Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising should be a key component of any B2B digital marketing strategy. Using PPC can help you increase your search engine ranking and revenue, but it can also help you generate high-quality leads that will keep that revenue growing over the long haul.
However, as Neil Patel says in his article How to Improve the Quality of Your B2B PPC Leads:
“[PPC advertising] is not the easiest thing in the world to get right.”
-Neil Patel, co-founder, Neil Patel Digital
He goes on to say that while PPC advertising drives revenue, the majority of the leads you garner from it are actually wasting your time and money. 🤯
So, what to do? How do you improve the quality of your B2B PPC leads to generate that higher ROI and stop wasting time and money?
We’ll give you a hint: it’s all about getting to know your customers and making sure they know how you can solve their problems. Let's get started.
1. Start by Creating Buyer Personas
If you’ve already launched your B2B PPC campaign, you know what we’re talking about. Most likely, the majority of your leads aren’t high-quality leads.
This is because your PPC campaigns often aren’t targeting the right people. Which leads us to this question: Do you know your customers? If the answer is anything other than yes, you’re most definitely not targeting them correctly.
We recommend creating a buyer persona before launching PPC campaigns. A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer. You can come up with this representation using past customer data and research, and by collecting information on your landing page.
By creating a buyer persona, you're better aware of the type of customers you want to attract. This alone is incredibly important in creating effective B2B PPC campaigns that generate better B2B PPC leads, not to mention that better campaigns can help your overall ad quality score and search engine ranking.
2. Quality Over Quantity
Okay, so you've created your buyer personas using existing customer data and research. However, when you gather data on your existing and future customers, are you simply asking for their name, phone number and email address? That’s exactly what most people do and it’s time for the cold truth; it's not enough.
As you gather customer data, ask qualifying questions. Here are some examples:
- How old are they?
- How often do they purchase for themselves or their company?
- Are they looking to purchase in the next month? Six months? Year?
- What do they like about your existing products?
- What are their interests?
- What companies influence them?
These questions provide some great foundational information for your buyer personas, but remember:
There are a few easy ways to work on this goal. Make sure you’re using appropriate keyword targeting in your B2B PPC advertising strategy to avoid wasting precious clicks on the wrong type of keywords (this also helps your ad quality score). The better your keyword targeting, the better your B2B PPC leads will be.
For those who aren’t highly-qualified leads, the data collection process itself can qualify prospects for you. For example, you can reject free or spammy email domains, which guarantees that anyone who wants to submit their information uses a custom domain name (a standard for business email addresses) or additional information (such as company name). Taking these steps will reduce the number of overall submissions you'll receive, but the submissions will be higher quality and also provides more context about the buyer’s possible needs before ever making contact.
Be sure to apply an effective lead scoring model to appropriately gauge each lead’s viability. A thorough, repeatable scoring process is one of the best ways to assess which of your MQLs will be primed to become value-driving SQLs.
3. It’s All About Ad Targeting
Now that you have a representation of your ideal customer, you can use this information to target similar customers via your PPC campaign. The information you have gathered will now help your PPC campaigns be more specific with audience targeting. No longer are you targeting just any customer. You know exactly who you want to attract and you can now tweak the ad content and audience targeting settings, as well as the landing page copy to appeal to these specific customers. Implementing these changes can also help your organic search engine rankings.
4. Demonstrate How Your Products and Services Solve Your Persona's Problems.
Now that you’ve figured out who your ideal customer is, it’s time to shift your focus to what you can offer them. You've figured out the problems and challenges plaguing your buyers; now it's your job to show them how what you offer is the answer to their prayers? Ask yourself these questions as you review your copy, images if applicable and landing page copy:
- Are you making it clear to them what problems your products and/or services solve?
- Are you speaking to your personas' pain points?
In other words, your ad copy and your landing page copy must be good and compelling, contextual to the personal experiences of your buyers. Often times, your ideal customer isn’t aware that your business exists or can help them. It’s your job to make it clear what solutions you provide and how it will make their lives better.
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and ask yourself:
- Why would I want this product or service?
- How will this offering help me in life/business?
- What common issues will this product or service help me solve?
- How have other businesses benefited from this service?
Educate your potential customers on the benefits of your services in your ad. By answering these questions for them, they’re more likely to become quality leads.
5. Target TOF (Top of Funnel) Leads with an Educational Campaign
Another option to gather more quality leads is to try different kinds of PPC campaigns. For example, most ads in PPC have a conversion goal of a sale. If that type of ad isn’t bringing in the best leads, you may want to consider an ad created for the sole purpose of educating, and whose long-term goal is to generate high-quality PPC leads knowing that a higher percentage of these will eventually convert into sales.
Again, according to Neil Patel, “If you place more focus on educating those who click on your ads, your leads will be better qualified when they do get in touch with you because they’ll already be aware of the benefits. This method, of course, helps to generate more leads, as well as improve lead quality. This is because you’re now making even more businesses aware of why they need your solution, rather than just reaching those that are actively looking for it.”
Are You Ready to Start Collecting Qualified B2B Leads?
Understanding how to improve lead quality in your PPC campaigns is both an art and a science. Start with your customers, put yourself in their place, and you can see how best to help them. This route is the opposite of the shortcut, but will lead to better results.
About us: Our team at The Creative Momentum creates effective B2B PPC campaigns that deliver strong ROI for our clients. The business owners we work with appreciate that we focus on what we’re good at while they have the priceless opportunity to do the same at their respective companies. Are you ready to start collecting better quality leads?
Get started with a free quote.