Look out LinkedIn because Meta is coming… Traditionally seen as the king of the B2B space, the professional social network might soon have some big competition from Facebook.

Meta has launched new B2B advertising options that it says can reach anyone across any size business.

Meta Support

“Meta is uniquely positioned to support B2B marketers in today’s world seeking to forge meaningful connections between people and businesses.

With more than 200M businesses and 2.9 billion people using our apps daily, Meta is a destination for B2B marketers looking to drive business-to-business engagement and establish a connection with their customers.”

It’s all about the Benjamins

Meta is almost certainly trying to take this slice of the advertising pie because of the impact Apple’s ATT update has had on the app. Facebook’s ads are now less effective than before the changes, which let people opt out of sharing personal information with third-party applications.

Facebook’s reach will be of keen interest to B2B marketers. It believes it can serve adverts to nearly three billion people, including business and IT decision-makers, who use Facebook daily. That reach will put advertisers in front of critical business decision-makers at scale, believes Meta.

Meta

“On top of our scale, advertising solutions and targeting segments, Meta is a destination for B2B advertisers to evoke an emotional connection with core customers and drive business outcomes.”

Meta says there will be four B2B targeting options for advertisers. These are verbatim descriptions of each segment.

• IT decision-makers
  • A B2B audience segment that targets ads to people who are IT decision-makers based on their job titles
• Business decision-maker titles and interests
  • A B2B audience segment that targets ads to people who are business decision-makers based on their job titles and interests.
• Business decision-maker
  • A B2B audience segment that targets ads to people who are business decision-makers in engineering/IT, operations, HR, strategy or marketing, based on their job titles.
• New active business
  • Admins of engaged businesses that were created in the last 6, 12 or 24 months. (Note: This reflects 3 segments, with one for each timeframe.)

Detailed Targeting run-down

Targeting of this nature falls under Detailed Targeting.

You can use Detailed Targeting to reach people based on:

• Ads they click on
• Pages they engage with
• Activities that people engage in on Facebook related to travel preferences
• Device usage
• Demographics like age, gender and location
• Or the mobile device used and the network connection speed

Meta Help

“Detailed targeting is a targeting option available in the “Audience” section of ad set creation that allows you to refine the group of people we show your ads to. You can do this with information such as additional demographics, interests and behaviours.”

You can create a Detailed Targeting audience by following these steps:

1. Chose a campaign objective.
2. Go to your ad set and select your Audience preferences by location, age, gender and language then by Detailed Targeting.
3. Next, refine your audience to include demographics, interests or behaviours that you want to target.

It’s helpful to note that the details you select aren’t mutually exclusive.

So, if you add four interests (comics, sport, TV, books), Meta will search for people who match your chosen demographics and interests.

You can narrow the audience to exclude demographics, interests or behaviours, or you can include and exclude a mix of demographics, interests or behaviours.

Cutting LinkedIn’s lunch

As mentioned at the top, LinkedIn is typically the go-to B2B advertising hub, and it’s been doing well from that, with 2021 ad revenue growing three times faster than the B2B category as a whole. LinkedIn revenue grew 26% in the most recent quarter, while user sessions were up 22%.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, April 2022

“Now, on to LinkedIn. We once again saw record engagement, as more than 830 million professionals used the platform to connect, learn, grow, and get hired.

Our Marketing Solutions business continues to thrive as we offer advertisers high reach and ROI.”

With Meta on the horizon, maybe it’s time for LinkedIn to batten down the hatches.

*Image: krakenimages via Unsplash.