Paid Social Works For B2B (SaaStr Response)

Update: SaaStr became our client after reading this article.

Why does this article exist? As a response to this tweet by Jason Lemkin:

So — Why does paid social work for B2B?

1. 55% of Americans log into Facebook or Instagram every single day of their lives

2. This includes 55% of your B2B target audience.

3. Therefore, you can get ads in front of your B2B audience on FB — if your ad:

• Immediately shows people that the ad applies to them

• Presents a solution to their pain points

B2B decision makers will click and convert.

Incidentally, this is why my agency is called Right Percent.

When does paid social not work for B2B?

1. Unlike other popular B2B acquisition channels (cold email, calling, or direct mail), the most effective Facebook + Instagram targeting uses machine learning to find customers, not direct lists.

2. If your market size is too small, FB’s customer-finding algorithms don’t work well.

3. We peg the minimum market size needed to make FB work at scale to be 100k-200k potential customers nationwide.

Facebook can still help your business if you have smaller market sizes, but only for things like retargeting and engagement — not for prospecting at scale.

Why should paid social work for SaaStr?

1. SaaStr targets a broad range of roles: “Product, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Engineering, Ops and More!“

2. Most decision makers in the above roles at B2B software companies (or B2B more broadly) have some pain point that attending SaaStr could solve — and therefore could possibly convert from ads.

3. There’s way more than 200k decision makers in the above categories in the US alone. Facebook’s algorithms should be able to find them.

Why should SaaStr work with Right Percent?

1. We specialize in growing B2B companies only. Brands we’ve worked with include Zenefits, DoorDash, Brightwheel and more.

2. Because we do this all the time, your time and money won’t be wasted trying inefficient strategies.

3. Since conferences are mostly fixed expenses, every marginal sign-up should be mostly profit — making it worthwhile to test a new acquisition channel if you have room for more attendees this year.

How would Right Percent test paid social for SaaStr?

1. We’d set up a FB campaign based on B2B best practices, including tracking and attribution.

2. We’d exclude existing SaaStr sign-ups (this year’s and past years) from our targeting.

3. We’d spend low amounts of ad spend at first and iterate to get better ad performance

4. If we get to an ROI positive cost per ticket bought in the first month of testing, we’d scale until you hit your max # of attendees for the conference space.

Sounds good? Get in touch at kevin@rightpercent.com to discuss more.