Paid search has countless benefits. The likelihood of a customer making a purchase is increased substantially as a result of paid ads while also increasing brand awareness.
Furthermore, starting your PPC ads on Google makes sense because Google holds a sizeable portion of the paid search market share. Even if your brand’s nature is business-to-business (B2B) like ours, Google has got you covered. You read that right; B2B marketing isn’t limited to LinkedIn and email marketing.
In this article, we’ll go through everything you need to know about Google Ads for B2B. Let’s do it.
Using PPC (pay-per-click) to generate B2B leads
A pay-per-click campaign is a perfect place to start if you want to promote content, generate sales through the creation of B2B leads, or build brand awareness.
Especially when used with non-paid marketing strategies like carefully constructed SEO pages.
PPC is a general-purpose digital advertising strategy that can be utilised to increase website traffic. For B2B businesses who use it, there are numerous benefits, starting with:
BOFU targeting
PPC is an important method to attract customers who are actively looking for a certain keyword associated with your offerings. For example, if you’re the owner of a clothes shop in Leicester, it’d only make sense to target keywords such as “clothes in Leicester” or “outerwear Leicester” and anything similar.
For a highly focused and successful bottom-of-the-funnel campaign, all it takes is a little bit of research to make sure you’re using the proper keywords.
You don’t advertise to potential customers on Facebook and LinkedIn. You’re not attempting to persuade them to download information or take any other action.
Actually, they’re looking for a specific thing. Therefore, all you are doing is giving them a path to take in order to reach your goods. If your website or landing page is effective and you’re working hard, you should earn leads.
Budget-friendly campaigns
Because you can customise your campaigns to fit you, regardless of the size of your budget, Google Ads is a great choice for producing B2B leads.
Furthermore, PPC is just like what it says. You simply pay per click, as most advertising can be quite expensive. But your industry, market, and budget all have an impact on the number of leads you generate. Capturing search volume might cost hundreds of pounds or even thousands of pounds per month, depending on the industry.
Therefore, when choosing your budget, be careful to determine your total addressable market and take into account the number of qualified leads you want to generate from your ads.
Room for growth
The key to any successful B2B marketing effort is experimenting. You can stop your campaign if you discover that it isn’t effective. You may optimise, employ a wide variety of keywords, and benefit from the data.
Consider focusing on keywords that are somewhat unrelated to those that your competitors are using to generate more leads.
Easy to track
PPC is excellent for personalised targeting, but you can also improve your buyer targeting by merely measuring and tracking your outcomes.
You can follow results in great detail with Google Ads because it provides all the B2B data and analytics you need. You should track anything from direct conversions from ads to cost per conversion.
It’s also a good idea to focus on your Search Impression Share. This tells you how often your ads appear in comparison to how often they could have appeared. For instance, you have an ad with 100 opportunities to show, but it only showed 75 times. This would result in a 75% search impression share. This metric is quite effective but often overlooked. And having a share that isn’t impressive could usually mean two things: a mismanaged budget or a bad quality score.
Moreover, make sure to track not only traffic and hits but also meetings scheduled and attended, and, most importantly, earnings.
Google ads for B2B: Launching a Google ads campaign
Who you’re selling to and what you’re trying to accomplish will all affect how you plan your PPC campaigns.
Before establishing any goals, consider these questions: To whom am I marketing? What do I provide them? What is it that I want them to do?
For instance, pick one service for each campaign if you’re targeting B2B sales executives and you have a variety of services to offer. Then consider whether you want them to schedule a demo, submit a form, or visit a blog.
What your campaign is for will determine the action your prospect takes. Booking a demo is an excellent CTA if you wish to promote a service. However, directing them to a blog or podcast is a smart CTA if you want to raise exposure.
Once you have the responses to all three questions, choose the number of leads you want to collect and base your budget on that number. If you try to promote three services at once, you’ll merely waste your money.
What will differentiate you and your campaigns from those of your competitors is thorough keyword and audience research.
Selecting and using the appropriate keywords
When choosing the appropriate keywords, you can rely on priority keywords, which can be followed by a few keywords that are relevant and somewhat related to what you’re offering.
In other words, you should rely on main keywords and secondary ones. For example, you’re in the business of selling paint. One of your primary keywords could be “buy black paint”. And there is also a different phrase that’s getting a lot of traction, and that is “black paint designs”. While this keyphrase is not very relevant to your goal, it could still be added to your secondary keyphrase list.
Most importantly, you should ensure that your main keywords align with the intentions of your target audience, always.
Luckily for you, and as a result of the significant advances in the Google algorithm over time, investing in automation when it comes to keyword research is always a good idea. Platforms like Google Ads itself and Ahrefs, for instance, offer great keyword-related features entirely based on automation.
So, to boil it all down, here are the top three guidelines we use when picking keywords:
- Keep your target audience in mind
- Don’t stray from the terms related to your product
- Make sure your CTAs are relevant to your keywords, actionable and brief
A smart way to start doing this is by connecting your SEO to your paid strategy.
Google ads for B2B: Rely on Google ad extensions
Your ads will stand out from those of your competitors thanks to Google Ad extensions. The good thing about them is that they’re completely free (when you pay for your ads, of course!).
They are particularly helpful because they enable you to expand on the content of your Google Ad without sacrificing any ad space. This frees you up to focus on the most effective messaging for your audience.
To help your ads stand out, you can use a variety of extensions, such as:
- Callout extensions
With these, you have the choice to add more descriptive information, such as items and services, to your regular text ads. They are affordable, adaptable, and simple to use.
- Call extensions
These increase conversions by providing a simple method for potential clients to get in touch with you without exiting the search results.
- Sitelink extensions
They’re excellent for launching short-term promotions, tracking clicks to particular pages, and developing sitelinks, particularly for mobile.
- Click-to-text extensions
These are ideal for your mobile audience since they give potential clients a simple and efficient way to get in touch with you.
Preventing bots and invalid clicks
Of course, there are drawbacks to anything, and in the case of Google Ads, they include bots who artificially inflate your click rate.
Fortunately, there are several ways to prevent them.
You can register for fraud prevention programmes that track users who click on your ads and analyse IP addresses and user behaviour. Additionally, these programmes reveal the reasons behind your recurrent clicks as well as how frequently they occur. These include ClickCease, ClickGUARD, and Google’s very own Ad Traffic Quality tool, just to name a few.
The best part about all of this is if you do see anything unusual, you can always notify Google Ads, and they’ll take care of it and automatically delete any irregular clicks.
However, bots aren’t the only Internet click threat you’ll run into with ads. You may occasionally receive a large number of clicks from unqualified users if your messaging isn’t connecting with the correct audience or you’re employing the incorrect keywords.
Fortunately, there are several strategies to avoid this. Those include checking your keywords, changing the language in your material, or developing a bespoke target audience.
Needless to say, now is the moment to start a PPC campaign to support your SEO efforts if you haven’t already. It doesn’t cost much to get started, and the rewards are well worth it.
Once you’ve gotten this down, it just takes a few months of experimentation to get everything in sync and right.
Need help with Google ads?
If you need a hand with your Google Ads campaigns while you focus on providing your services to your clients, we can help. Book a discovery call with us today, and one of our paid advertising experts will show you how we can boost your revenue with Google Ads.
0 Comments