Search Engine Marketing for B2B - 7 Planning Tips
Paid Search, otherwise known as search engine marketing, is a fantastic tool for B2B marketers. Why? Because it is one of the only marketing mediums that gets you close to the bottom of the marketing funnel. Unlike traditional or social media advertising, SEM can be used to identify the people who are putting time and effort into active research, signifying that they are ready to buy and want a solution NOW.
By performing a search for your product, the target signifies that they already know that they have a problem needing to be solved. So, an entire chunk of the standard awareness-consideration-decision journey has already been walked by this segment of your audience. The very definition of low hanging fruit.
And because traditional B2B marketing has relatively expensive CPA (cost-per-acquisition) compared to B2C, low hanging fruit is even more desirable for a good ROI. However, SEM for B2B isn’t necessarily easy. If it were, you wouldn’t see huge B2B corporations still pouring millions of dollars into other mediums.
Here are my tips for making B2B search engine marketing a little bit easier and more successful:
Take time to learn about the customer before jumping into keyword research. Talk to the best sales rep and the best customer service rep on your team. Listen in on some of their calls to get a feel for the language they use and the barriers they encounter.
What are the top 3-5 problems that need solved for the customer? You can get some incredible information from within your organization by digging deep into the most frequent use cases. Don’t be afraid to ask, “but why is that?” when learning about your customer. This question gets you closer to the real root of the problem, which is where your best keywords and ad copy will come from.
Leverage personas to organize your campaigns. Each persona will likely have a separate set of problems and things they consider valuable. Does it make sense to separate each persona from another, in order to serve more specific ads to each?
After you’ve gotten the top pain points from your sales reps, and drilled down into the “but why?” as far as you can go, you can now write your ad copy. Use those pain points to draft outcome-oriented headlines such as “Reduce Lost Sales” or “Double Your Speed Today.”
Keyword time! I won’t go into all of my tips for mining keywords (see my other posts!), but when you’re working in B2B, a few extra steps are helpful. Browse UberSuggest, AlsoAsked, and AnswerthePublic websites to find the questions people ask about your category of products. Can you answer these questions and quell these concerns with your ad copy or landing page?
Another great place to get pain points and objections is your own website Site Search. Make sure it’s hooked up to Google Analytics so you can see what real people are asking or trying to find.
Research what your competitors are doing on SpyFu. What keyphrases are they buying in bulk? Should you avoid those keyphrases, or try to share those impressions? While I never think mimicking your competitors is a good idea, it’s helpful to analyze their strategy before embarking on yours.
