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There are tons of ways in which B2B SaaS marketers can use Facebook ads.
But coming up with fresh & bright ideas, can get taxing at sometimes. Those are the days, when you want to take inspiration from brands in your niche and see what’s working from them.
So here we are, sharing with you 21 Facebook ad ideas for B2B SaaS businesses. These creative examples from successful companies have tons of takeaways and will help you inspire your next Facebook campaign.
Here they are:
- Encourage Your Audience To Sign Up For A Demo
- Target Your Audience Based on Language & Region
- Book Sales Calls
- Offer Rewards To Increase Product Usage
- Try A New Low Risk CTA
- Offer A Sneak Peek At Pricing Options
- Promote Product Launches & New Features
- Highlight A Use Case
- Offer An Inside Look At Your Product Dashboard
- Display Testimonials
- Emphasize Your Brand’s Approachability
- Use Video Ads To Demonstrate The Benefits Of Your Product
- Share Case Studies
- Promote Your Blog Posts
- Promote Exclusive Research
- Promote Guides & Whitepapers
- Promote Webinars
- Promote An Upcoming Podcast
- Sell A Course
- Highlight Feature Integrations
- Promote Online & Offline Events
Now that your gears are turning, we’re going to show you the best way to put each of these ideas into action. How do we know what’s best?
Last month we wrote an extensive post analyzing 100 Facebook ads from top B2B SaaS companies. We shared a number of key takeaways—how B2B marketers can create a testing framework, what’s trending in design and copy, and so on.
We also studied the good ads and the not-so-good ads to determine what separates the best from the rest. Like we did, you can learn a lot from these successful B2B Facebook ads.
So let’s get started, shall we?
Facebook Ad Ideas For B2B SaaS Business
👉 Encourage Your Audience To Sign Up For A Demo
For B2B SaaS businesses, demos matter a lot—as marketers we all know that. In order to bring in consistent revenue, businesses need to focus on adding more and more demo requests to their pipeline.
Below is an example of demo ad by Housecall Pro. While advertising their demo, is a great tactic used by the company, the CTA button doesn’t align with the objective—‘Learn More’ promotes awareness rather than conversion.
A CTA like ‘Call Now’, ‘Contact Us’ or ‘Sign Up’ would be better suited at this stage. And of course we can’t forget that engaging copy is essential to draw in the audience and encourage conversions.
In comparison, here’s an excellent example of Salesforce using a CTA that coordinates with the copy. Also check out how they use humour to entice users.
👉Target Your Audience Based On Language & Region
Facebook’s Dynamic Ads feature automatically translates ads into different languages. These ads, according to Facebook, “automatically show the right products to people who have expressed interest on your website, in your app or elsewhere on the internet.” For B2B SaaS businesses, this is a great opportunity to tap into your audience at scale, without much effort.
Here’s an example from SEMrush, an SEO tool with a global audience. The company published this ad in several languages to attract customers, including Italian, and tested two variations of the ad. (Side note: Dynamic Ads on Facebook allows marketers to test up to six total languages with five variations.)
Furthermore, targeting your customers in their preferred language is the best way to attract business. Take Spanish, for example—in the US, Spanish speakers make up a significant portion of the population.
Facebook conducted a study and found that “US Hispanics’ language preference also extends to ads. 79% of Spanish Dominant, 82% of Bilingual and 60% of English Dominant research participants surveyed think brands should advertise in both Spanish and English.
“What’s more, on average US Hispanics surveyed who saw static ads for products in Spanish were 1.40x more likely to agree that they wanted to buy the products than those who saw the same ads in English.”
Needless to say, this perception extends to B2B consumers as well: Advertise in their native language, and you’ll get better results.
👉 Book Sales Calls
Using Facebook ads to book sales calls for your B2B SaaS business? Well…why not? Here’s an interesting example from Optimove. What’s really exciting about this ad is the image of an actual employee. Showing a real human (with a name) inspires curiosity, which in turn attracts more clicks.
It’s safe to assume that more clicks = more leads.
Upon clicking the CTA, the visitor is directed to a well thought-out landing page:
The company’s end goal is to fill up their employee’s calendar with sales demos, and given the ingenuity of the ad, the tactic is bound to work because it isn’t showing any stock image, but a company employee with a real name—something that they are more likely to trust.
👉 Offer Rewards To Increase Product Usage
As a B2B SaaS business, you want more and more decision-makers to interact with your product. There are a number of ways to attract more users (see the other 21 ideas in this post), but sometimes you’ve got to unleash your creativity and disseminate your message in out-of-the-box ways.
G2 Crowd, for example, offers a reward (in the form of coffee or Amazon gift cards) to attract potential users. If you’re on their mailing list, chances are you’ve received an email like this:
But instead of limiting this reward offer to their existing user base, the company uses Facebook ads to amplify their reach and encourage participation in their b2b referral campaign:
If your B2B SaaS business offers a rewards and referrals program like G2 then Facebook ads are a great tactic to use—not only will this tactic help you reach a wider audience it will significantly boost their interaction with your product. Additionally, integrating Facebook ads reporting can provide valuable insights into the performance of your ad campaigns, allowing you to optimize targeting and messaging for better results.
👉 Try A New Low Risk CTA
Among the plethora of SaaS products that offer self-serve and enterprise solutions, there are still a few that allow instant downloads.
Here’s how Framer uses straightforward copy and a low-risk CTA button such as ‘Signup’ to encourage app downloads instead of using a high-risk CTA like ‘Learn More’ that requires multiple actions on the user’s part.
However, Framer can do better by replacing the word “sign up” with “try it now”. The idea of trying something is a low risk action. No one is afraid to try something. Signing up is more high risk as it implies giving something to get something back.
👉 Offer A Sneak Peek At Pricing Options
Feel that highlighting your competitive pricing can get you more leads? Then try displaying prices in your Facebook ads. Linode uses the carousel format to share its various plans and pricing options:
PDFfiller, on the other hand, puts the price in the copy and hammers home the point with a customer quote about “reasonable pricing”:
👉 Promote Product Launches & New Features
B2B SaaS businesses that offer subproducts or Chrome extensions can use Facebook ads to make their audience aware of their various offerings. In the example below, Vidyard offers free downloads of GoVideo, one of its subproducts. Image, copy, headline—all the elements of the ad plainly lay out the benefits of the product:
👉 Highlight A Use Case
Your B2B SaaS business may have numerous use cases, each appealing to a different user. But that’s where you can harness the power of Facebook ads to showcase each use type.
Here’s a good example by Adobe Lightroom highlighting its geometry tool. The video-based ad plays to the idea that we hate misaligned images and reveals how Adobe Lightroom can fix them:
👉 Offer An Inside Look At Your Product Dashboard
Seeing your software in action is enough to entice some buyers. B2B SaaS marketers can leverage this psychology and give potential customers a peek at their product dashboard through Facebook ads.
Marketers can do this by either going for a text-based ad that makes use of a well captured & design elevated product screenshot or they can use a video-based ad that displays the product dashboard.
Toggl, Salesflare, and PipeDrive all use this tactic in their Facebook ads:
Being able to visualize themselves using the product will make the purchase decision easier for potential buyers.
👉 Display Testimonials
We all know the power of social proof—reviews, testimonials, case studies, etc.—for getting more leads. That’s because people trust the opinions of other people. Leveraging social proof through Facebook ads is a good way to build trust with potential clients and score leads.
Chargebee uses client testimonials as graphics in text-based ads:
Meanwhile Exponea created a video-based ad with a client’s testimonial:
👉 Emphasize Your Brand’s Approachability
Good people do business with good people. Ever heard that before? Well, I just made it up. But it’s true—and it’s a wonderful premise for your Facebook ads.
How do you convince your audience that you’re friendly and approachable? By adding trust icons and client numbers to your Facebook ad copy. Emphasizing the number (and caliber) of clients you have tells your prospect two things about your business:
- A business similar to theirs already trusts your product
- You are pleasant to work with—otherwise, you wouldn’t keep all those clients around
Want to try this tactic in your own Facebook ads? Take inspiration from Officevibe:
👉 Use Video Ads To Demonstrate The Benefits Of Your Product
With an average attention span of 8 seconds, today’s audiences can be difficult to engage. Thankfully, video offers a ray of hope for B2B marketers. You can use video in creative ways to tout your product’s benefits.
Grammarly seems to have mastered the Facebook video ad. The editing tool’s bite-size videos demonstrate the benefits of using its product in various scenarios—without losing the audience’s attention. Here’s an example:
What’s also exciting is the optimum use of emojis (5 stars) in the news feed link description which makes the ad pop up for the user.
👉 Share Case Studies With Well Known Brands
Facebook ads come in handy when you want to show prospects how you helped another business solve a problem. While you may create case studies for all your client, highlighting the ones which are well known help can help in establishing credibility and cutting through the noise.
In the example below, Vimeo leverages social proof by touting the success that another well-known brand (Lululemon) has found with live video:
👉 Promote Your Blog Posts
As a B2B SaaS business, you create a ton of content to engage, educate and inspire your audience. But without proper distribution, all that content creation is a futile exercise.
Facebook provides the perfect platform for advertising your blog posts to a larger audience. Here’s an example from Culture Amp:
The ad copy clearly communicates what the reader will get out of the article and makes good use of emojis which has become a norm. Talking about emojis, Adpresso—the leading Facebook Ad management platform found that the Facebook ad headline that included an emoji had 241% higher click-through rate than the ad with no emoji.
👉 Promote Exclusive Research
If your B2B SaaS company spends hours on research, then you need to share those findings with your audience—not only is it educational, but it also establishes your brand as a thought leader. Facebook ads can help make that possible.
Here’s how Zuora uses a Facebook ad to drive awareness of its Subscription Benchmark Report. The company uses a bold graphic that not only highlights one of the findings of the study, but it also uses a bar graph that adds more punch to it, making it extremely relevant for the audience.
👉 Promote Guides & Whitepapers
It is often seen that marketers do not spend as much time promoting their content as much as they do creating it. We all know that for our content to be visible we need to promote it—sometimes it means testing platforms that haven’t been used before. So similar to blog posts, case studies and research, are strong content assets that can be effectively promoted using Facebook ads.
👉 Promote Webinars
Are webinars part of your content marketing strategy? If so, Facebook ads can help you create awareness and increase signups. Marketers can experiment with video ads and create snippets of what people can expect from the webinar. Here’s an example of a video-based Facebook ad:
👉 Promote an Upcoming Podcast
Doing your own B2B podcast is a huge opportunity to connect with your audience. Whether you conduct interviews, share stories from your clients, or discuss industry topics, podcasting is the way forward.
But here’s the thing: promoting a podcast isn’t easy. And that’s where Facebook advertising is valuable, thanks to the platform’s superior reach and targeting capabilities which allows marketers to tap a large group of people based on their interest such as ‘listening to podcast’ in this case.
Mailchimp makes clever use of the ‘Listen Now’ CTA with copy that highlights how even the strongest people can struggle—a statement which is relatable and enticing, making people connect with it instantly and acting on that CTA.
👉 Sell A Course
If you’ve developed an educational course for your audience, then Facebook ads should be your go-to channel for promotions and signups. Check out this example from BigCommerce:
BigCommerce uses a video ad to entice businesses/entrepreneurs (their target audience) The ad, which is all of 13 seconds, invites the audience to join an online course where they can learn more about launching an E commerce business. This is a simple yet effective Facebook ad tactic any B2B SaaS business can imitate.
👉 Highlight Feature Integrations
Software integrations are critical and that’s why B2B businesses build their products with integrations in mind. Partner integrations/APIs, makes the core product valuable and provides an entirely new audience to your business. So if you’ve added a new integration to your list of offerings, let your audience know via Facebook ads. For example, the Facebook ad by Clearbit mentions the same in their ad copy as well as ad headline.
👉 Promote Online & Offline Events
Need more people to sign up for an upcoming event? Facebook ads can make it happen. Check out these ads from B2B SaaS companies using the platform effectively—Hubspot to promote their online summit on Digital Agency Day, ActiveCampaign to promote a live workshop, and Chargify to attract conference-goers.
You can also use geo-targeting to promote region-specific events through Facebook ads. For example, if you wanted to promote events in Auckland, be sure target Auckland residents when running your ads.
Facebook Ads can also be targeted to event participants to show them hotels near event locations, so if you’re promoting a Hotel RFP software tools, target event participants.
Another category of event that B2B SaaS can promote via Facebook Ad is meetups. They are perfect for creating buzz and attracting an audience.
I really like the way Vyond—a video creation platform, uses Facebook ads to let its audience know about an upcoming meetup. The copy uses a warm and friendly tone, highlights that the event is free and makes good use of the raised hands emoji—all in all a good way to show that they’re excited about meeting their users in-person.
Wrapping it Up!
There you have it: 21 Facebook ad ideas that you can use to generate brand awareness, amplify your content, promote events, make product announcements and ultimately boost sales for your B2B SaaS business.
Keep in mind that if you run multiple Facebook ad campaigns, it’s a good idea to to keep everything organized. If spreadsheets are your jam, you can set up an automated Facebook ads to Excel export to have fresh data for each campaign.
Want an overview of what you read today? Here’s everything once again:
- Encourage Your Audience To Sign Up For A Demo
- Target Your Audience Based on Language & Region
- Book Sales Calls
- Offer Rewards To Increase Product Usage
- Try A New Low Risk CTA
- Offer A Sneak Peek At Pricing Options
- Promote Product Launches & New Features
- Highlight A Use Case
- Offer An Inside Look At Your Product Dashboard
- Display Testimonials
- Emphasize Your Brand’s Approachability
- Use Video Ads To Demonstrate The Benefits Of Your Product
- Share Case Studies
- Promote Your Blog Posts
- Promote Exclusive Research
- Promote Guides & Whitepapers
- Promote Webinars
- Promote An Upcoming Podcast
- Sell A Course
- Highlight Feature Integrations
- Promote Online & Offline Events
Clearly there’s no dearth of ways you can use Facebook ads to grow—all you need is a bit of creativity, an understanding of your sales funnel and a willingness to test and experiment.
Use these ads as inspiration, and let us know what worked for you in the comments below.
Looking for more ways to generate leads using Facebook? Check out this post for some amazing tips.
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