As an entrepreneur or marketing executive, your task is to drive more B2B and B2C leads during the work week. You may have a small or large marketing budget, and you may or may not have already been using SEM ads. Regardless of the circumstances, driving MQLs is a challenging task that requires both art and science. You need to ensure that your leads are valuable and that they can be tied back to ROI.
Does this describe who you are? You’re in luck if so.
Paid search is the marketing channel that can help you, and it offers a great method for driving low-funnel conversions and getting your solution in front of qualified leads who want a solution quickly. Google Ads, the largest paid search platform of all, allows you to serve ads on Google, the world’s largest search engine. Whether you are a first-timer or already running paid search campaigns, Google Ads is an effective and useful tool for driving B2B and B2C leads into your pipeline. The combination of functionality, access to qualified buyers, and low barrier to entry makes it a perfect fit for demand generation. So, you should put your chips onto Google Ads as it is a smart move, especially in 2023. Below, we will discuss six simple Google Ads strategies that help any B2B and B2C lead gen campaign convert more smoothly and drive ROI.
1 Integrate your CRM reporting with Google Ads
To ensure effective performance measurement of your paid search campaigns, you need to track their performance throughout the funnel. This involves integrating your CRM system, such as Salesforce or HubSpot, with Google Ads, beyond just relying on Google Ads and Google Analytics. This integration enables you to monitor the performance of keywords and audiences that generate leads and those that do not. This is critical for lead scoring, where you need to distinguish between high-quality and low-quality leads. Merely knowing the average number of leads required for a sale or the value of the average lead is insufficient.
Identifying the quality of leads and tying it back to the campaign is essential. For example, you may believe that one keyword deserves most of your budget, but another keyword may generate more revenue and sales. Integrating Google Ads with your CRM enables you to view the entire customer journey from start to finish. You can integrate Salesforce CRM data directly into Google Ads or download performance reports into your CRM dashboard to obtain a keyword-level view of your leads and sales’ sources. Ultimately, the objective is to understand lead quality, enabling you to optimize your ads, keywords, and landing pages for the best performance.
2 segmentation of a campaign
Many paid search accounts suffer from not segmenting campaigns based on targeting tactics. Simply having a single campaign for a single offering is inadequate. To improve, one must be more specific by segmenting campaigns according to various factors such as device, target consumer, location, network, keyword match type, and brand. This allows for better organization and duplication of campaigns across different territories and product offerings. Effective strategies include researching stand-alone keywords, adjusting ad copy to suit both B2B and B2C customers at different stages of the sales cycle, and segmenting landing pages. By doing so, performance is enhanced, and it becomes easier to determine which audience converts the best, resulting in more qualified leads, better conversion rates, and increased revenue.
3 Keyword Approach
The lifeblood of any B2B and B2C paid search campaign is keywords. Each keyword has its own associated conversion intent, and it’s crucial to consider how urgently potential customers need a solution for their problem. Refining keywords constantly is necessary due to the highly competitive playing field. To ensure the best performance for your marketing budget, you need to start small with a set of keywords most likely to convert.
You must consider the competitiveness of a term and how much you pay per click. Typically, keywords with higher CPCs are more competitive. You can lower the cost by improving Quality Score at the keyword level, updating ad copy, or targeting a less expensive keyword. Alternatively, you can focus on testing a small number of terms that are more likely to convert. Broad match keywords are usually a smart play for advertisers with larger budgets, while exact match terms are an excellent option for smaller budgets and those who want to exert greater control.
Additionally, prioritizing “long-tail” keywords, which are made up of four or more words, is a smart strategy since they usually mean more educated customers who are further along in the buying cycle. Long-tail keywords are often less competitive and more likely to convert.
Finally, negative keywords are essential. Review Search Query reports to identify which phrase and Broad match keywords are driving irrelevant impressions, cost, and clicks. Then, add the wasteful search terms as negative keywords to your campaigns to tell Google Ads not to show your campaigns to people searching for that particular keyword.
4 Create advertisements that Potential Leads will Qualify
Instead of focusing on the highest possible CTR when writing ads, you should write ads that qualify potential leads before they click. This approach will ensure that the prospects you pay for are more engaged with what you’re offering on the landing page. You should aim to create ads with ad text and headlines that are similar to the landing page they lead to.
To accomplish this, you should include several elements in your ad copy. These include the target customer’s job title, the landing page offer (such as a free download, trial, or buy button), your product or service price, your trial availability and length, industry clients you’ve worked with in the past (i.e. social proof), your target industry, vertical, or customer size, and any other differentiators that would excite a potential customer.
By understanding what calls to action, benefits, and offers an ideal lead really wants, you can tweak your ads to attract only the most ideal prospects. This will result in significantly better lead quality. You can also spy on competitors to see what elements they include in their ads, which will help you understand what your competition offers and give you fresh ideas to test in your own ads..
5 Build Relevant Landing Pages
Routing the ad to a relevant page on your site that speaks directly to the referring search ad can solve the issue of a generic landing page that only serves to sabotage SEM performance. Bad landing page pairings can increase bounce rates and lower Ad Quality scores, ultimately increasing a company’s cost-per-click when investing in an SEM campaign.
Although altering your web pages to match your campaigns may seem like a waste of time, it is usually a better move than trying to do without since relevance and consistency are critical to the campaign’s success. When you sync the original ad and landing page with one another, users will have a better reception, and performance rates should improve.
You don’t have to complicate SEM lead generation. Once you have these components of your paid search strategy in place, your SEM leads should see an uptick in relevance and value, leading to more conversions.
6 Test Your Landing Pages
When a visitor reaches a landing page, the focus shifts from being driven there to maximizing their value. If you offer a free content asset like a white paper or a free webinar replay, ensure that it is gated and that the visitor comprehends its value. You can achieve this by using attractive photos, bullets, and other elements that emphasize the benefits of the asset. Your landing pages should be specialized and organized based on your objectives.
You should determine whether you are driving leads or sales. A/B testing your landing pages is as crucial as A/B testing your ads. This involves creating significantly different variations of landing pages, with diverse outlines, copy, assets, and more. This helps you determine which offer and asset your audience prefers. By testing elements such as cost action, main images, the lead form, headlines, and the layout, you can often improve conversion rates. Adding trust-based elements like third-party reviews, customer recommendations, testimonials, privacy seals, videos, or employer screenshots will also help improve conversion rates.
7 Remarket Effectively
Nurturing prospects down the funnel is a crucial aspect of today’s B2B AND B2C sales environment, and remarketing plays a significant role in achieving this. In particular, B2B AND B2C lead gen sales require repeatedly bringing the customer back to relevant landing pages until they convert.
Developing campaigns, ads, and landing pages specifically for prospects who have previously visited your website but did not convert is a wise strategy. Such visitors are typically more knowledgeable and engaged, making them more likely to convert. To encourage conversion, you can segment remarketing audiences into low-investment offers, such as a free trial or a coupon.
Remarketing is a critical component of the B2B AND B2C sales cycle, as potential customers browsing your product pages are likely to make a decision soon. Therefore, it is vital to capture their attention and encourage them to convert before they choose a different solution. Remarketing can be executed through Google Display, which involves displaying banners and text ads to users on different websites, or through Remarketing List for Search Ads, which allows you to serve ads to people in your remarketing audience when they search on Google later.
