How to Target Businesses on Facebook

Targeting other businesses on Facebook can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. The platform is built for connecting with friends, not for sourcing B2B leads, yet it's where your ideal customers - CEOs, marketing directors, and founders - spend their personal time. This guide breaks down exactly how to find and reach those decision-makers with effective ads by using the tools Facebook gives you. We’ll cover the core targeting methods, what kinds of offers actually work, and how to craft ads they won't just scroll past.

Why Targeting Businesses on Facebook Feels Different (And How to Succeed)

The single most important mindset shift for B2B advertising on Facebook is this: you aren't targeting companies, you're targeting the people who work at them. A law firm doesn't have a Facebook profile where it scrolls for fun, but its partners and associates do. A software company doesn't watch videos of its friends' vacations, but its Director of Engineering does.

These individuals are on the platform in a personal capacity. Your goal is not to scream "BUY OUR SOFTWARE!" in their faces. It's to tactfully interrupt their personal scroll with something so relevant to their professional pain points that they can't help but stop and listen. Success means respecting the context. Your ads should feel like a valuable resource or an insightful discovery, not an unsolicited sales pitch.

Before You Spend a Dollar: Pre-Campaign Essentials

Great targeting starts long before you open Facebook Ads Manager. Setting up a campaign without a clear plan is the fastest way to waste money. Nail down these two elements first.

Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

You need to know exactly who you're trying to reach. Go deeper than just a job title. An "Owner" of a 5-person agency has very different problems and motivations than a "VP of Marketing" at a 5,000-person corporation. Get specific. Your ICP is a portrait of the person, not just their professional role.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What are their job titles? (e.g., "Marketing Manager," "Founder," "CEO," "Director of Operations")
• What industry do they work in? (e.g., SaaS, Real Estate, E-commerce, Financial Services)
• What is their company size? (e.g., 1-10 employees, 50-200 employees) Are they the final decision-maker, or do they influence the decision?
• What software or tools do they already use? This can reveal interests and sophistication levels.
• What are their biggest professional frustrations? What keeps them up at night? What does their boss pressure them about? This is where your ad copy will come from.

Craft a Compelling B2B Offer

On Facebook, a direct-to-purchase ad for a high-ticket B2B service is almost guaranteed to fail. Nobody is impulse-buying a $20,000 consulting package while waiting in line for coffee. You need a low-friction, high-value offer to generate a lead - something they can grab now and review later.

These lead magnets work exceptionally well for B2B:

• A detailed e-book or whitepaper solving a specific problem (e.g., "The Founder's Guide to Scaling a Remote Sales Team").
• Registration for an upcoming webinar that teaches a valuable skill.
• A practical template bundle (e.g., "5 Fill-in-the-Blank Content Calendar Templates for SaaS").
• An insightful case study showing how a similar business achieved specific results with your service.
• A free trial or interactive demo of your software.

The offer should educate and build trust. It's the first step in a relationship, not the closing handshake.

Hands-On Guide: Building Your B2B Audience in Ads Manager

With your ICP and offer in hand, you're ready to build your audience. Here are the most effective methods for targeting business professionals on Facebook, ordered from foundational to advanced.

Method 1: The Power of Layering Detailed Targeting

This is where most beginners go wrong. They add a dozen interests and job titles into one big pot and hope for the best. The secret is using Facebook's “Narrow Audience” function, which works like an “AND” statement. It guarantees that someone in your audience must match ALL of your criteria, not just one of them.

Let's walk through an example. Imagine you're selling project management software to marketing agencies.

1. Start with a Broad Interest: In the first targeting box, add interests related to your industry. For this example, you might add interests like "Digital Marketing," "Advertising Agency," or "Social Media Marketing." This group will be massive and include students, enthusiasts, and actual professionals.
2. Narrow with Job Titles: Now, click "Narrow Audience." A new box appears that says, "and MUST ALSO match..." In this box, select a demographic category for Work - >, Job titles. Here, you’ll add titles like "Business Owner," "Founder," "CEO," "Marketing Director," and "Account Manager."
3. Narrow Again with Behaviors or Demographics: You can even add another layer. Click "Narrow Further" and you could, for example, target "Business page admins" to filter for people who manage pages, or filter by education level or age if relevant to your ICP.

By doing this, you're not just targeting anyone interested in marketing. You are targeting someone who is interested in marketing AND has a job title like Founder AND is a business page admin. This filters out the aspiring marketers from the actual decision-makers, giving you a much higher-quality audience.

Method 2: Leveraging Your Existing Data with Custom Audiences

If you have existing data, this is the most powerful targeting functionality Facebook offers. Custom Audiences let you advertise to people who already know who you are. These are excellent for re-engagement and an absolute must for any B2B advertiser.

Here are the most useful Custom Audience sources:

• Customer List: This is a game-changer. You can upload a CSV file with your current customer email addresses or phone numbers. Facebook will securely hash the data and match it to user profiles. You can use this audience to upsell existing clients or, more importantly, to exclude them from your lead generation campaigns so you don’t pay to acquire customers you already have.
• Website Visitors: Using the Meta Pixel (a small snippet of code on your website), you can create an audience of everyone who has visited your website. Better yet, you can create audiences of people who visited specific, high-intent pages, like your pricing or demo booking page. Retargeting these warm leads is often highly profitable.
• Lead Form Interactions: Created a lead gen ad on Facebook? You can make an audience of people who opened your form but didn't submit it. Re-engage them with a different ad or a simplified offer to win them back.
• Video Views: If you use video in your ads (and you should!), you can create audiences based on how much of the video someone watched. Someone who watched 75% or 95% of your 2-minute explainer video is showing a strong signal of interest and is an excellent prospect to retarget.

Method 3: Scaling Success with Lookalike Audiences

Once you find something that works, Lookalike Audiences are how you scale it. You provide Facebook with a "source" Custom Audience (like your best customer list), and its algorithm goes out and finds millions of other users who share similar characteristics and behaviors.

The quality of your source audience is everything. Here’s a hierarchy of the best source audiences for creating B2B Lookalikes:

1. A list of your highest-value customers. This is the gold standard. They've already paid you and represent exactly who you want more of.
2. A list of all customers. Still excellent, but less refined.
3. A list of qualified leads who converted from any source. (e.g., webinar attendees, e-book downloaders).
4. A Custom Audience of people who visited a conversion page like your thank you page for a demo request.

When creating a Lookalike Audience, start with a 1% audience size for the target country. This creates the most concentrated, highest-matching audience. Once you get results, you can test expanding to 2% or 3% to reach more people.

Your Targeting is Only Half the Battle: Creating Ads B2B Prospects Won't Ignore

The world's best targeting won't save a bad ad. Your ad creative and copy must stop the scroll and connect with the professional on the other side of the screen.

Speak to Pain Points, Not Just Features

Your ICP research is critical here. Don't lead with "Our software integrates with X and Y." Lead with the problem they're facing. Instead of talking about features, talk about outcomes.

• Before (Feature-focused): "Our accounting software offers automated invoicing and expense tracking."
• After (Pain-point focused): "Tired of spending the last week of every quarter chasing invoices and sorting receipts? Get your time back."

This reframe connects what you do to a real-world annoyance they experience every day.

Use Professional, Yet Authentic, Creative

Stuffy corporate stock photos are an instant scroll signal on Facebook. Your creative needs to look native to the platform while still representing your brand professionally.

• Simple Video Explainers: A short, 30-60 second video showing how your product solves a key problem is incredibly effective.
• Talking-Head Videos: Filming a short, direct piece of advice from the founder or an expert on your team builds immediate authority and trust. It feels authentic.
• Carousel Ads: Use carousels to break down a concept, show before-and-after results, or walk through a few key benefits of your lead magnet.
• Image Ads with Clear Value: Use clean graphics with a strong headline that clearly states the offer, such as "Free E-Book: The 5 Biggest Mistakes SaaS Startups Make."

A Clear Call to Action (CTA)

Finally, tell them exactly what you want them to do next. The button should reflect the action. If you're offering an e-book, the CTA should be "Download." If it's a webinar, use "Sign Up" or "Reserve Your Spot." Be specific and make it clear what they get by clicking.

Final Thoughts

Finding your B2B customers on Facebook isn’t about some secret trick, it's a strategic process. It starts with deeply understanding who you're targeting as a person, crafting a valuable offer for them, and then using Facebook's powerful layering, custom, and lookalike audiences to put that offer in front of them repeatedly. Test, learn, and refine, and you'll soon find that the world's largest social network is also an incredibly effective B2B marketing channel.

Running successful paid campaigns also depends on a strong organic presence to build trust and authority with potential customers who check out your page. This is where consistent, valuable content comes in. To make that happen without the daily scramble, we built Postbase, a social media management tool designed for how social works today. Our visual calendar lets you plan all of your content - especially short-form video for company updates or case studies - across all platforms from one clean dash. It simplifies scheduling so you can create a cohesive strategy for both your paid and organic efforts, ensuring your message stays consistent everywhere.