Building an impactful B2B PPC Campaign from scratch in an ever-changing digital world with shifting consumer trends is not easy. It takes a strong understanding of who you are and who your customer is, and creating a winning strategy to reach and convert qualified leads.
In fact, most B2B businesses fail at marketing not because they don’t invest enough into the marketing budget but because of poor strategy, targeting, and messaging. They create generic messaging using B2C tactics and are baffled when the results are sub-par.
We’ve seen it repeatedly and strive to help our clients understand where they are wasting their resources on inefficient B2B PPC campaigns. When they come to us, we help apply the following strategies to design powerful campaigns with high ROI. Let’s dive in!
Define Your Campaign Goals & KPIs
Before you even begin your custom campaign, get clear on what success looks like to you in terms of metrics. Unlike B2C campaigns, where the goal is centered on getting an immediate sale, B2B sales cycles are typically longer and center around nurturing prospects.
Having a primary objective for your PPC campaigns will keep you anchored to your sales goals, so start by defining which KPIs are important. Is it to drive more demo bookings, capture form submissions, or get more email signups from your webinars?
Each of these goals should align with your buyer’s journey funnel and offer value whether it’s at the awareness or decision-making stage.
Measure Campaign KPIs
Once your campaign objectives are clear, the next step would be to define the key performance indicators you will track to measure your campaign success.
For most B2B advertising strategies, essential KPIs include the following:
- CPC (Cost Per Click): Are you attracting the right traffic efficiently?
- CTR (Click-Through Rate): Is your ad copy resonating with your audience?
- CPL (Cost Per Lead): How much are you paying for a qualified lead?
- Conversion Rate: Are your landing pages and offers converting users?
- ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): Are you generating revenue that justifies the ad spend?
By knowing which KPIs to measure, you’ll be empowered to optimize your campaign performance continuously and see better results through A/B testing, messaging revisions, keyword strategy refinement, and new creatives.
Understand Your Ideal Buyer Persona
To minimize wasting your spending on irrelevant clicks and unqualified users, you must hone in on the precise targeting of key decision-makers and send your traffic to highly optimized landing pages.
To do this well, you’ll have to understand your ideal buyer persona - what makes them tick and how they make their purchasing decisions. Oftentimes, B2B customers are multiple stakeholders across different roles at a company.
Therefore, your campaign strategy should address the pain points and needs of each decision-maker separately, as opposed to speaking to all of them at once through diluted messaging.
One way to do so is through audience segmentation using tools like Google Ads custom segments, which allows you to target your ideal client based on job title, industry, company type/size, and more factors. Overall, segmentation lets you personalize ad messaging so that your copy feels directed to one stakeholder.
The B2B Buyer Journey
Beyond understanding whom to target, you have to know where they are on their buyer journey. Are they just looking to do product research or are they ready to book a call and buy? When you set up a proper customer journey blueprint that outlines various stages of your funnel, it will help you personalize your ads and landing pages to match where your prospects are on their buying journey.
For example, depending on your campaign intent (spread business awareness vs get bookings), strategize your B2B PPC campaigns around the following objectives:
- Top of the funnel: Educate and raise awareness.
- Mid-funnel: Share case studies and comparisons.
- Bottom of the funnel: Encourage demos and trials through social proof.
By understanding your ideal customers and where they are on the buyer journey with more precision, you’ll be able to attract higher-quality leads with smaller ad budgets.
Keyword Research & Match Types
Once a clear strategy is in place to convert key B2B buyers, keyword research and implementation will help you reach those goals by getting in front of the right people. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, SEMrush, or SpyFu to find keywords with preferable search volume and low difficulty.
When it comes to B2B buyers, you’ll want to understand their intent and find keywords that match it. For example, we find that long-tail keywords that are very specific and have high intent perform the best. So, instead of choosing “healthcare software,” look for more descriptive phrases, such as “healthcare CRM software for small clinics.”
To improve your conversion rates even further, you can use match types to control when your ads appear. Here is how match types work:
- Exact Match: Your ads will show only for exact or very close searches of your keywords. This is the most precise keyword targeting strategy.
- Phrase Match: Your ads will show when a user’s search includes your keyword phrase or intent. You can specify the order of this, with user keywords coming before or after your phase. This strategy allows for a wider search intent.
By understanding which prospects to target at which stages of the buyer journey, you can have more control over your campaign outcomes while lowering your ad spend.
Create Click-Worthy Ad Copy
Your B2B ad copy should not only drive curiosity but also address the target audience's main pain point – and do so clearly and quickly. The headline is your primary ad copy "real estate," where you have an opportunity to spark curiosity and present your unique value proposition.
The rest of the text should speak to user challenges and how your solution can help them overcome major pain points. For the copy to be effective, always include action-oriented calls-to action that encourage immediate engagement.
And finally, don’t forget to test out multiple ad variations by A/B testing your copy and seeing which version has the best conversion rates.
Design a High-Converting Landing Page
Unlike websites, landing pages are stand-alone pages that guide visitors to perform one specific action without the distractions of a full-blown site with menu pages, footers, and click-worthy navigation pathways.
A highly converting B2B landing page always focuses on one offer and strong calls-to-action that are visible throughout the page. In fact, feature your first call-to-action above the fold so that visitors don’t have to scroll to find it.
Further, the landing page should be easy to navigate and have clear and persuasive messaging that builds trust and shows why your offer stands out above the competition.
Since B2B sales is a multi-layered process that includes various stakeholders, trust signals like reviews and industry awards are an essential part of a high-converting landing page by reducing friction and maximizing credibility.
Given the increasing trend of mobile shopping, make sure your landing page is mobile-friendly, can take secure payments, and loads quickly. Overall, strive to improve on small technical and content gaps to make the user experience even more effortless and enjoyable.
Set Up Conversion Tracking & Analytics
Without using analytics and tracking your PPC campaign performance, you won’t know exactly what’s working and where to invest your marketing spend for a better ROI. By tracking your campaign performance, you will get a clear picture of how to refine results and navigate your PPC marketing more effectively.
We recommend that you use tools like Google Tag Manager and Google Ads Conversion Tracking to understand how specific keywords and ads perform to drive valuable leads. Then, integrate these metrics with your own CRM system to track customer journeys through the entire sales funnel.
Keep in mind to regularly monitor other metrics like landing page bounce rates and scroll depth to identify user behavior patterns that could easily impact your conversions. Knowing what metrics to monitor and how often will help you tweak your B2B advertising strategy for improved performance before it impacts your campaign budget.
Test & Optimize for Best Performance
In marketing, testing is everything! What may work in one niche may not work well in another, so understanding how our approach connects with users in real-time is the most effective way to start building a successful strategy and campaign that is unique to your brand and products/services.
To do so, begin your B2B PPC campaign with a “test budget” that will help you gather initial performance data without overspending. This part of your campaign building will show you exactly what’s working before you try to scale your efforts.
A suggested time frame for testing the grounds and getting enough data to understand the patterns of user behavior is about 2-4 weeks, depending on your sales cycle and audience size. For B2B companies with a longer sales cycle, a month is a preferred time frame to understand the impact of your efforts.
Approximately 10-20% of your campaign budget is sufficient for the campaign's testing phase. Monitor and make adjustments to campaign performance weekly depending on the results of key metrics like click-through rates and conversion rates. Eliminate underperforming keywords and ads and allocate their budget to top performers.
B2B PPC Campaign Management
If you are a B2B business and want to perfect your PPC campaign results, getting clear on your buyer persona, campaign objectives, and performance analytics will help you create and run campaigns with high ROI.
However, at The Creative Momentum, we understand that knowledge is one thing, and applying it is vastly more complex. If creating your own high-converting B2B PPC campaigns seems a bit too intimidating and you want to skip the longer experimentation phase that comes with DIY advice, we are here for you!
Our PPC campaign experts understand B2B business needs and the more complex sales cycles. We simplify the process of getting conversions because we’ve learned from hundreds of clients and can use the same successful blueprint that worked to help their businesses grow.
Ready to see sustainable ROI from your PPC campaign performance? Reach out to us today!