The tactics for generating leads using
Pay-Per-Click Advertisement are significantly different for
Business-to-Business (B2B) businesses. Here, the decision-making process is
much more methodical than in retail businesses and involves multiple people.
The game involves reaching out to “relevant” people involved in the
decision-making and converting them at every stage till they finally decide to
submit a query. This article lists tried and tested guiding principles that an
online marketer must keep in mind for successful business results.
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%.
Kapil
Nakra is working in Online Marketing Domain since 2000. Kapil is a co-founder
of OMLogic, a leading online marketing service provider. Prior to
starting OMLogic, he started his first venture, Whizlabs, in 2000 and played
instrumental role in creating a global online brand. Kapil speaks at number of
conferences on Entrepreneurship and Online Marketing. Kapil is a graduate of
IIT-Delhi. You can contact him at: Kapil.nakra(at)omlogic.com. Visit B2B Lead Generation article to download
