Targeting Business Owners? 9 Effective Strategies To Reach Them Using Facebook Ads

After working with many businesses to refine their digital marketing and advertising strategies, I noticed that one of the biggest struggles and the deciding factor of the success of their Facebook advertising strategies is finding who to target.

More specifically, how to find your target customers and what to add to the Ad Set of your Facebook campaign.

If Facebook ads have you feeling overwhelmed, beat down, or stressed, you’re in the right place.

Learn How To Set Up A Facebook Campaign Here

You know your audience best but let me show you how I target business owners in my Facebook Ad campaigns, and hopefully it helps to give you ideas on what to add to your Ad Sets!

And for those whose target customers are indeed business owners, this is exactly for you!

Facebook Audience Insights

To start, go to Facebook Audience Insights to know more about your existing audience and to spy on your competitors. The breakdown of their interest would give you an idea what "Interests" to add to your Ad Sets.

Facebook Pixel

Next, make sure you have installed Facebook Pixel on your site. It's a MUST.

Facebook Pixel is a little piece of code that gives you better insights into your audiences and campaigns. You can do things like:

• Measure your conversions across multiple devices.
• Create dynamic ads for Facebook users who visited your website.
• Optimise your audience to reach Facebook users most likely to act.

Once a Facebook Pixel is installed on your site, you can get a better grasp on things like brand awareness. This is because you’ll know if someone converted after simply seeing your ad even if they didn’t interact with it.

Essential tips to optimise how you target business owners on Facebook

Before we move on to Ad Sets categories, let’s go over some essential tips to optimise how you target business owners on Facebook:

• Optimise your business page: Make sure your brand and page content are on-point before running a new targeted campaign.
• Set up specific landing pages: Facebook lets you create in-app landing pages to nurture your leads. If you don’t use Facebook’s landing page feature, you need to  create your own dedicated landing pages for each campaign. You are wasting your money if you are simply sending them to your website homepage.

• You can combine multiple ad categories to create a unique persona: You don’t have to use the audiences below in isolation. Layer relevant categories like job title, industry, and technology to create distinct audiences for each of your buyer personas.
• Consider the stage of the buying cycle: Using your analytics tool, do your best to design each campaign for a buyer’s specific stage of the funnel. Your Facebook B2B advertising will be much more relevant and it boost your chances of conversion.
• Keep is simple: Each paid Facebook campaign deserves its own call-to-action. A single CTA keeps visitors focused on the task and prevents any confusion. 

How to Target Business Owners on Facebook: 9 Strategies to Reach the Right People

Note: Not every targeting strategy below would be a good fit for your business. Pick the ones that fit your ICA (Ideal Customer Avatar).

1. Target Business Owners on Facebook with Lookalike Audiences

After you link a Facebook Pixel with your website, you can create custom lookalike audiences. Start with existing criteria you’ve collected on your sites, Facebook and Instagram. For example, you might start with audiences like:

• Your email/customer lists
• B2Bs who visited your website as prospects and converted into leads
• Leads who ended up converting into customers
• Your most loyal customers or accounts
• People who bought a specific product

Facebook will use its collected user data to find other people who behave similarly online like the audience who have interacted with your business - hence "Lookalike". This comes in handy for creating account-based marketing campaigns too.

You can also optimise your lookalike audience with data on your top-performing customers.

After you have a few lookalike audiences ready to go, you can further narrow down your business owners to target on Facebook with location, age group, job role, industry, and more.

2. Target Page Admins with Facebook B2B Advertising

Targeting page admins alone isn’t enough. You don’t want to waste money reaching a 15-year-old behind a meme page. Instead, target business page admins, admins in specific industries, or combine other categories like job title.

3. Target Business Owners on Facebook via Media Publications

Which websites, blogs, or news sources do your ideal business owners read?Facebook Audience Insights will tell you. Simply plug the name into the Detailed Targeting to target their Facebook followers.

4. Target Businesses on Facebook with B2B Job Titles

Who is the decision maker for your B2B products/services? Try targeting specific job titles.

For example, you could create unique Facebook campaigns for distinct roles within the same company as part of an account-based marketing strategy. To target business owners, go right for the gold!

5. Target Unique Interests and Industries

Facebook’s advanced ad segments give you so many opportunities and subcategories to target like banking, design, technology, and more.

6. Reach New Businesses With This Trick On Facebook Ad

You’ll want to combine ad categories here to target business owners on Facebook. Start by adding owner as a job title. Next, tell the ad tool to narrow users who just started a new job.

8. Target B2B Who Use Facebook Payments

This clever category lets you target people who spent money on Facebook within the past three or nine months. This lets you know that the people targeted are key decision-makers, or B2Bs in control of company budgets.

9. Target Business Owners on Facebook via Your Followers (or a Competitor’s)

Facebook makes it super easy to reach your competitors’ customers. Just plug in a competitor’s page (or a few):

And if you're targeting decision makers, narrow this further by adding your target job title to reach owners or C-level employees. Alternatively, reach the Facebook friends of your current followers who match the demographic of a business owner.

Figure Out How to Target The Right Audience Using Facebook Ad in a Way that Works for You

Don’t get discouraged if your Facebook advertising doesn’t deliver the results you want right away. Instead of tossing the entire campaign away and start again (or non-stop creating brand new Facebook Ad creatives and copy), understand what are the important key metrics.

Knowing how to read the data on your Facebook Ads Manager would help you adjust and perfect your campaign accordingly.

Want to learn more on how to set up the perfect Facebook Advertising Framework? We have a FREE masterclass to get you started. Just click here to access it!