We can all agree that Facebook is huge and the stats back it up. Total monthly active users are at 1.11 Billion (with a “B”), daily active users is over 650 million, and over 750 million mobile monthly users. Add in the fact that average time spent per Facebook visit is 20 minutes and that’s a lot of potential.
But how can B2B advertisers leverage this potential? Say hello to my little friend – Partner Categories!
What Are Partner Categories?
Heather wrote a post about this hidden gem (available only in the Power Editor right now) but here is the official wording from Facebook:
With partner categories, they can also show ads to people on Facebook based on the products and brands they buy across both desktop and mobile. Partner categories uses data from select third parties including Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon.
Pretty cryptic huh? To get a better idea of what is actually available you can pull up the Power Editor and click through lots of navigation and hover over more information boxes. Or, you can just check out this post that includes Partner Category audiences & size estimates. You can target everything down to who buys cat food vs. who buys dog food, but how can the B2B advertiser use this?
Let’s look at how a couple different B2B companies might want to target:
- Targeting investors – This one is easy because Acxiom actually has a category for “Highly Likely Investor” and “Likely Investor”. Epsilon also has a category for “Investor”. You can bet companies like Etrade are already using this type of information.
- Targeting health care professionals – Acxiom has a “Medical Professional Category” job role and Epsilon has occupation categories that include “Health Care” and “Physician/Dentist”. Combine them and you still have an audience size of 3.2 million potential customers.
- Targeting CEOs – You can get at this a couple ways (and even layer them together). Say you start with the “Administration/Managerial Category” in Acxiom’s Job Roles. You could then layer in Home Market Values of say $1,000,000+ to get to the real big earning CEOs. Perhaps you want to target only users with a propensity toward buying luxury car brands like Mercedes, Infiniti or Land Rover. You could target people who travel internationally for business through Datalogix “DLX Demographics”. Perhaps you want to target the Datalogix Lifestyles group called “Corporate Execs”. See the possibilities?
