B2B Lead Generation - Convert Relevant Ad Clicks Smartly

The rules of the game for generating leads through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertisement are radically different for Business-to-Business (B2B) than they are for Business to Consumer (B2C).

The key objectives of using online marketing, like Online media and PPC campaigns for B2B businesses are - to extend their reach, and to reduce the investment on acquiring leads by substituting high-cost sales resources with online media. But, the lack of real time interaction between clients and sales people at the beginning of the process puts an additional responsibility on marketers - to develop an in-depth understanding of customer behavior, and to design the right message to address customer requirements at all stages of the buying process.

In the B2B universe, whether the client is an early Startup, SMB or a large Corporation, the decision-making process is considerably more methodical than in retail businesses where the impulsive kick plays a big role. Also, in most cases the buying decision involves multiple people in the organization who can be broadly categorized, for our purposes, as decision makers and influencers. It is crucial that our online presence speaks to both the decision makers and the influencers through effective messaging.

In my experience, B2B PPC Management is like adjusting multiple lenses and mirrors of a telescope. You miss out on one and your customer gets a distorted view.

5 Key Guiding Principles of a Successful Campaign

• Ensure that customers’ perception of your value proposition(s) is what you want it to be: The online world provides an extremely limited time and mind share to address your customer’s concerns. Your landing pages need to directly address your customers’ key concerns. If you are experiencing a high bounce rate, a low conversion rate or visitors are not taking desired actions; chances are your marketing message is off the mark.  You need to go back to the drawing board, and talk to customers, industry insiders, and prospects to confirm whether your assumption of how they perceive your product or service is accurate. Make sure you are empirically testing multiple messages to come up with the right communication.

• Customer segmentation is not the same as keyword segmentation: It is important to conduct a focused research in understanding various customer segments, and in designing distinct landing pages for each of them. But, that’s not enough. You need to drive the right set of customers to the right landing page. Very often, what happens is that customers of different segments, whom you want to communicate differently to, use the same keywords for searching your products. To avoid this, group keywords independently based on the intent of the searchers and then map the ad groups to various customer segments. In case the same ad group maps to multiple customer segments, you might have to design a common landing page that directs customers to the right place.

• More visitors do not guarantee more business: To truly impact business results, it is very critical to look at the holistic sales cycle. A myopic view might help you in improving a portion of the sales cycle, but it will not give you the desired business results. Long tail keywords and lateral keyword themes make sense only if they are generating relevant traffic. Often, companies designs ads that communicate more than the business offers or delivers just to impact the CTR (Click-through-Rate) of ads. Not only does this invite irrelevant visitors on the landing pages, it also distorts the ad message communication for relevant prospects. Online Marketing companies are search specialist; they know how to generate more traffic. But, doing just that – without incorporating domain knowledge – to create an appropriate conversion path from search to leads does not produce desired results.

• Only talking to the Decision Makers will not work: Many Search Marketers produced great success for retail businesses where the visitor is the ultimate decision maker, and marketers can harvest impulsive buying. But, they fail when they use these tricks for the B2B environment. The desperation to generate more leads using these techniques takes away from the discipline of addressing concerns at each   step of the business-to-business sales cycle. If you are not providing the information required by influencers, there’s little probability your business will be short-listed by the decision makers. All it does is increase the number of irrelevant leads, and may even negatively impact the quality and quantity of relevant leads.

• Focus on quality rather than quantity in lead generation: If your focus is quantity, you would probably never take steps that might decrease the number of leads, but increase the possibility of receiving high-potential leads. The number game does not work for B2B Lead generation. If you outsource your PPC campaign management to search engine marketing company, whose compensation is purely based on the amount of media spend or number of leads generated, they would inherently never support any step in reducing leads even if it means an increase in the quality of leads.

I recently worked with an IT services company offering IT Application development and Staff Augmentation services to clients in Europe and US. To achieve next level of growth, they were looking at increasing the number and the quality of leads through online marketing. For the last 5 years, they were managing the PPC Campaign in-house and, 2 years back, they hit a bottleneck – they were not able to increase the number of relevant leads generated per month.  They tried to outsource their lead generation to external online marketing companies. Although these companies were able to increase the number of visitors to their website, they did not produce the desired business results. OMLogic worked with them and identified the key bottlenecks in their sales cycle.  We selected various customer segments and revamped each stage of sales cycle based on the 5 principles defined above. Within 2 months we were able to triple the number of leads while maintaining the lead relevancy ratio and reducing the cost per acquisition by 30%.