Paid Search for B2B: Advanced techniques

Fol­low­ing my first arti­cle, Paid Search for B2B: the basics, I want­ed to share some advanced tech­niques which will allow you to max­imise the per­for­mance of your paid search cam­paigns and deliv­er a world class user experience.

Nur­tur­ing Campaigns

Cam­paigns with the pri­ma­ry aim to cap­ture as many leads as pos­si­ble to grow the sale pipeline, need to be part of any B2B paid search strat­e­gy. Col­lect­ing leads and more impor­tant­ly qual­i­fied leads, requires spe­cif­ic search opti­mi­sa­tion tech­niques, but also atten­tion to the land­ing pages used. The com­mon prac­tice for land­ing pages is to use a short reg­is­tra­tion form where prospects fill out the essen­tial infor­ma­tion required: name, con­tact details, job title, indus­try, etc. In exchange for shar­ing per­son­al data, you need to offer some­thing rel­e­vant to share: indus­try whitepa­pers, webi­na­rs or an invi­ta­tion to an event. The bet­ter-qual­i­fied leads you get, the more effec­tive your lead fol­low up, and the high­er the return on your cam­paigns will be.

Mobile Cam­paigns

Most clients search on mobile for prod­ucts or ser­vices before mak­ing a final deci­sion. Mobile cam­paigns need to focus on aware­ness, offer­ing gener­ic mes­sag­ing as an intro­duc­tion to your com­pa­ny. But also allow­ing calls direct­ly from the ad through the use of the Click-to-Call exten­sions, which enable imme­di­ate con­tact with a call cen­tre or account man­ag­er. The track­ing of those calls can be done either from Google, through an inter­nal sys­tem, or with a com­bi­na­tion of both.

This method is about tar­get­ing clients accord­ing to the key­words they are search­ing for, but also accord­ing to their pro­files (col­lect­ed by cook­ies). This allows com­pa­nies to pro­pose a mes­sage specif­i­cal­ly adapt­ed to their audi­ence. Retar­get­ing cam­paigns are high­ly effi­cient, and typ­i­cal­ly will yield a con­ver­sion rate much high­er than tra­di­tion­al campaigns.

Time Part­ing

Time part­ing is the process of deliv­er­ing ads dur­ing spe­cif­ic times or and/or on spe­cif­ic days. It is espe­cial­ly rel­e­vant for B2B cam­paigns, as prospects are much more like­ly to be inter­est­ed in your ads dur­ing office hours, while the ROI of a Paid Search cam­paign for B2B run out­side office hours is like­ly to be quite low.

Geo-local­i­sa­tion

Final­ly, many B2B busi­ness­es are offer­ing prod­ucts or ser­vices specif­i­cal­ly for local clients; there­fore you can boost a cam­paigns per­for­mance by tar­get­ing spe­cif­ic areas like cities, air­ports or com­mer­cial areas. You can also adjust bids based on the loca­tions tar­get­ed (e.g. high bids in Moscow vs low bids in rur­al parts of Russia).
What about you, do you have any oth­er rec­om­men­da­tions? Do not hes­i­tate to share your own tips in the com­ments sec­tion about the best ways to suc­ceed with Paid Search in the B2B sector.