Better Performance, Less Control, and a New Role for Meta in B2B
For years, Meta has been a non-starter for most B2B and professional services campaigns. The targeting has been clumsy at best, engagement has been thin, and it relied too heavily on users self-identifying their jobs.
Over the last year, that’s changed, and not because we suddenly discovered better interest targeting. Meta simply got much better at finding the right people with far less instruction.
That shift has made us rethink where Meta fits in B2B strategies. Not everywhere. Not blindly. But far more often than we would have a year ago.
Why Facebook/Instagram Ads Have Been Historically a Tough Sell for B2B
Before getting into what’s working now, it’s worth remembering why so many B2B advertisers wrote Meta off in the first place.
A few reasons most will recognize:
- Targeting depended too much on self-reported info. Job titles and industries only work if people bother to keep them accurate, which most do not.
- Engagement didn’t feel meaningful. Likes and comments rarely turned into real leads or sales conversations.
- The platform was clearly built for ecommerce. Many campaign settings, features, and optimization options made sense for selling physical products, not professional services.
- It required precision without rewarding it. You could spend hours dialing in audiences and still come away with weak results.
For a long time, Meta felt fine for awareness and frustrating for performance. In many cases, it just hasn’t been worth the effort.
What’s Actually Different Now
Over the last year, we’ve seen Meta drive B2B performance that simply wasn’t realistic before, even in campaigns that didn’t start with perfect inputs (i.e. first party data, lots of traffic, variety of creative/copy).
Yes, Advantage+ is part of this. But the bigger change is that Meta no longer needs advertisers to spell everything out.
In practice, that looks like:
- Campaigns performing even without ultra-tight targeting
- Meta finding professional audiences without leaning on job titles
- Learning periods that feel more stable (and shorter) than they used to
Inputs still matter, of course: contact lists, retargeting, traffic audiences, and clean conversion tracking all help. But Meta doesn’t fall apart the way it used to if you don’t micromanage every setting.
That’s a big shift.
Creative is the New Targeting (and Variation is the Trick)
As targeting controls have loosened, creative has quietly taken on a much bigger role, not just in messaging, but in how Meta finds the right people on Facebook and Instagram.
One thing we’ve learned quickly: variation in ad copy and visual creative matters.
Running the same message four slightly different ways doesn’t help much. Saying the same thing with minor wording tweaks doesn’t give Meta new signals.
What does help is TRUE messaging variety:
- Different tones: direct, conversational, confident, empathetic
- Different lengths: short and punchy vs. more explanatory
- Different angles: problem-focused, outcome-focused, curiosity-driven
- Different visual layouts: with and without emojis, “bullet” content breakdown
- Different voices: may be age group or personality specific
- Different marketing speak: high urgency or “spammy” language compared to well-spoken phrasing (you’d be SHOCKED to see how much people respond to old fashioned urgency marketing language)
People don’t all speak the same way or respond to the same framing. And Meta is very aware of that.
The same idea applies to creative. Different visuals, formats, and styles give the platform more ways to learn who responds to what.
Right now, copy and creative diversity are doing a lot of the work targeting used to do.
The Tradeoff No One Loves
There’s a catch, of course.
As Meta does more of the work behind the scenes, we see less of how it’s making decisions.
We can usually tell:
- What’s converting
- What’s efficient
- What’s scaling
But we know far less about:
- Why specific people were reached
- What signals triggered relevance
- How Meta is defining a “professional” audience in a given campaign
Meta is clearly using huge volumes of behavioral data we’ll never see (and probably shouldn’t, from a privacy standpoint). Still, it means advertisers are trading audience insight for results.
That’s powerful and a little unsettling… but right now, it’s working.
The Arc Take: Skeptical by Default, Credit Where It’s Due
At Arc Intermedia, we don’t commit to platforms, we commit to results.
Meta spent years earning its [not-so-lovely] reputation in B2B, and we treated it accordingly. We were slow to trust it for good reason. But when performance changes, we pay attention.
Over the last year, Meta has earned more space in B2B strategies because it’s delivering. That doesn’t mean loyalty. If results slide, budgets move. If the platform shifts again, we’ll adjust just as quickly.
Comfort has never been part of our media strategy!
Are you running Facebook Ads for your B2B organization? Tell us about it! If you are or are not, Arc can help you figure out if these platform improvements have potential for your specific industry. Don’t be shy; we love strategizing, so reach out and let’s chat about your current social media advertising efforts (or lack of).
