More About B2B Paid Search
• What is business-to-business paid search?
• How do B2B market characteristics relate to PPC?
• The benefits of B2B PPC marketing
• 5 Results-driven B2B PPC tips
• Conclusion
How Do B2B Market Characteristics Relate to PPC?
PPC advertising is a very effective marketing avenue, but it’s especially useful for B2B companies. This is because businesses often have fewer direct engagement channels than B2C.
PPC is an effective way to generate B2B leads because it allows businesses to target their advertising to people who are already interested in what they have to offer. However, with B2B, as opposed to B2C, the primary goal is to reach the executive leaders and crucial decision-makers within your target industry.
What is Business-to-Business Paid Search?
Business-to-business paid search refers to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on search engine results pages such as Google and Bing. This form of digital marketing allows businesses to target and bid on certain keywords in order to appear at the top of search results when users type in those targeted keywords.
What makes this form of advertising so effective, is the fact that the ads are served to people who are actively searching for a business, product or service that’s related to your business. An added advantage is that paid search ads work on a pay-per-click model, meaning you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
Essentially, pay-per-click ads allow B2B companies to target the exact target audience they want to attract in their niche industries, at a more reasonable price.
The Benefits of B2B PPC Marketing
If you are looking for a type of advertising that won’t drain your marketing budget but will produce excellent results, PPC marketing is an excellent avenue. It’s flexible and can give you online results in a matter of days. Here are some of the main benefits you can see from a B2B PPC advertising campaign.
Increase visibility where it matters
Traditional advertising media such as newspapers and magazines allow businesses to advertise nationally to a mass market, from which you typically only get a small percentage of quality leads or business.
One of the biggest benefits of PPC marketing is that you can give your business better exposure where it matters. Through careful targeting, you can ensure that you only reach relevant, in-market B2B audiences, which means less ad budget wastage and a higher ROI.
PPC is inexpensive for businesses of all sizes
PPC campaigns are relatively inexpensive, which makes them accessible to all types of businesses – whether you are an entrepreneurial venture capital start-up or a large multi-national enterprise. And since you are only targeting an audience that is most likely to respond to your advertising, your PPC budget can go much further.
You are on a level playing field with competitors
When it comes to traditional advertising media, small businesses have always had a hard time competing with bigger brands in terms of marketing. After all, most large businesses have internal marketing teams with large monthly marketing budgets, often larger than what most small businesses spend in a year.
With PPC advertising, the playing field is more level, since the success of a campaign does not only rely on budget, but also on relevance and ad quality, for example. This means that, with careful keyword selection and smart bidding strategies, small businesses can potentially get just as much exposure as the larger business.
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Real-time tracking and optimisation
With PPC ads you can see clicks in real-time, allowing you to not only track the success of the campaign but to optimise it on the go for more conversions and better results.
By looking at metrics such as the most clicked keywords, or the types of ads generating the most clicks, you can optimise your strategy for more conversions (B2B PPC conversion rate optimisation). This will allow you to increase:
- The percentage of users who click on your ads, and
- Who perform the desired action after clicking on your PPC ads.
Depending on your PPC goals, a conversion may be a completed contact form, a request for a free trial or a purchase. By tracking and optimising your PPC campaigns, you can win real estate on Google Search and earn more clicks at a lower price.
Near-immediate results
Unlike most traditional marketing media, a pay-per-click campaign will deliver results in a relatively short period of time. Businesses can generate leads and get conversions in a matter of days.
Need help in planning a PPC strategy that will deliver real results? Get in touch.
5 Results-Driven B2B PPC Tips
B2B PPC marketing is all about generating leads cost-effectively, closing more deals and ultimately boosting your business’ profitability. That’s why it’s important to have the right B2B PPC strategy in place so you can get the most of your advertising spend. Here are our top four PPC tips for B2B companies:
- Adjust your PPC strategy by platform
Each type of platform has its own unique characteristics that dictate the way people interact with ads and click on them.
For example, desktop ads tend to have more text due to the size of the screen, while mobile ads tend to be more visual. Mobile users are also more likely to click on a “call now” button whereas desktop users may fill out a contact form.
Another factor to keep in mind is the increasing use of voice search. Voice search (especially on mobile) has been one of the fastest-growing technologies over the last decade. And the voice search trend is set to be even more important in 2022.
The fact that voice search queries on mobile are often longer and more conversational than typed queries on desktop, will affect the types of PPC ad keywords you use to reach your audience.
Mobile B2B PPC ads, for example, will focus on more conversational, long-tail keywords, or location-based “near me” phrases. Another tactic might be to launch a dedicated question PPC ad campaign for mobile to help you reach more Google Voice Search users.
While one of the key steps in adjusting your PPC campaign by platform, is using the right keywords, choosing the right Google Ads formats is also important. For example, data has shown that videos are currently the best mobile ad format since people are watching an increasing amount of video content on mobile devices and video ads convert well. - Consider the phases of the B2B marketing funnel
The sales cycle of the B2B marketing funnel is typically longer than the B2C counterpart. In fact, it can be anywhere from several months to a year, or more, which will be spread out in several buyer’s phases. This is an important aspect to take into consideration when creating your B2B PPC campaigns as it will influence how you spend your marketing budget and what kind of ad formats and messaging you’ll use.
A consumer brand or business can, for example, easily get sales with an initial PPC ad campaign. Yet, it won’t be as easy for a business to convert prospects in the same way. The B2B marketing funnel is a step-by-step process that requires you to generate leads and nurture them before converting them into paying customers and brand advocates.
An initial B2B PPC campaign aimed at generating leads at the top of the marketing funnel may lead prospects to a landing page on your website with gated content. At this stage, your prospects will not be ready to convert, so you’ll nurture your captured leads with relevant content and useful information. This will enrich their understanding of your offering and aid their decision-making process.
By the time your prospects reach the bottom of the marketing funnel, they will be in a buying mindset. Here, you can, for example, re-engage them with a PPC remarketing ad with a strong sales offer. This type of advert will be completely different from your initial PPC ad, which means that you’ll likely use a different ad format (like a product shopping ad). - Tailor your keywords for a B2B audience
It is often found that the search volume for B2B keywords is lower than in B2C advertising. This tends to happen because B2B keywords can be very industry-specific terms. The search volume for a term such as “post-COVID office space planning” would be much smaller than “kitchen design ideas”, for example.
It’s therefore important that you do proper keyword research before you get a B2B PPC ad campaign up and running. Selecting the right keywords is not only important to match your audience’s search intent, but also to ensure you capture higher quality leads.
Just like there are different types of SEO keywords, there is also a differentiation when it comes to PPC keywords. For B2B in particular, it’s important to focus on long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords (also known as search queries) contain more than three words and are typically typed into search engines by users who are searching for something very specific.
While long-tail keywords have a lower search volume, they are more focused and therefore attract higher-quality leads. Long-tail keywords are also much less competitive, easier to rank for and less expensive to bid on, making their inclusion into your B2B PPC campaigns, a great strategy.
Another thing to keep in mind is that in some marketplaces, the same keyword, such as “quality printer ink cartridges” can be relevant for both B2B and B2C. In these instances, the messaging has to be extra clear and tailored specifically for who the ad is meant for. - Get your targeting right
Targeting goes hand-in-hand with selecting the right keywords for your PPC campaign. Targeting is especially important for B2B campaigns since the audiences are so narrow and niche.
You can also target your B2B PPC ad campaigns according to:
• Age ranges
• Genders
• Ethnicities
• Income levels
• Education levels
• Career types
• Geographic locations
• Parental statuses
• Languages
You can both include and exclude the types of audience in your targeting, which will narrow down your audience even more and improve your ads’ relevancy. This will help enhance your click-through rates (CTR) and optimise your conversion rates, which will minimise ad budget wastage and improve the ROI of your ad campaign.
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While precision targeting can help you narrow down your audience, and compelling ad copy can improve your click-through rate, having an optimised landing page can improve the performance of your business-to-business PPC campaigns.
This is true whether you are focused on capturing B2B leads at the top of the sales funnel, nurturing leads with valuable content in the middle of the funnel, or closing a sale at the bottom of the marketing funnel.
There are a couple of best practices when it comes to optimising your PPC landing page. For example, PPC ads that are intended to generate new leads, need to link to a landing page that is focused on capturing email addresses and contact information, rather than selling a product or service.
It’s also crucially important to match your landing page content and messaging to your PPC ad. This means that the keywords, headline, and offer of the ad and landing page should match. This will ensure that the landing page delivers on the ad’s promise and that the users find the information they are expecting to find, all of which will help increase your conversion rate.
Conclusion
Pay-per-click advertising can be a great way to generate leads for B2B companies. It’s important to remember, however, that the leads generated may not be ready to purchase immediately. That’s why you should have a solid lead nurturing strategy in place to guide leads from the top of the sales funnel, through the middle of the funnel, and towards the bottom of the marketing funnel where they’ll be ready to convert.
If you want us to skyrocket your digital marketing results, reach out to find out more about our high-impact, cost-effecting PPC advertising methods. We can help you establish dominance for industry-related keywords and get your business in front of the right audience.