Top Reasons Your B2B Marketing Strategy Should Include Facebook Live

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Released to all users in January of 2016, Facebook Live is barely one-year-old and is still unknown territory to many. However, its importance to businesses, big, small, and any size in between, shouldn’t be ignored. We’re here to give you 5 reasons your B2B marketing strategy should include Facebook Live.

Campaign ROI

Facebook Live is completely free, making any return on investment from it extremely valuable. Add on your ability to use it to target those already interested in your business, you’re set to run a successful campaign with a great return.

However, any successful marketing campaign takes thoughtful planning, strategy, and execution, and Facebook Live is no different. If you want to get the most out of your effort, you need to consider these questions:

“Why are we planning to do a Facebook Live?”

Are you planning a product demo or an interactive FAQ session? Is your team capitalizing off a recent press release and going Live to casually and quickly talk about it?

The answer to this will stem from what you are doing and will determine if going Live is right for this particular endeavor.

“What are we doing on Facebook Live?”

Are you going to have to sit in a conference room for a QA session? Are you going to walk around the trade show floor? Interview a colleague?

There isn’t a right or wrong way to this part. Your reasoning is reflective of your team’s overall strategy, and it may vary from campaign to campaign.

The answer to this question will stem from why you are choosing to go Live and your chosen strategy. It will also determine if the Live session will be announced ahead of time or launched on the spot and what (if any) the CTA will be.

“When is our organization going Live?”

Even if you choose not to announce that your organization is going Live ahead of time, your team still needs to know when it’s happening. No one important should be finding out about your Live session when the rest of the Facebook world does.

Making sure everyone on your team is on the same page allows everyone to be prepared for the final product. While not being spontaneous may seem counterintuitive to going Live, it is important. If everyone is ready to go, you can mitigate risks for mistakes which could negatively affect campaign performance and, subsequently, ROI.

Looking for ideas on where to start your brainstorming session for Facebook Live? Consider some of the examples above: short product demo, interactive FAQ session, capitalizing on a recent press release to show how excited the office is, or showing some of the faces behind a recent article. Your team could even go Live at a trade show your organization is attending, giving those unable to make it an in-person experience.

Facebook Live utilizes short-form content

Content creation can be one of the biggest bottlenecks in campaign execution. White papers, infographics, videos, and testimonials all take a lot of time and money to research, develop and design. But Facebook Live has changed the game.

Traditionally, creating short-form content, like a short video clip, could mean investing hundreds of dollars to film, animate, and edit a 30-60 second video. In the end, your team has a new piece of valuable content, but it took a lot of time, considerable budget, and specialized skills to get there.

Now, there’s another option to that video process, where your team gets short-form content perfect for audiences with short attention spans. Facebook Live videos are a great alternative to traditional video marketing investments, still fulfilling the challenging need of attention-grabbing content.

Facebook Live content is even more appropriate when we think about people’s attention spans. In 2015, TIME magazine announced that humans now have a shorter attention span (8 seconds) than a goldfish (9 seconds). The 4-second decrease since 2000 means digestible messages and short-form content are crucial to marketing success.

Facebook Live requires very little commitment from both parties — marketing teams don’t have to allocate the budget to create a short video clip, and viewers don’t have to carve out an hour of their days to sit down and give their undivided attention. Facebook Live allows you to reach your audience (and millions of other Facebook users). Those viewers get the information they want in the format they need it: short, consumable, and to the point. In the end, that means “going Live” on Facebook for only a few minutes is not only justified, it’s encouraged.

3. Easily engage a quality audience at scale

B2B organizations of all sizes tend to ignore Facebook for marketing initiatives (maybe besides the occasional content sharing). The most common reason we hear is, “Our audience isn’t on Facebook.” Except…everyone is on Facebook. There are 1.79 BILLION active users worldwide every single day. Surely, of those billions of people, your organization’s target audience is in there somewhere.

The rationale for this objection stems from Facebook being more about social interactions than developing business relationships. But those two ideas aren’t as black and white as they once were. Your audience is on Facebook, but they aren’t there just to stay in touch with friends anymore. Facebook users are looking for content that interests them, even in B2B industries. In fact, 81% of B2B decision makers use online communities to help make purchasing decisions.

With that statistic, we know Facebook users can be quality buyers if you target correctly. Facebook allows you to create targets based on location, job titles, and even interests to forming the perfect audience for your business. You can get them interested in learning more and building a relationship with your organization by providing content they’re interested in, and it’s not one at a time. You can reach them, in the masses, quickly, easily, and for free with Facebook Live.

As a side note, those billions of people spend an average of 50 minutes on Facebook DAILY. That’s more than 6% of a person’s waking time! In a world filled with constant distractions, Facebook’s users are on the site for nearly an hour each day, giving your organization ample opportunity to go Live and easily grab the viewer’s attention without interruption.…Now it’s your job to engage with them!

4. New Facebook app design gets your audience’s attention every time you go Live  

Recently, Facebook released made some big changes to user notification settings. Facebook combined friend requests with other notifications, including ‘likes, shares, comments,’ etc. With this update, most notifications appear together under the globe icon at the bottom right of screens.

For Live notifications only, Facebook added a ‘play’ icon on the bottom left of your screen. Whenever a page you follow or person you’re friends on Facebook with “goes Live”, an individual notification will appear to let you know. In addition to the red pop up notification, all Facebook Live videos will still show up in News Feeds, with the option to “pop out” a miniature version of the video and watch while continuing to scroll through the rest of the News Feed. These changes give Facebook Live the advantage over other types of posts to engage some of the billions of Facebook users.

Even if someone in your audience misses you while your company is Live, he will still get the notification and be able to view, save, share, and interact with your video. So, when will we see you Live?

5. Maximize Content Lifespan and Reach through Repurposing

Facebook live also makes it incredibly easy to repurpose content and maximize its lifespan. Once the Live video is complete, you can save it and use it for other marketing campaigns, promotions, website material, etc.

Check out these ideas for ways to repurpose strategic Facebook Live videos into professional marketing materials:

  • If you used Facebook Live to hold a quick FAQ session, use the video as a quick and easy way to answer common customer questions. Now they don’t have to sift through documents on your website.
  • Instead of hosting a full-blown webinar, your team can hold a Facebook Live session to give a product demo. Awesome! Now, your marketing team can use that in an email nurture, and your sales team can use it as a resource when meeting with leads.

The possibilities to repurpose any and all Facebook Live content is up to your team. I recommend being proactive and determining how it supports your strategy, like you would with any good marketing initiative, before you ever go live.
Has your company tried Facebook Live yet? If so, share your experience with us! If not, what’s stopping you now?

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