Five Proven Methods To Bring In Higher Quality B2B Leads From PPC

Over the past five years, B2B and B2C businesses have begun to resemble one another. As part of this mirroring process, marketing strategies between the two have grown closer.

In 2020, B2B businesses are often relying on traditional B2C marketing strategies such as Pay-Per-Click advertising and social media.

Because of the improvements in targeting options available on advertising platforms, such as Google and Facebook, PPC has become a powerful tool to generate leads for B2B businesses. In fact, PPC advertising has overtaken traditional advertising methods for such businesses in recent years. 

However, B2B lead generation PPC campaigns are very different. To successfully bring in quality leads, advertisers need to understand the principles of generating leads through PPC. Today, we will cover five of the most important methods you can implement into your paid campaigns to see instant results.

1. Be more specific with your keywords

The foundation of any successful B2B PPC campaign is a great keyword strategy. Keywords are the backbone of any PPC campaign as they determine pretty much everything – from what search queries trigger your ads, which searches block your ads from showing, which landing page you need to send your clicks to and how you structure your ad copy.

There are two primary categories when it comes to keywords, short-tail and long-tail. Using both of these is critical to reaching the right audience and enhancing the quality of the leads generated by PPC. 

Short-tail keywords are terms containing one or two words and tend to generate higher volumes of traffic. However, due to their broad nature, they are less revealing of the user’s intent. As an example, if a user searches for “CRM System”, they could be simply searching for what a CRM System is.

To generate higher quality leads through PPC, businesses should put more focus on more specific keywords that match the user’s intent. You can achieve this through long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are specific phrases that are made up of three or more words that allow businesses to reach searchers that are further along in their sales journey. An example here would be a user searching for “CRM pricing for a small business,” which indicates that the searcher is closer to making a purchase than those found on short-tail terms. Therefore, when looking to improve the quality of leads through your PPC campaigns, you need to explore long-tail keywords that match the users intent.

2. Utilise match types

Match types play a significant role when improving the quality of your leads. When you are either optimising or creating a new campaign, exact and phrase matches will give you the most control. On the other hand, broad-match keywords bring in a higher volume of lower quality leads. 

In order to avoid poor keyword matching, you can use one of two methods:

1. Be proactive in analysing your search queries and implementing negative keywords.
2. Limit your use of broad-match keywords

Although neither of these approaches are perfect, you can optimise your campaigns over time to hone in on your ideal customers. However, this can be a time consuming task, so it is always a good idea to work with a skilled marketing team to aid in this optimisation process, which will save you money in the long run.

3. Connect ads to relevant landing pages

For ads that are looking to generate qualified leads, your destination landing page is a vital component for success. To create landing pages that increase your conversion rates, focus your destinations on capturing contact information instead of selling the end product – let your sales team do the speaking for your brand. 

4. Create longer contact forms

I know this may sound counterintuitive. However the best way to scare off low quality leads is to ask for more information on your contact forms.

Consider the information that is important for your sales team when they follow up on a lead, these can be…

• Job Title
• Industry
• Business Goals
• Number Of Employees
• Annual Revenue

On top of this, do not pay attention to the amount of data collected in your forms, but the quality of the data. Asking for a work email address is a lot more powerful than asking for a personal email address as an example. 

A lot of B2B companies are looking for long term relationships, so they will be more than willing to part with this information if they are serious about buying.

5. Craft compelling ad copy

Your ad copy can be the difference between an eager searcher clicking on your ad or scrolling right past it. 

In order to curate compelling ad copy for B2B:

• Display Credibility – Has your company or product won any industry awards? Is your service rated 5 stars? If so, use these in your ad copy to make yourself stand out from your competitors.
• Highlight your value – If your service provides a solution for businesses, let this be known in your ad copy. Letting the searchers know that you can help solve their issues will improve lead quality. 
• Be Specific – Write detailed ad copy that is relevant to the user’s search. Do not run generic ads across the whole campaign, make new adverts for each ad group you create to increase your relevance.

The bottom line is that to generate higher quality B2B leads through PPC advertising, businesses will have to understand that they’ll have to turn people away and that the goal is not to generate the most leads possible but to separate the good from the bad and to find profitable prospects.

Implement the strategies mentioned above to develop a more sophisticated and refined PPC campaign and in turn, find the most qualified leads for your business.