Paid Search and B2B Lead Generation: Make it Work for Your Business
A prospective client recently approached 360Partners with a plea for insight into a lead generation dilemma. They had previously launched a paid search account through Google, which they hoped to leverage as a fresh source of sales leads for their product: a complex B2B service with a long sales cycle. After months of trying to manage the campaign in-house, they came to us scratching their heads and asking, “Why are the leads so expensive, and are they any good?”
This is not an uncommon experience in B2B paid search marketing, and leaves some B2B firms wondering whether paid search is an appropriate marketing channel for them. The complex sales cycle of a considered purchase does present some unique challenges for a paid search campaign: a company searching for a $50,000 software solution is, of course, not going to click on a paid search ad, place a product in a shopping cart and then simply check out. More than likely they will go through a long research process, involving multiple decision makers, with an extensive period of relationship-building between them and their prospective vendor that requires multiple interactions. This can frequently take several months or longer. Within such a layered, complex process, where does paid search fit in?
The answer is that business decision makers repeatedly use the internet to research products and services throughout the buying cycle. Paid search can be a means of helping to frame a potential client’s buying criteria early on, as well as relaying key messages to them throughout the rest of the cycle.
Of course, the challenge extends beyond merely demonstrating the potential value of paid search for B2B marketing efforts. The complexity of the B2B sales cycle presents obstacles to paid search, which must be taken into consideration if a campaign is to be run successfully:
- Optimization Difficulties- The drawn out sales process makes it difficult to make improvements to the campaigns in a timely fashion: how do you determine that paid search efforts are hitting the mark if it takes upwards of 12 months to reach a sale? How do you decide which keywords and messaging are speaking to targeted customers?
- Measurement Problems- the audience typically consists of a small niche, which entails a small number of clicks and conversions for measurement. This makes it difficult to measure results and spot trends.
- High Costs- there is generally a very small, focused niche of keywords, on which competitors are aggressively bidding and driving up costs. 360Partners has clients that regularly pay $10-$15 per click for some of their terms.
This environment offers small room for error, and one can see how a firm can get burned by a poorly targeted search campaign.
With some appropriate strategizing, many of these problems can be avoided. The key is to be highly focused and conservative at the outset of a new campaign and to look at metrics inside of the sales funnel for optimizing search efforts. 360Partners has successfully utilized some of the following strategies for our own B2B search clients:
- Start with a small focused set of keywords- marketers in less competitive niches with less expensive and higher trafficked keyword terms have the luxury of experimenting with a broad set of keywords to locate new, relevant terms. Unfortunately, for a B2B marketer with expensive keyword terms, budgets can be overspent quickly. We recommend starting with a smaller set of focused terms and gradually expanding the account over time.
- Advertise where your clients are searching- Google and Business.com are the most favored networks for a business audience, and are the best outlets for a new B2B campaign. Proceed with caution on search engines that skew towards consumers- you can get a lot of unqualified clicks from these sources.
- Advertise on the Google content network- 360Partners has found the Google content network to be a great source of B2B leads. In line with our other recommendations, we suggest starting with conservative bids and a targeted keyword list and/or a focused list of placements (remember to add site exclusions!).
- Determine the actions that you want prospects to take on your site- you cannot measure the success of a campaign without first defining what constitutes success. What do you want prospects to do when they get to your site? Do you want them to submit contact information, to view online demos, download a white paper, or read content and learn more about your products and services? Consider also segmenting your traffic from your paid search campaigns. Customers searching on more specific terms, such as your brand name, are likely to be further along in the buying process, and will need to be engaged in a different way than customers that are using more general search terms. By segmenting your search terms, you can direct users to actions that are attuned to their stage of the buying cycle.
- Use short-term metrics to measure the success of paid search campaigns- there are many possible stages within the buying cycle prior to the final sale where conversion can be measured and many possible metrics for representing customer engagement: page views, time on site, number of white paper downloads, newsletter signups, lead form signups, etc. The solution lies in determining which of these actions is valuable to you and relating each type of action to final sales numbers to estimate a value for each action type.
The general idea is to begin modestly and to grow the account as you learn more about what motivates your target customers. You must also keep in mind that your marketing plan needs to be focused on more than an immediate conversion. Some marketers hold the misguided notion that paid search is all about instant gratification. They believe that a click upon one’s ad must immediately end in a sale and is worth nothing beyond that. The truth is that the initial click is the beginning of a relationship, which can flourish or quickly fizzle, depending on how appropriately traffic is handled once it reaches a website. The B2B sales cycle is all about building a relationship over the long-term, and paid search, when leveraged properly, can play a valuable part in initiating and nurturing client relationships. Approaching paid search with relationship-building in mind is yet another key to making effective use of it.
If you would like to learn more about using paid search as a part of a complex purchase cycle, we would be happy to sit down with you and share more of our insights. We can use our 101 point checklist to take a deep dive into your account and provide further suggestions on leveraging paid search for lead generation. Contact us today at searchmarketing@360partners.com for a free evaluation.
