creative, you’ll be running high-converting, cost-effective ads in no time.

How Directive Consulting lowered their cost per opportunity by 63% with Clearbit

Tim Davidson, Senior Digital Marketing Director at Directive Consulting, recognized that the team couldn’t achieve scale and meet their revenue targets with LinkedIn. He knew that they had a great offer and strong creative, but the cost was too high and the audience was limited on LinkedIn.

Tim wanted to branch out to Facebook, but native targeting options are limited for B2B businesses. Utilizing Clearbit’s extensive dataset of more than 44 million companies and 350 million contacts, Tim was able to identify and build his target audience: individuals with titles of CMO, CRO, VP of Marketing, VP of Demand Gen, and Managers and Directors of Digital Marketing at B2B SasS companies. Tim then synced his audiences directly to Facebook and launched personalized ads.

With advanced targeting options, the cost per opportunity on Facebook was 63% lower than what they had been seeing with LinkedIn-sponsored content.