PPC is an immediate and demonstrably effective way to reach potential customers, with B2C and B2B businesses alike standing to gain from implementing well-managed PPC campaigns.
For B2B businesses looking to improve their PPC strategies, there are a few important factors to take into account in addition to regular PPC considerations: things like longer sales cycles, higher value products and services, and a decision-making process with more steps.
In this article we’ll run through the fundamentals of B2B PPC strategies, giving you the information you need to effectively incorporate the factors above and to tap into the potential ROI and lead generation capabilities on offer.
Here’s what we’ll be covering:
Anyone working in B2B will know that the buying cycle varies from B2C in significant ways. Let’s take a look at why:
Given all of these factors, it’s easy to see why B2B PPC campaigns need to be configured differently from B2C ones. The information that needs conveying must be adjusted to meet the specific needs of prospective B2B customers, the CTAs and ongoing engagement must be tailored to address the many and varied needs within the buying journey, and so on.
With these considerations in mind, you need to know from the outset that a one-size-fits-all approach does not work in B2B PPC. Each campaign must be built from the ground up to address the particular pain points of the prospective customer you’re targeting. And each campaign must be subject to ongoing monitoring, analysis and refinement to make performance improvements possible over time.
If you take just two things from this article, let it be the following:
With the scene set and the need for tailored campaigns laid out, let’s take a look at the elements that define a successful campaign. Each of these is its own blog post, at least, so the information below is designed to give a workable summary.
To learn more about how to run a successful B2B PPC campaign, you can also get in touch with our team.
Keywords are the building blocks of PPC campaigns. Your ads will display in searches for specified keywords, with the ad content, landing page content and onward journey being tied into their search intent. It’s crucial to get the right keywords, firstly to make sure you’re appearing in the right places, and secondly to ensure you’re not wasting money on irrelevant searches.
Here are some things to consider:
We’ve written in more depth about PPC keyword research here.
Landing pages act as a bridge between clicks and conversions, and the most effective ones follow a clear set of principles:
We’ve written in more depth about PPC landing pages here.
We touched very briefly on ad copy in the previous section. Let’s take a closer look at what copy needs to do in a B2B PPC campaign:
We’ve written in more depth about PPC ad copy here.
Audience segmentation lets you target different users with different ads, depending on their search behaviour, demographic information and so on. This is a powerful way to improve the targeting of your ads and the performance of your overall campaign.
The most effective B2B PPC campaigns are those where guesswork is removed as much as possible, and a reliable way to do this is to create audience personas. These fictionalised representations of sections of your prospective customer base let you more accurately target ads and tailor messaging to the needs and pain points of different user types.
PPC campaigns require ongoing management and optimisation to perform at their best, and part of this is changing budget allocation and bid management over time. Here’s what to consider:
Realistically, most B2B PPC campaigns will benefit from a combination of manual and automatic bidding strategies, with the balance to be determined by the specifics of the campaign.
There are several ways to improve campaign performance or to capitalise on campaigns that are performing well already. These advanced techniques broaden the remit of your campaign by targeting a wider range of users in arenas beyond Google Search results pages.
We’ve written in-depth about remarketing here, but here’s a top-level summary of the concept.
Google Ads remarketing is a way for businesses to remain connected with potential customers after they leave your website. Businesses can use remarketing via the Google Display Network to keep their brand visible to users who have engaged and to encourage further interactions.
By incorporating remarketing into your campaigns, you can target prospective customers with ad content that is relevant to their needs beyond their original engagement with your search ads. This is a great way to nurture the lead, provide information relevant to their needs, and keep them in your ecosystem.
While Google lends itself well to B2C and B2B advertising, some B2B businesses wish to advertise to a more B2B-centric audience. LinkedIn’s advertising tools are a response to this desire.
LinkedIn gives options for very detailed targeting on criteria like job title, industry, company size, and even skills. This allows advertisers to achieve much more granular targeting than would be possible elsewhere: ideal for reaching users directly with ad content relevant to their needs.
Bear in mind that LinkedIn ads are likely to be more expensive due to the greater accuracy of their targeting.
Ongoing measurement and optimisation are just as crucial as taking care to design and implement an effective B2B PPC campaign. This stage of the process lets you review campaign performance data, draw conclusions about what’s working and what isn’t, and refine your campaign accordingly.
Here are some of the metrics you should look out for to review campaign effectiveness:
These KPIs are relevant to B2B PPC campaigns because they reflect the longer sales cycle, the presence of multiple stakeholders, and the relative overall complexity of the process compared to B2C.
You can find other PPC metrics to track here.
There are a lot of moving parts in a B2B PPC ad campaign, as we’ve seen. You’ve got target keywords, ad copy, landing page design, and bid settings, to name but a few.
Testing different variations of each of these moving parts is crucial in achieving optimised performance. Google allows you to test variations of ad copy, for example, so you can review which achieved the best engagement. You can also make changes to keywords and bid strategies over time, and review which led to the best performance.
The best B2B PPC campaigns are those subject to ongoing refinement based on analysis of campaign performance data.
B2B PPC differs in subtle but important ways from B2C PPC. There is a longer sales cycle, customer needs are more complex, and multiple stakeholders are likely to be involved. For this reason, businesses need to build a solid understanding of the B2B PPC process to achieve success.
This article has looked at why it’s important to have this understanding, but also how to build it. We’ve explored the key elements of a successful campaign, with reference to keywords, ad design, landing page design, budget allocation, ad targeting, and more. Taken together, these are the areas that will determine how well your campaign performs.
Still looking for more information about PPC Services? We’ve got you covered. Find out more through one of the article below:
Or, why not check out our Definitive Guide to PPC Services.