How to Target B2B on Facebook

Forget the myth that Facebook is only for reaching consumers. B2B marketers who ignore the platform are leaving a massive opportunity on the table because the decision-makers you want to reach are scrolling their Facebook feeds just like everyone else. This guide will walk you through the exact strategies to find, target, and engage your B2B audience on Facebook using custom audiences, layered targeting, and value-driven content.

Rethinking B2B on Facebook: Your Customers Are Already Here

Success in B2B marketing on Facebook starts with a mindset shift. You're not trying to sell enterprise software between photos of a friend's vacation and a baby announcement. You’re building brand awareness, demonstrating thought leadership, and establishing trust so that when a business decision needs to be made, your company is the first one that comes to mind.

The people who sign checks, manage departments, and make purchasing decisions are individuals with lives outside the office. They scroll Facebook on their lunch breaks, in the evening, and on weekends. Your goal is to meet them where they are with content that educates, informs, or entertains in a professional context. You can build a B2B funnel on Facebook, but it hinges on pinpoint-accurate audience targeting.

The Foundation of B2B Targeting: Custom & Lookalike Audiences

Instead of guessing who your audience is, the most powerful way to start is by telling Facebook exactly who you want to reach. This is done through Custom Audiences and their powerful counterpart, Lookalike Audiences. They are, by far, the most effective tools in your B2B advertising toolbox.

Step 1: Build Your Custom Audiences

Custom Audiences are created from your own data sources. These are warm audiences who already have some relationship with your brand, making them ideal for both retargeting campaigns and as a source for finding new prospects.

Customer List

This is the gold standard for B2B targeting. You can upload a CSV file of your existing leads, email subscribers, or customers directly into Facebook's Ads Manager. Facebook then hashes this data and matches it to user profiles on its platform.

• How to use it: Go to your Audiences dashboard in Ads Manager, create a new Custom Audience, and select "Customer List." Upload your file, and Facebook will create an audience of matched users.
• Why it works: You’re reaching people who already know you. You can run campaigns to upsell existing customers, nurture cold leads, or exclude current customers from top-of-funnel prospecting ads to avoid wasting ad spend. More importantly, this list becomes the perfect source for a Lookalike Audience.

Website Visitors

Using the Meta Pixel (a small piece of code you install on your website), you can create audiences based on user activity. This is incredibly powerful for retargeting based on intent.

• High-Intent Audiences: Create separate audiences for people who visited your pricing page, a specific service page, or your “contact us” page. These people have shown strong interest and are prime for a targeted follow-up ad.
• Content-Based Audiences: Group users who have read specific blog posts. For example, if someone read an article titled "5 Ways to Improve Warehouse Efficiency," you can retarget them with an ad for your warehouse management software.
• Time-Based Audiences: You can define the duration, such as "visitors in the last 30 days." A shorter window is better for retargeting high-intent actions, while a longer window (e.g., 180 days) is great for general brand awareness.

Engagement Audiences

These audiences are made up of people who have already interacted with your brand directly on Facebook or Instagram. They are low-hanging fruit because they’ve actively shown interest in your content.

• Video Viewers: Create an audience of people who watched a certain percentage of your videos (e.g., 50% or 75%). Someone who watched most of your two-minute case study video is a highly qualified lead.
• Facebook Page/Instagram Profile Engagers: This includes anyone who has visited your page, liked a post, commented, shared, or saved something. They are familiar with your brand and receptive to seeing more of your content.
• Lead Form Submitters: If you run on-platform lead generation campaigns, you can create and retarget audiences of people who opened your form but didn't submit it, or those who did submit it.

Step 2: Scale with Lookalike Audiences

Once you have a high-quality Custom Audience, you can ask Facebook to find millions of new people who share similar characteristics. This is what's known as a Lookalike Audience, and it’s how you scale your B2B prospecting efforts efficiently.

The process is straightforward:

1. Choose your source audience: The quality of your Lookalike depends entirely on the quality of your source. A Custom Audience built from your best customers (highest LTV) will produce a much better Lookalike than one built from all of your website visitors.
2. Select your location: Choose the country or countries you want to target.
3. Choose your audience size: This is set as a percentage of the total Facebook population in your chosen location. A "1%" lookalike is the smallest and most similar group to your source audience. A "10%" lookalike is much broader. Always start with 1%. It gives you the highest-quality audience. You can test larger percentages later.

For example, you could upload a list of your top 200 clients, create a Custom Audience, and then generate a 1% Lookalike Audience in the United States. Facebook will then find the top 1% of US users who most closely resemble your best customers based on thousands of data points.

Using Detailed Targeting for Cold Prospecting

What if you don't have a large customer list or significant website traffic yet? You can still find your B2B audience using Facebook's Detailed Targeting options. The key is to think creatively and layer different targeting types to narrow down your audience from millions to a highly relevant few thousand.

Target by Job Title, Employer, and Industry

While some of these options have been reduced over the years, they are still valuable for B2B. In the Detailed Targeting section of your ad set, you can find fields for:

• Job Titles: Target users who have listed titles like "Marketing Manager," "Chief Financial Officer," or "Software Engineer" on their profile.
• Employers: Want to get your solution in front of people who work at specific companies? You can target by employer. This is great for account-based marketing (ABM) approaches.
• Industry: You can select broad industries like "Information Technology," "Healthcare," or "Financial Services."

Target by Interests & Behaviors

This is where you need to think like your customer. What do they care about? What tools do they use? Who do they follow?

• Software and Tools: Target users with interests in specific B2B software like Salesforce, HubSpot, Asana, or QuickBooks.
• Industry Publications & Leaders: Target interests like Harvard Business Review, TechCrunch, or industry-specific influencers they might follow.
• Industry Events: People interested in conferences like Dreamforce or INBOUND are clearly engaged in their professional space.
• Professional Associations: Target users with interests in organizations relevant to your field, like the "American Marketing Association."
• B2B-related Behaviors: Look for behavioral categories like "Business page admins" or "Small business owners." These are broad but can be very effective when layered with other targeting.

The Secret Sauce: Layering Your Targeting

You almost never want to use just one detailed targeting option. The power is in combining them to create a hyper-specific audience profile. Use the "Narrow Audience" function to specify that users must match all of your criteria, not just one.

Here’s an example of how to go from broad to specific:

1. Wide Net: People who live in Canada who are interested in "Software as a Service (SaaS)." Audience size: several million.
2. First Layer (Job Role): Now, click "Narrow Audience." Add the requirement that they must also list a job title like "Founder," "CEO," or "Marketing Director." Audience size: now in the hundreds of thousands.
3. Second Layer (Behavior): Click "Narrow Audience" again. Now add that they must also match the "Small business owner" behavior category. Audience size: now a much more manageable and highly relevant audience of a few thousand people.

This layered audience of Canadian small business owners in leadership roles who are interested in SaaS is far more likely to respond to your ad than just the initial broad interest group.

Beyond the Ads: Organic Strategies That Build Trust

Paid advertising is only one part of the equation. Your brilliant targeting will fall flat if your content doesn't resonate. For B2B, content shouldn't scream "buy now." It should focus on building authority and providing value.

• Optimize Your Business Page: Treat your Facebook Page like a mini-landing page. Your 'About' section should clearly state who you help and how you help them. Pin a compelling case study video or a link to a helpful whitepaper at the top of your feed.
• Post Value-Driven Content: Stop posting promotional graphics. Instead, share behind-the-scenes glimpses of your company culture, client success stories, short video tutorials that solve a common problem, or insights from your latest blog post. This content positions you as a helpful expert, not just a vendor.
• Engage in Relevant Groups: Find and join Facebook Groups where your ideal clients hang out. But do not join just to paste links to your site - this will get you banned. Instead, participate authentically. Answer questions, provide thoughtful advice, and share helpful resources (even ones that aren't yours). By establishing yourself as a resource, people will naturally start checking out your profile and your business.

Final Thoughts

Successfully targeting a B2B audience on Facebook is a blend of art and science. It requires moving past broad assumptions and leveraging the platform's powerful tools to create laser-focused audiences with Custom Audiences, Lookalikes, and strategic layering. Combine that technical precision with value-first content, and you’ll effectively build the trust and brand awareness that a B2C-centric platform can really deliver for B2B.

Once you’ve honed these targeting strategies, consistency is everything. To make those campaigns work, you need a steady stream of valuable content, but wrestling with clunky tools built for a different era of social media can drain your time and energy. We built Postbase because we knew there had to be a better way to manage today's content, especially short-form video. Our visual calendar, reliable scheduling, and unified inbox help you plan and publish consistently across all your platforms, so you can focus on building relationships with that highly-targeted B2B audience you’ve worked so hard to find.