From a straw poll of our advertisers, I’d suggest very few companies are, in the industrial and scientific B2B sector. It doesn’t surprise me. You’d expect things like Google search advertising to be more appropriate, and few companies are spending as much as they could on that, never mind looking at further opportunities to advertise online.
However, a few companies do consider it worth a go, and for any of us, that might include our own competitors. But how would we know?
Unlike Google search advertising (where we can just make a search to see who else is advertising, and what their ads look like), Facebook has a very different way of targeting ads, and we might not be that target, so we wouldn’t see the ads.
However, it offers something quite different: the Meta Ad Library. This provides information on any Facebook ad running. There’s a good article here on how to take advantage of this resource.
Of course, whether we discover that none of our competitors seem to be advertising – or perhaps lots of them are – doesn’t necessarily tell us anything significant. We all tend to overestimate our competitors’ marketing knowledge and budgets. In reality they’re probably guessing and testing as much as we are. However, any insight into what they’re doing (or not doing) can help us with our decision-making.