Facebook will offer marketing tools through IBM’s product suite to help advertisers reach specific groups of people on the social network with pitches.
Through International Business Machines’ web-based marketing Cloud, businesses will be able to use customers’ e-mails they already possess with Facebook’s Custom Audiences tool to target those people on the social network, said Blake Chandlee, Facebook’s vice president of global partnerships. The companies will also work together to build additional features for marketers.
Facebook, which makes more than 90% of sales from ad revenue, has tried to leverage its user data so marketers can tailor and track advertising campaigns.
IBM has added partnerships, including with Facebook rival Twitter, to drum up sales for its newer cloud-computing and data-analytics businesses, as demand for older hardware and services has fallen off.
“This is kind of the entry point of the relationship,” Chandlee said of working with IBM. “Where our real strength is is online behavior. IBM has penetration in some of these big, big vertical markets.”
