Legacy: Build a Pipeline Acceleration Campaign on Facebook with Prospect Audiences

Last Updated: September 25, 2023

🔍 Please note: this article is for customers on Standard Bundle, Enrichment, or Clearbit Platform plans.

Pipeline acceleration campaigns are designed to surround influencers and decision-makers with ads while they're in an active sales cycle.

These campaigns are designed to maximize the share of voice (SOV) and the end of the buying cycle. Executed well, it creates a lasting emotional connection with your buyers, improves brand sentiment, and increases the chance of a successful deal. Common creative includes testimonials, reviews, customer stories, ROI reports, and product videos.

How to Build a Pipeline Acceleration Campaign on Facebook with Prospect Audiences from an Existing Company Audience

The first step is to build a prospect audience from an existing company audience (e.g. account-based prospect audience): 

1. Navigate to the Advertising tab and select create a New Audience.
2. Choose Advertise to New Prospects.
3. Choose the Prospect from an existing company audience radio button.
4. Click the Create a Company Audience button.
5. Create or select a Company Segment. Company segments allow you to prospect into a dynamic list of accounts based on their stages in the sales cycle.
6. Name your audience and choose the Collection folder and save it so you can use it again for other audiences.
   
   
   💡 Clearbit  Tip: Company Audiences are the building blocks of Clearbit audiences and marketing workflows. When you create a new account-based Prospect Audience, we save the Company Audience you created so that you can use it in other workflows.
7. Define the criteria for companies in active sales cycles. Use your CRM fields to build a dynamic list of companies in active sales cycles. 

   Example of using Criteria for Open Opportunities in Salesforce

   • Closed (Boolean) - When the Closed field is marked False, the opportunity is open.
   • Stage - If your organization has early stages that you would like to exclude, we recommend using the Stage field instead. The stage gives you granular control over the stages that are included in your campaign and excluded. In this example, we exclude stages 1 and 1.5 to focus our impressions on a pipeline that has been qualified by the sales team.
   • Type - Important if your Salesforce org uses opportunities to track renewal opportunities. Use the Type field to only select new business opportunities, and exclude renewals.

   

8. Click through the Collections folder and select the Prospect Audience name you want to choose.
9. Choose a  person's attributes from the drop-down to define which types of employees you would like to target. Define the decision-makers and influencers to target. Account-based Prospect Audiences allow you to reach a broader set of people than you may have in your CRM.

   

   Instead of limiting your ad target to the few contacts assigned to an opportunity, this strategy allows you to expand your influence to every person with a voice. Think about all of the users, influencers, decision-makers, and budget-holders.

   Keep your audience broad! The low-cost structure of brand awareness campaigns makes it easy to maximize impact without hurting your wallet.

   📝 Please note: Common person attributes include job roles (functions like sales, engineering, etc.) and seniority (managers, directors, and executives—or you can leave it blank to target just ICs). Or, if you want to reach every employee, just leave the person box empty.
10. Type in a name for your Prospect Audience and hit the Next button.

The second step is to sync your prospect audience to Facebook:

1. Select the radio button next to Facebook Custom Audience and specify which Facebook account should receive it on the other side.
2. Edit the audience name, or keep the same one and click Create and Sync Audiences button.
   
   
   📝 Please note: Your audience is ready to use in a campaign within seconds after you sync it. Head to the “Audiences” tab in Facebook Ads Manager to check the status. That said, you may need to wait a few hours before your audience reaches its full size. 
   Account-based Prospect Audiences refresh in Clearbit every 24 hours to reflect daily changes to your audience, adding new audience members and removing old ones from your Facebook Custom Audience.
3. Your audience will be ready to use in Facebook campaigns immediately. And because it’s dynamic, it will update with new companies and people every day. Add your prospect Audience to a Facebook Ad Campaign.

We recommend using campaign objectives that maximize impression-share.

• Brand Awareness - This objective maximizes the chance that people see and remember your ad. They do this using what Facebook calls "estimated ad recall lift," which is measured by how many people Facebook estimate would remember your ad if we asked them within two days.
• Reach- The reach objective maximizes the number of people who see your ads and how often they see them. The benefit of using Reach is that you can define the frequency and schedule of your ad impressions. For long sales cycles, you can spread out the impressions over a series of weeks (or months) to provide consistent engagement without overwhelming your prospects.