PPC for B2B lead generation: a fast and effective sales tactic during crisis

Have you decided to innovate your products or services since the Coronavirus outbreak?  If so, is your new objective to generate leads for them? Or build awareness? Then the fastest way to do this is through a PPC strategy! This strategy is especially useful when a business wants to gain results quickly. In this article, we will outline aspects related to PPC for B2B lead generation such as:

• What is PPC?
• Benefits of using PPC
• Tactics to increase your lead generation through PPC

What is PPC or pay-for-click?

Pay-per-click (PPC in short) is a form of paid advertisement where the advertiser - you guessed - pays for each click to their website or application. The most well-known PPC Advertisement Network is Google Adwords. Here, people bid on specific keywords that have the potential of driving up more traffic to their website.

The advantage of such a strategy is that you pay only when people click on your link. Therefore 10.000 people might see the link, but only 1.000 click on it => you pay only for the 1.000 website visits. That is indeed an excellent way to save your budget during crisis, while investing in effective digital marketing strategies.

Benefits of using PPC for B2B lead generation

With the fierce competition that is out there in the online environment lately, PPC can boost the conversion rates and lead generation. Some other benefits of using PPC are:

• You achieve immediate keyword rankings and traffic to your website/app;
• It contributes directly to the business goals such as boosting awareness, educating your market or increasing sales;
• A company can gather a wide array of information about their potential prospects, what pages attract them the most, and which one brings the most financial results for a business;
• It is easy to track & measure results since Google Adwords also offers reports for each ad campaign;
• You can combine PPC with other marketing channels to generate the conversion;
• It brings results fast and continuously over time.

Tactics to increase your lead generation through PPC

1. Building action-driven landing pages

In the end, prospects will click your ads, but the landing pages will convince them that your services/products are exactly what they’ve been looking for. Therefore, before setting up your campaign, invest time and resources in making the most customer-centric landing pages. This means:

• Identify clearly what is the pain-point that you are solving for your potential clients;
• Have suggestive images or, even better, some well-crafted videos
• Include the top benefits the client will get by working with you
• Maybe offer a demo/discount/free material that could educate them further
• Include a clear call-to-action with a color that pops out
• Don’t crowd a lot of information on one page; use white space, bullet points, headlines and emphasize specific words
• Include a form or some other way for getting into contact with your business

2. Test and retest for the best results

A/B testing is a way of comparing 2 versions of the same web page (for example) and notice which one gets the best results. How does it work? After you’ve prepared the 2 versions, you split your audience in half. One will see the 1st version, while the other one will be exposed to the 2nd one. After you’ve established with hard data which one performs the best, you tweak again the winning page. You create one where you have an image with your product/service and another one where you have a video explaining your product/service. Test again.

Important: when testing, only one variable can be modified to notice if there are any changes in conversion rates. This way, a company can test which headlines, images, call-to-actions, words trigger the most often the desired action.

3. Use keywords that convert

Here the real magic of what PPC specialists can do comes in. A business needs to know it’s audience AND the way it searches for specific information. You start with a set of keywords that are the most likely to be clicked on according to the volume of searches and available budget. 

In time, after results start coming in, the list of keywords narrows down. Or new ones come into play. The most important aspect here is to find keywords that are the best for lead generation for a specific business and for the current context. That means that you might want to find the perfect keyword combination that speaks about your services while making reference to the existing crisis.

4. Content must match keywords

Needless to say, the keywords chosen from Google Adwords should have to match the actual content of the page. Google has algorithms that match the search intent of a user with specific links that should answer that intent. If you plan on investing in PPC for B2B lead generation, make sure you actually offer what you say you do.

5. Include retargeting in your marketing strategy

Retargeting complements well your PPC strategy. This is because maybe your prospects weren’t ready to buy your product or even forgot about it. After the potential clients clicked on your website link and landed on a specific landing page, they can receive ads about that product/service on Facebook and other websites.

This way, you remind your prospects that you are out there and you can solve their pains. More than that, retargeting is critical in times when there are so many people active in online due to pandemic outcome. Therefore, you will have to constantly adapt your PPC strategy to make your efforts pay off.

Final thoughts

PPC generates leads and improves brand awareness. When used with other marketing strategies, they can become powerful tools for steady revenue, even during crisis.

If you find it difficult to adapt and reinvent your existing strategies to grow your business, you can get in touch with us, and together we will find a solution to implement the PPC strategy that will bring added value to your business.