By google ads
A Google Ads strategy can always complement your marketing plan. The best part about Google Ads is that it allows for a serious amount of customization, flexibility, metric tracking, and more. This translates into Google Ads and PPC for B2B is an excellent avenue for lead generation and prospecting.
In this article, we will discuss:
- How to set up your Google Ads account
- Organizing your Google Ads account
- What are Negative Keywords
- Types of Negative Keywords
- How to be Specific
- Competitor Snatching
Setting Up Your Google Ads Account
The first step in implementing your Google Ads strategy is to set up all of the necessary tracking codes. This includes Google Ads, Google Analytics as well as Google Search Console. These are in addition to any other apps you are using for landing page creation, lead generation, and lead tracking/nurturing.
Not setting this up is as good as not having a plan in the first place for your marketing, you’d be spending money blindly and doing yourself a huge disservice.
Organize your Google Ads account
This is another thing that that absolutely has to be done. An effective way to do it is by the key terms or demographics that you’re going after.
Organization strategies stay very similar between B2B and B2C Google Ads accounts.
That means:
1. The campaign level stays fairly broad, based on topics.
2. The ads group level will include splitting up different key terms for different results.
3. Finally, the ads level should be split up by different ad copy, different landing pages, and different types of ads/ extensions.
Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are are an absolute must-have in your Google Ads strategy, yet are overlooked by so many marketing teams. These are terms that you ask Google to exclude from your search as a way of making sure you’re not spending your clicks budget on searches that aren’t useful to you.
You might be worried that you’re too narrowly focused, but trust us - you’re better off focusing narrowly on people who are significantly more likely to turn into leads or make real use of the landing page – rather than focusing too broadly and spending money on clicks from someone like a college student who most definitely has no use for your services.
Types of Negative Keywords
Irrelevant search terms
Searches that may use similar words but are unrelated to what you do. For these, you’ll want to exclude things like pop culture references, misspellings, and homonyms
For example, your company offers simulation consultation and predictive modeling services. So you bid for the term “simulation” But someone searching simulation video games stumbles upon your ad and clicks on it because it says “Simulation Software” somewhere in it and that’s what they thought they wanted.
Unqualified search terms
These are terms related to your industry and what you do but are used by people who aren’t ready or qualified to buy from you.
Terms like: ''Jobs'', ''Careers'', ''Resume'', ''Employers'', ''Hire'', ''Hiring'', ''Intern'', and ''Full-time'' are going to be input by someone looking for a job in the said industry.
Whereas terms such as: ''Classes'', ''Course'', University'', ''Teach'', ''Learn'', ''Tutorial'', ''Meaning'', ''Definition'', ''Coaches'', and ''Coaching'' suggest that someone is looking for teaching related to that industry as opposed to someone looking to hire a provider of some sort. In both cases, the user is not interested in your product or service.
Special Case Terms
The last class of terms, which are budget hunting terms like ‘free,’ ‘quote,’ ‘trial,’ and ‘demo’ can be very useful in certain cases, particularly for B2B. Because the buyer’s journey can be so complex and involve so many different players, having something that the company can try with no cost at all is a great opportunity to get in contact with people of value at that company.
This differs from a B2C eCommerce store that doesn’t want to pay to get people looking for free stuff on their site.
Other types of terms that work very well for B2B lead generation include:
- case study
- guide
- how-to
- white paper
These will have to be manually reviewed and used on a case-by-case basis, depending on the offer or event your company is advertising at the time. Who knows, you might even be doing a hiring boot camp, in which case, job-seeking terms are exactly what you want to include.
How to be Specific
Sometimes your internal team uses a unique term (a special acronym for example) for a specific product or service you offer. It’s important that you don’t get caught up in your own internal terms.
You may refer to something as “maintenance,” while everyone else refers to it as “management,” or “business continuity”
Make sure you’re focusing on their definitions and don’t confuse them or force them to learn the extra jargon.
Although these terms often mean the same thing, they perform very differently and have different stats based on a number of factors; it’s up to you to determine which one has the intent you’re after, and what modifiers to include/ exclude. This change in focus could lead to more qualified leads in paid traffic as well as organic traffic.
There are plenty of tools out there, but Google’s own Keyword Planner tool can be a good place to start your research and get some insight into what people are looking for.
Competitors Snatching
A clever way to take advantage of keywords is to target terms that are similar to terms such as: “replacement for”, “alternative for”, and “substitute for ”
This way you’ll catch someone at a great starting point; once they’ve already started considering other options.
Just be sure not to use any actual brand names or your ad won’t get approved or your Google Ads account would be penalized.
If you would like to learn more about Google Ads, contact one of our specialists.
