Amplify Your B2B PPC Strategy for Great Lead Gen and Growth
B2B businesses spend more on PPC ads than B2C businesses because it is harder to attract and convert a client business than an individual buyer. It is crucial to maximize your budget. Excellent keywords and ads are a good start, but there is more to PPC.
Here are nine excellent PPC agency tactics you can apply right now to boost your PPC strategy:
- Carefully choose target and negative keywords.
- Retest ads for maximum effectiveness.
- Convert leads with landing page optimization.
- Upgrade PPC ads with extensions.
- More accurately target and retarget leads.
- Track and attribute lead conversions.
- Maximize the LinkedIn lead generation form.
- Promote products and services with videos.
- Learn from competitors' wins and losses.
There is a lot to discuss, so get ready to take notes.
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If you want to learn how Digital Authority Partners can increase your PPC effectiveness, watch this video!
9 Ways to Amplify Your B2B PPC and How to Apply Them
To refine your B2B PPC strategy, begin with keyword research and split testing. Both give you a decent overview of what does and does not work for your marketing goals. However, much more goes into building a reliable PPC campaign for better results.
To fine-tune your strategy, you have to know how to precisely target and accurately trace conversions. We cover these in more detail below. Here are nine of the best ways to amplify any B2B PPC strategy for more growth, based on reliable expert advice:
1. Carefully Select Target and Negative Keywords
Keyword research for PPC differs greatly from research for website content. The goal for PPC is to be as precise as possible to reduce any wasted budget. On the other hand, you want to allow broad matches for blog posts to reach more people. Experts even suggest broadening matches.
The cost of running PPC and its relation to your cost per acquisition (CPA) and cost per conversion (CPC) means not all keywords are vital to your goals. Keyword match type is the critical factor that dictates whether related search terms trigger your ads, affecting your budget.
Fortunately, most ad platforms provide keyword insight to help marketers maximize ad clickthrough rates. Long-tail keywords that reflect specific B2B pain points and solutions, coupled with negative keywords to filter traffic, ensure that your budget is spent on drawing high-quality leads.
For example, a PPC agency can help a B2B tech company refine its keyword strategy by finding the best keywords with its software solutions. At the same time, they narrow the possible triggers for ads by adding negative keywords and selecting the correct match type for each one.
2. Test and Retest Ads for Maximum Effectiveness
How you build your ads affects lead generation and PPC ROI because relevance is a key metric to assess Quality Score. Google provides Quality Scores by comparing how your ads (and landing pages) might perform against competitors based on historical data for target keywords.
The expected clickthrough rate (CTR) and landing page experience add to your overall Quality Score, too. The more your search ads indicate and provide an excellent user experience to prospects, the better they rank in search results and attract clicks.
This is why testing is a critical component of any PPC strategy, especially for B2B PPC, which is likely to take more time to acquire promising leads. Everything about a PPC ad, from visual elements to message to formatting, needs robust testing to identify what is most effective and works best.
A file hosting platform that offers secure file-sharing solutions hires a PPC agency to optimize its ads. The agency tests different scripts and formats (text, video, and image) and finds that video ads that highlight security features show potential for 50% more conversions than other formats.
3. Optimize Your Landing Pages to Convert Leads
Despite PPC being primarily focused on creating and running ad campaigns, landing pages play just as important a role in its success. Based on the concept of Quality Score, how people interact with your landing page affects the value of your strategy. This is also true for SEO.
Ads act as hooks for your business. Their purpose is to divert leads to a landing page where they learn more about your product, service, or other offers. That said, misalignments between them result in poor user experience (UX), causing bounce rates to rise and hurt your page rank.
A landing page must deliver relevant information effectively and efficiently to ensure that visitors do not waste time guessing about your business. More importantly, there has to be a seamless transition. Your ad is the movie poster, and your landing page is the trailer.
For instance, SurveyMonkey has an engaging landing page that centers its call to action (CTA) on the page (Sign Up Free). As you scroll, you read the core benefits of its products, which are fitted to any screen using responsive design. It’s simple yet effective.
4. Upgrade Your PPC Ads by Using Ad Extensions
An ad on search results is nothing impressive and barely stands out, besides having extra space around it and “Sponsored” above it. With ad extensions, you can modify any Google ad to include more information and make it easier to convince prospects to click it.
The best extensions for a B2B SaaS company include the callout (to add a short snippet about your business) and site link (to link a selection of pages to your ad). Other ad extensions that help SaaS PPC include the app (download link) and promotion (present limited time offers).
Despite being in a more visible spot on the results page, search ads could use any help that they get from extensions to outshine competitors. Remember, your ad appears alongside others. However, an additional variable to improve your PPC strategy’s effectiveness is needed.
To maximize its ad’s appeal, a photo and video editing software developer added a callout highlighting its products and site link extensions for each product page. As a result, CTR increased by 25%, and trial account signups jumped by 35% across the campaign.
5. Target and Retarget Leads with Better Precision
Though PPC is often cited as an SEO strategy with high ROI, reaping that reward is not instant. The average conversion rate for a PPC hovers just below the 5% mark. That is just the rate of conversions based on total clicks, not how many times an ad appears in results.
When you consider that PPC has a normal ratio of around one click for every 1,000+ impressions, you start to appreciate the value of precise targeting. By adjusting your PPC campaign through keywords and demographic markers, you raise the likelihood of getting clicks.
The CTR for PPC is inherently low because most people are not immediately aware of or interested in your brand. Therefore, a retargeting strategy is central to effective PPC. Marketing with display ads fails unless you re-engage your target market until your core audience emerges.
Part of this is having the right keywords set. How you allocate your budget for bids also has a huge impact on your success rate. For instance, PPC agency experts say that automating bids lets you get the most from a limited ad budget by ensuring that you do not overspend on clicks.
6. Learn to Track Leads and Attribute Conversions
Data should be central to optimizing a PPC strategy because it gives you a concrete and objective overview of campaign results. One of the key benefits of data is that it allows you to better track leads and attribute each conversion to the correct sources.
Ad platforms record PPC metrics, but their data might be biased or inaccurate to some extent. This is why data on campaign performance ideally comes from multiple reliable sources to provide a more holistic view. Once you accurately trace conversions, you can build on what works.
One approach is to set up advanced conversion tracking so that your business is able to attribute leads and sales back to specific ad campaigns. This helps with optimizing campaigns and more effectively allocating budgets. The result is a strategy that plays to your company’s strengths.
A cybersecurity firm hires a PPC agency to assist in conversion tracking. Upon reviewing the data, they discovered that remarketing campaigns generate over 40% of lead conversions for the firm. That spurs them to allocate more time and effort to perfecting their current remarketing strategy.
7. Use the LinkedIn Lead Gen Form to Its Fullest
No social media or ad platform has the same utility for B2B marketing as LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms. First, LinkedIn caters primarily to the core demographic of every B2B company: the business owner or company executives. It makes targeting easier than on other ad platforms.
LinkedIn has also set up its ads to benefit from how meticulously its users manage their profiles. You can narrow your audience by industry, position, years of experience, and more. As a platform, it also offers various ad options to match any B2B PPC strategy that you have.
One of these is the ability to send targeted messages right on LinkedIn. Less intrusive methods, such as sponsored posts and text ads, are also available. More importantly, LinkedIn ads enable you to collect lead information within the platform, giving prospects a greater sense of security.
An HR software company hires a PPC agency to assess its LinkedIn ads due to their less-than-stellar performance. They found that the ads were weighed down with too many questions, discouraging leads. Streamlining and simplifying the ad resulted in 30% more leads being generated.
8. Showcase Products and Services Using Videos
Although LinkedIn sits at the top of the most effective B2B PPC platforms, social media apps focusing on video content are good candidates for any strategy. YouTube, for example, has an incredibly diverse user base, which is fine for a general-purpose strategy to capture more leads.
Videos are also more appealing to people because they deliver information better and faster than other types of PPC ads. They address various buyer intents and align with an array of marketing goals, such as generating brand awareness and briefly demonstrating your products.
Many companies that provide content management systems (CMS) utilize video in paid ads because it works. Grammarly, for instance, shows how its app helps set the right tone in emails and blogs. NordLayer highlights its ease of use in business security.
A software development agency creates short video ads to show the ease of integration and efficiency of its software. This ad generates 25% more clicks and lead inquiries compared to its search ads, signaling to the agency that its strategy should shift more focus and resources to video ads.
9. Learn from Competitors Successes and Failures
PPC success comes in part from careful planning and, in part, video and display ads. Once you find what works, it warrants full attention to yield results. Trends also have a way of changing customer behavior.
A thorough competitor analysis puts you ahead of rival B2B businesses if you have a complete overview of their SEO and PPC campaigns. Knowing what tactics have worked well for competitors narrows the options for effective strategies, requiring basic changes for the best results.
Reviewing your competitor’s PPC plans gives insight into where they failed to perform as expected. It also brings to the surface possible gaps that you can leverage in future strategies to overtake them at the outset. In short, competitors are a valuable source for market research.
Hiring experts is the smartest way to apply competitor analysis because they have tools and resources that expedite the research process and enhance the insights you obtain. It also helps them mold a profitable PPC strategy to boost sales and lead generation.
Summing Up
Every B2B company needs a robust PPC strategy to generate and convert leads, but that does not mean PPC is easy. It requires multiple rounds of strict testing to pay off and relies on thorough research to build well. Even the optimal format changes with business goals.
Most methods to optimize PPC, such as using negative keywords and mastering LinkedIn lead generation, are doable. However, the more technical aspects of tracking and attributing leads and using ad extensions are much simpler with the help of a PPC agency at your side.
Need help amplifying your B2B PPC strategy? Contact Digital Authority Partners (DAP) to learn how we can help.
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