Google Ads: B2B Prospecting Strategies and Tactics

In this article, you will learn how Google Ads B2B prospecting will help you reach a wider audience with digital marketing PPC strategies. We will summarize the findings from the B2B Academy Google Ads workshop. Here are some of the key takeaways from going through the Google Ads workshop and how this will help you reach a wider audience with digital marketing:

• We’ll talk about what Google Ads are
• The importance of the landing page
• Setting up Goals
• The various types of Google Ads lead generation campaigns
• Choosing the right campaign Name, Segmentation, and Location
• The importance of budgeting for lead generation
• What is matching
• Negative Keywords
• Conclusions

Let’s talk about Google Ads.

Google Ads are an essential tool for most marketing campaigns, for obvious reasons - Google is used by millions of people on a day-to-day basis. 

In this article, we'll go over the fundamentals of lead generation Google ads and then look at how some of these elements may affect the long-term strategies of your company.

The importance of the Landing Page

Let's begin at the very beginning. The landing page is the first thing you should think about when starting a new lead generation campaign. It's critical to have a landing page in place for your B2B company/business before starting the campaign. All of the information you'll need to develop your campaign will come from your landing page.

Setting up your Google Ads B2B goals 

Next up, goals. Setting up your company B2B goals is fairly straightforward:

• Sales goals are used for online stores, for example. They can easily show relevant information
• Leads, one of the most common campaign goals, are used when trying to get customers to sign up for your newsletter, sign a form or watch a video, for example
• Website traffic brings people to your website
• Product and brand consideration are mainly meant for brand awareness
• Display ads will provide a huge amount of impressions, but unfortunately, their conversion rate is rather low.
• App promotions are promotions for apps
• Local stores and promotions are for when you have a physical location

Let's go with website traffic for our hypothetical B2B campaign. This is significant because when you initially start utilizing Google Ads, Google has no idea how to segment your company customers and will have to learn through this B2B campaign.

Type of Google  Ads campaigns

After we’ve selected our objective it’s time to select the type of campaign that we want to run. The types of campaigns are: 

• Search campaigns are the most basic type of campaign, and, in most cases, also the most efficient. They have a medium cost per click whilst also having a rather high conversion rate.
• Display campaigns are image ads and you can control them either by keyword website placements or interests.
• In shopping ads, you can insert a list of products from your eCommerce store 
• Video campaigns will appear on social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook.
• Discovery will let Google decide what the best approach for your business campaign should be, but caution should be applied when choosing it, for Google does make mistakes sometimes. 

Let's use a search campaign as an example for the purposes of this guide. Google's continual improvement is one of its best features. Many of the things that we used to have to manually enter a few years ago are now incorporated automatically.

Campaign Name, Segmentation, and Location

After you set the campaign name (don’t worry, you can change it later!). Next up, you’ll need to set up your segmentation. Let’s go for both desktop and mobile customers. After the first month, we can make some changes to the B2B campaign based on our results.

As for the location, let’s select Canada. You’ll notice that you can select either people that are interested in services sold in Canada or people that have a physical presence in Canada. If your company is selling online courses, for example, then choosing both options is fine. In the end, what matters the most is choosing what’s right for your business.

You'll note that you can select other languages, so if your business is offering our courses in Canada, having this B2B campaign in both English and French may be really beneficial.

The importance of budgeting for lead generation

After that, we can go on to the most common lead generation B2B campaign ad question: What is the budget? Finding out how much you should spend is tricky, but thankfully Google has provided us with a free tool: the Keyword Planner. Google makes a decision based on statistics generated by customers searching for keywords related to your business/company.

Even if you don’t do any keyword research, Google will still automatically suggest a few keywords for you - some will be good, and some will not be so good. So there may be a 60% chance of it being right. Look at the lowest Cost per Click (CPC). That will be very important for you. If you play around with the keywords and only add the relevant ones, you can quite easily lower the CPC from 1 dollar to 50 cents, for example, while also increasing the number of clicks per day!

Matching

Now let’s talk about matching. There are 3 types of matches:

• Broad match, which allows Google to select any keywords that are similar to the ones that you selected in your lead generation B2B campaign.
• Phrase match, which allows Google to select keywords that include the meaning of your keyword
• Exact match, which only selects the keywords that you have personally chosen yourself. 

Negative Keywords

Another important part of the lead generation Google Ads lead generation B2B campaign setup process is setting up negative keywords. The most common negative keyword that you can use in a B2B campaign is “free”. So someone who is looking for free online courses won’t see your ads, which will increase the click rate of your lead generation B2B campaign and also, in the end, the conversion rate. 

Remember to keep an eye on the budget deadline. You and your business or company followed the method to a tee, yet you only received a large number of impressions and little clicks. This could indicate that there isn't much demand in your goods or service in the location you've chosen. This could be due to the fact that you used the incorrect language, such as making Hungarian adverts in Ecuador.

However, in the majority of cases, it all comes down to bidding. We have to start from the lowest point, but if nothing changes in a couple of days, we’ll have to modify it ourselves. If you do this periodically, then by the end of the month you will pay two or three times less than Google estimates while basically keeping the same results. This is especially important if you sell products that are only searched for a very specific amount of time, such as Christmas decorations.

Conclusions

And that’s it. Those are the basics of Google Ads. Thankfully all your B2B campaigns are very easy to modify, so if you feel like you’ve made a mistake, there’s absolutely no reason to panic. Keep working on it!

If you want to find out more about this workshop please download the recording here.