Top Tips for Google Search to Supercharge Your B2B Marketing Efforts
Learn unique ways to improve your search advertising on Google Ads and generate high-quality business leads without draining your budget.
Google search marketing is one of the popular marketing strategies businesses use. However, when the target audience is business employees, a solid strategy must drive profitable results. B2B marketing can be tricky, and marketers face several challenges like unqualified leads, high CPCs, and low search volume for niche industries.
B2B marketers need a clear roadmap to drive the profitable results from paid search marketing.
Here are some Google search tips for B2B businesses to help optimise their paid marketing performance.
1. Use Google’s Lead Form Ad Extension
A relatively new ad extension from Google is their “lead form” that can generate leads quickly and cost-effectively than sending users to your landing page first.
Here’s how it works:
When the user clicks on the lead form ad extension, they are then sent to a lead form that is already populated with their information based on their personal Google account. This is easier for the user and provides more accurate information than requiring the user to complete this themselves.
Some advertisers are seeing a 20% boost in their sales closing rate through this ad type, so be sure to give it a try. You can learn step-by-step how to set this up by visiting here.
2. Answer a User’s Question in Google Search
B2B marketers are known for only wanting to target very specialised technical keywords related to their product.
On the other hand, people who are experiencing the difficulties that a product solves may be unaware that the product exists.
For example, if a business supplies board meeting software, only a tiny percentage of potential customers will search Google for “board meeting software.”
Instead, more individuals are looking for terms like “how to enhance my board meetings” or “what’s the best way to share board meeting minutes.”
You can identify questions people ask using tools like Answer the Public and Also Asked and adjust your ads to highlight how the products or services resolve the customer’s particular problems.
Image source: Also Asked
Additionally, monitor search term reports data for keywords you may include in ad groups with more customised ad content.
3. Improve User Abandonment With Better Sign Up Forms
A seamless sign-up flow is significant to turn a click into a lead. A poor or intrusive experience can ultimately ruin your ad performance, and Landing pages are essential for every ad campaign, but there are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to B2B efforts.
Advertisers should keep the same theme going with the landing page copy as they did with the ad copy to avoid unsuitable individuals from clicking.
Use the text to refer to prospective clients' ideal business sizes, job responsibilities, and possible budgets.
Image source: Github
Additionally, the form structure might be critical in balancing the need to qualify the correct people with not preventing contacts from filling the form excessively.
Include enough form fields to guarantee that individuals are serious about providing their contact information while also letting them vet out their firm data without requesting extra information.
Job title and firm name, for example, are probably legitimate requests, but asking for the city and state to download a whitepaper is unnecessary.
Requesting a phone number for a top-of-funnel offer can also be a turnoff, as many people dislike being called out of the blue when they are only doing preliminary research.
4. Save Money By Reducing Ad Fraud
Despite your best efforts to build an effective campaign and lead funnel, there can still be room for improvement by reducing the amount of ad fraud you may be experiencing.
A study conducted by Juniper Research found that advertisers lost $42 billion to ad fraud in 2019, and Forrester research found that 20% of budgets were lost due to ad fraud.
Click injection, bot traffic, and competitors can result in invalid clicks that waste the ad budget.
Many independent services are available to marketers to help them reduce ad fraud, such as Fraud Blocker and PPC Protect. These can help reduce fraud and improve your overall B2B campaign performance.
Image source: Fraud Blocker
5. Improve targeting with “Similar Audiences”
Correct audience targeting can help marketers narrow down who they want to reach with advertising.
Try using Google’s “Customer Match” to upload prospect emails to Google Ads to target people who have shown an early interest in the company by signing up on a lead form or downloading an ebook. Once the customer match list is created, advertisers can generate a “Similar Audience” group that can be layered onto ads to expand your reach and target customer prospects with similar qualities.
Create remarketing audiences from website visitors, and don't forget to include them in ads, even if they're merely for observation.
When manual bidding is set to observation-only, advertisers may bid on these people to be more competitive for search queries from people who have previously expressed an interest in their business.
Furthermore, Google and Microsoft provide a variety of third-party audience choices, with B2B-focused in-market audiences providing the most accuracy.
In-market consumers have demonstrated that they are actively looking for a specific product or service by searching and browsing.
Moreover, use industry targeting to approach people who work in the sectors you're attempting to break into.
With such multiple layering of audience targeting, advertisers can hyper-focus their campaigns and drive fruitful results.
6. Add Conversion Tracking At Each Funnel Stage
As ad networks encourage marketers to use automated bidding in their campaigns, accurate conversion data is more critical.
Also, it's crucial to optimise for conversion steps that are most relevant to generating quality leads.
Advertisers may use conversion actions such as asset downloads or webinar signups for higher funnel campaigns to optimise around more significant volume inquiries.
On the other hand, lower-funnel efforts may be more focused on demo requests, trial signups, and pricing inquiries and should use those as conversion actions.
Assigning values to each of your different conversions, such as valuing a free trial at $25 and downloading a whitepaper at $5, can help Google’s engine optimise your ad campaigns for a more significant ROI.
Conclusion
B2B marketing can be challenging for advertisers as the space is highly competitive. But the strategies above can help improve your campaigns' efficiency and performance. Implement these to get B2B paid marketing work at the highest potential.
Moreover, continuous optimisations according to changing variables and new trends are necessary to have consistent incremental results.
