Get advice from qualified sources. Plan well. Start small. Check results and tweak the plan. Be persistent. Watch for orders. Those were the steps taken by niche B2B data transport company Fiberplex when it decided to advertise its LightViper brand on Facebook. LightViper’s approach has moderate costs, stays “within the box” and serves as a model for other B2B companies who are considering advertising on social media platforms.

Buddy Oliver, the company’s director of Business Development, was motivated to try Facebook advertising from ideas gathered at a Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference late last year. Among his motivations were to find an alternative to high-priced advertisements in print and online trade publications. These offered little feedback and appeared to have a poor return on investment.

In determining targets for the ads, Buddy looked at Facebook pages of relevant trade and interest groups, other manufacturers and similar pages where his customers where likely to be fans. We won’t state exact statistics on this campaign so as not to reveal Buddy’s strategy to his competition. We can say that LightViper’s unqualified potential customer base on Facebook in the US, based on the sum total of the selected fans, is less than one-ten-thousandths of a percent of US Facebook members. Yet, a single Facebook ad has the potential to reach a larger population than any single trade publication vehicle previously used online or in print.

The campaign started in February and the ad directed to LightViper’s Facebook page. Within a few months, the number of new fans versus solicited population was comparable with an acceptable level of response for a direct marketing campaign – at a fraction of the cost. While Facebook provides information on who becomes a fan as a result of clicking an ad, it does not provide the identity of a member who clicked an ad and did not become a fan. While this respects member privacy, Buddy sees this as withholding potentially useful marketing data from advertisers.

In advance of the recent InfoComm10 trade show, LightViper ran a campaign promoting their booth at the show, again linking the ad to their page. This is how I encountered their advertising – when I became a fan of InfoComm a few days before the show, their ad popped up on my home page. The ad was reinforced by a “thumbs up” under the ad from a colleague who was already a fan, motivating me to click the ad. It was interesting to note that, while research demonstrates a correlation between advance trade-show marketing and success at the show, no other InfoComm exhibitor with a Facebook page had an ad show up on my home page.

While many small businesses that are not on social media platforms cite a burdensome time commitment as a barrier, Buddy observes that his Facebook campaign requires little time to maintain. To cover all bases, Facebook page updates are replicated on LightViper’s Twitter and LinkedIn accounts and traffic on all sites is monitored for customer kudos as well as complaints. LightViper also uses Google AdWords, with every ad click imported into LightViper’s Salesforce CRM for tracking from first impression to final sale.

Are the campaigns working for LightViper? At this early stage, the results warrant continued investment. “It didn’t make sense to try and market cutting edge technology using legacy methods,” Buddy tells us. “While it might be an ego boost to see a beautiful full page ad in print, it’s not always the smartest use of marketing dollars anymore.”