Here’s How to Leverage Hubspot’s New Audience Sync Feature for B2B Marketing

Yesterday, Hubspot officially announced the release of their Audience Sync feature. Audience Sync is a feature that allows you to turn Hubspot contact lists into targeted audiences in Facebook and keep them synced. This time-saving feature is included in the Ads Add-on for Hubspot's Professional & Enterprise Marketing packages.

I've been beta testing Audience Sync for about 2 months with a grasp on ways to leverage the feature for B2B Marketing. During the trial, I provided feedback on the product upgrade, and the Hubspot team even implemented my suggestion to increase the maximum number of audiences from 5 to 25.

Hubspot's Audience Sync feature is excellent for targeted Facebook marketing to existing contacts in your database. The feature is also pitched for use with Facebook Lookalike Audiences, though I do not recommend this for most B2B marketers. The minimum audience size for a Lookalike Audience is 2.1 million people (1% of the U.S. population that uses Facebook). Unless you have a very broad potential customer profile, there are better (and less expensive) ways to target Facebook ads for prospecting.

Practical Use Cases for Audience Sync

To get the creative engines revved up, here are 3 examples for how you could use the Audience Sync feature for B2B Marketing.

#1 - Announce a Feature Release or Product Upgrade to Existing Customers

So, let's say we're preparing to announce a new feature to existing customers. The feature would enable many existing customers to upgrade to the next pricing tier, and therefore provide a favorable boost to our customer lifetime value (CLV). We better make a big splash with the announcement.

We'll build our audience using Audience Sync to include all contacts with the property Lifecycle Stage set to customer. Then we'll target that audience with several forms of creative, such a short video announcement or a photo linking to information about the feature release.

I've built a sample video ad (shown right). For campaigns planned for more than 20,000 impressions, I'll test 9 variations of headline text, post copy, and video thumbnail. Note the use of vertical video blended with the Traffic campaign objective. Vertical video stops thumbs and most video creative should be re-framed this way for best results.

We would duplicate these ads and run a parallel campaign to custom targeted audiences based on employer and job title. Lastly, we'll re-target website visitors using Facebook Pixel.

Pro Tip: When using Facebook Pixel for re-targeting, remember to closely monitor ad delivery frequency to avoid appearing spammy. I commonly set up Automated Rules to programmatically turn off the Ad Sets when Frequency > 2.

#2 - Deliver Content via Facebook to a Segmented Audience

Let's pretend we've identified a new product/market fit, and our strategy is to expand our business within small (< $50MM) Manufacturing companies. We identified a brand-loyal customer in this segment, and built a suite of content to share the story of their success with our product. We want to promote this content to accounts and prospects with similar characteristics. We'll use Audience Sync to build a Smart List of all the contacts that work at Manufacturing companies with less than $50MM annual revenue. Now, we can deliver native content through Facebook & Instagram.

For those still holding on to email as their primary content delivery mechanism, it's worth considering supplementing that tactic with Facebook targeted ads. Yes, I know email is free and you'll need to pay for the delivery through Facebook. It's 100% worth it. The viral nature of sharing content on Facebook presents extreme upside. Nobody is forwarding an email to 500 people, but they often share content with their 500+ Facebook friends.

Pro Tip: When beginning a Facebook campaign with several ad variations, temporarily ramp up your daily budget to reach more than 50% of your total audience. This expedites the ad testing process. Within 1-2 hours, you'll have clear data on which ad version performs best with your audience. Then, turn off underperforming ads and return budget to a normal level.

#3 - Present Conversion Lead Ads to Engaged Contacts Based on Lead Score

Here's one from left field. Using Hubspot's Predictive Lead Scoring, we could theoretically leverage this intelligence for conversion-based Facebook marketing.

First, we'll segment our audience using the Predictive Lead Scoring contact properties.

Then, we'll target this group using Facebook Lead Ads with a bottom-of-the-funnel conversion offer, such as a demo request, free trial, or special pricing offer.

Pro Tip: Leverage Hubspot's Facebook integration to unlock powerful marketing automation capabilities. Conversions from Facebook Lead Ads can programmatically be enrolled in Workflows. For instance, to automatically deliver content or hand-off to Sales.

Note: Predictive Lead Scoring is only available with Hubspot's Enterprise Marketing package. Those on lower plans could alternatively use Manual Lead Scoring.

Last Thoughts

From a platform integration perspective, Hubspot seems to be betting the farm on Facebook. Earlier this year, Hubspot also released Lead Ads, a feature that brings Facebook's Lead Generation ads directly into the Hubspot platform. However, if you are an advanced user or plan to spend a significant portion of your marketing budget on Facebook Ads, I recommend using Power Editor instead. Power Editor is Facebook's native advanced ad creation platform, and is much more capable than Hubspot's Lead Ads when building robust Facebook ad campaigns.

Have you tried out Hubspot's new Facebook integration features? How are you planning to use the Audience Sync feature?

Send me a direct message with any questions!