LinkedIn Versus Facebook for B+B Advertising

[Kingalan1]

For B+B advertising how do the costs of advertising on Facebook compare to LinkedIn? How do the quality of the leads compare from the networks? We are a New York City commercial real estate brokerage seeking to advertise to commercial office tenants.

We intend to advertise to, very specific segments. For instance partners of law firms with 1-10 employees located in the 10017 zip code. We will promote posts marketing specific properties to specific segments. From a  targeting point of view, which network is better?

Our  objective is to acquire actionable leads. We are not looking to build brand or become a "thought leader" at $28/click. Also, we have specific lists of contacts in each industry, however we don't have their personal emails, only their business emails.

Best to focus on Facebook or LinkedIn? A concern I have is that most people do not frequently check their LinkedIn account so this may be very limiting in terms of advertising.

[Cesare.Marchetti]

Hi,

Very interesting question indeed, I had to face also a couple of times.

Why don't you do the one thing (LinkedIn) without neglecting the other one ** in a smart way (Facebook Remarketing)?**

Short answer (and my gut feeling): LinkedIn is probably going to bring you the better actionable leads, but also the more expensive ones for sure...But you still could leverage the huge user base of Facebook at very reasonable costs, i.e. doing Remarketing on Facebook.

We use Facebook mainly only for Remarketing purposes as we found out that it has an incredibly good cost/conversion ratio. Doing that we can leverage a $ spent on advertising, e.g. on AdWords even better and very efficiently. I usually pair AdWords campaigns with Facebook Remarketing.

You can do Remarketing based on visitors to your website (as a whole) or only particular pages of it (even excluding the ones that have already converted, e.g. sent you the contact form if you like) or you can build up a  (Remarketing) list (called Custom Audience at Facebook) of prospects that you will deliver your ads  to, based on a list of e-mails you provide in the backend.

Also, we have specific lists of contacts in each industry, however we don't have their personal emails, only their business emails.

This can be a problem you are right but check it out. To build a Custom Audience (list) on Facebook doesn't cost anything and the data won't be used otherwise. If your Remarketing list has a reasonable size  in your eyes (minimum of 20 needed by Facebook) give it a try and evaluate the results...

A concern I have is that most people do not frequently check their LinkedIn account so this may be very limiting in terms of advertising.

Depends also very much on the target audience, etc. I guess but if they don't klick on your ads its not not going to cost you anything either.

--> Its often difficult to predict everything: Check out things for your particular case with a reasonable budget in a reasonable time frame. Evaluate the results and then go with the one that delivers the better results for you. So your decision will be data driven and not just a gut feeling.

Hope this is going to help you a little bit.

Cheers,

Cesare