Here’s How Far $100 Will Get B2B Marketers on Facebook

Here at BlueWing, we’ve long trumpeted the merits of Facebook as a B2B advertising platform. Although LinkedIn is fantastic, we’ve found Facebook to be the most cost-efficient way to reach senior executives using paid social ads. (Consider that 79% of senior execs check Facebook for thought leadership compared to only 68% who check LinkedIn.)

The duopoly of Facebook and Google has a stranglehold on the digital advertising market. In 2016, the two giants accounted for 77% of the growth in digital spending. Google is running things on the inbound side, allowing digital marketers to serve up contextual ads based on what a user is searching for. On the outbound marketing side, those same advertisers are using Facebook to push content into the News Feeds of highly targeted groups—and this includes plenty of B2B players. Facebook’s partnership with Dun & Bradstreet and outstanding custom audience tools give B2B campaign managers a wealth of creative options for getting in front of ideal clients.

Recently, as we were writing a proposal, our lead asked if we could give them a sense of how many people they could reach on Facebook with $100. In other words, for B2B marketers using Facebook, what is the CPR (cost to reach a thousand people) and CPM (cost-per-mille, or a thousand impressions)?

We couldn’t find a firm answer in our searches. So we went straight to the source: our own ad accounts and those of our clients.

Here’s what we found. On average, across all of our B2B client accounts, the average cost to reach 1,000 people (CPR) is $43.64 and the average cost to serve 1,000 impressions (CPM) is $22.50. So with $100, you could serve ads to 2,292 people and get 4,445 impressions.

So, a few contextual points about this data. First, and most importantly, this is only an average from five B2B advertising accounts. We don’t claim that this data is a perfect benchmark, but it’s a start—and we’ll continue adding data as we bring on new clients. Secondly, most of the posts were either link ads, which drive users to click-through to a website, or lead generation forms, which capture users’ emails and other info directly in the feed. Video content, which you can boost very cheaply on Facebook, would likely bring the cost down significantly.

One last interesting thing to note is that four of the five clients had a CPR between $31 and $38, and the fifth had a CPR of $71. Those same four clients had a CPM of $14 to $20, and the fifth a CPM of $40. In other words, without the one outlier, our overall averages would have been a little lower.

As advertisers continue to shift budgets into digital, Facebook’s prices are only going up. Take advantage of the platform’s tools to grow your agency while it still only costs $100 to get in front of 2,292 target buyers.