If you are a marketing leader who is in charge of driving demand and revenue for specialized, niche products, then this is for you. Today, we’re diving headfirst into the dynamic world of PPC advertising and how it can be your secret weapon for promoting niche B2B products online, at a profitable CAC (customer acquisition cost).
Understanding Your Niche B2B Audience
First things first – know your audience. Stroll through the market research landscape and build those buyer personas. Dive deep into the industry’s intricacies, unraveling the pain points and needs that keep your niche B2B audience up at night. A good way to do this is to listen to sales and customer service calls to understand the words customers use when researching your products and what questions and concerns they have. It’s helpful to marry this with what the market is doing, and you can use any number of online research tools, one that we like is SEMRush, which gives you insights into terminology used in the market, rather than product speak. What is product speak? It is easy for a B2B company to focus on the language created by the product teams and engineers rather than how the market talks. Tailor your messaging to speak their language of what people are asking questions about and looking for as you target the keywords that can translate well into addressing those industry-specific concerns. You’ll know how you’re doing when looking at click-through rate.
Setting Clear PPC Campaign Goals
Define your goals – assuming you’re aiming for lead generation or online product sales, do you know how much you’re willing to pay for a qualified opportunity or product sale? Do you know the value of what you are providing in terms of revenue so you can determine what amount of cost is appropriate for your marketing dollars? More so, do you know how many leads you need to reach your target for qualified opportunities, to ultimately yield revenue goals? Do you know which products are more important to the business from a sales standpoint? Do you have a loss leader? A product that you use to get people “in the door” in hopes of having them convert higher ticket items later? Being really dialed in on goals is important before embarking on campaign planning and setup. And then knowing where you have room to test and explore is critical to your long term growth.
Keyword Research and Selection
We’ve already discussed B2B niche products and the importance of customer language vs internal product speak. Unearth those long-tail keywords and do the research to understand when a term might overlap with B2C terminology. Is there a longer tail term defined more accurately as B2B? Are you willing to sacrifice the additional dollars to have visibility in terms that could be B2C or B2B? In this case, there are ways to qualify users with specific ad messaging and see a lower CTR. Maybe that’s what you want? Your prospects are searching for what you’re offering. Still, you need to explore how the terms you select relate to your market in general and complementary or directly opposed markets like those pesky B2C e-commerce products. 🙂 The language in SEMRush is to consider informational versus transactional, i.e., commercial keywords. High-intent keywords are going to be more commercial. This means they will include qualifiers like ‘for sale’, ‘near me’, ‘best’, ‘alternative’, etc. Informational will be those educational terms that could be considered as a hybrid paid search and organic strategy.
Crafting Compelling Ad Copy
Write ad copy that speaks directly to the hearts and needs of your niche B2B audience. Highlight those unique selling propositions and values that set your product apart. Test different ad headlines and copy against each other – paid search is always a balance of art and science.
Leveraging Ad Assets for B2B Success
Assets support a robust ad experience for the user. Use site links, callouts, and structured snippet extensions, among others, to showcase additional information that’s music to your niche B2B buyers’ ears. Boost that ad visibility and watch those click-through rates soar.
Budgeting Strategies for Niche B2B PPC Campaigns
Time to talk dollars and sense. Allocate your budget wisely based on campaign goals and priorities. Set bid strategies to maximize ROI in your niche markets. Keep an eagle eye on those budgets and make adjustments as needed – it’s the financial dance of marketing brilliance.
Landing Page Optimization
Your landing page is the entrance to your B2B extravaganza. Design it with your niche B2B audience in mind and specifically tailored to answer the questions that those searchers queries might suggest. Provide ONE clear call-to-action across the whole ad ecosystem of ad to landing page. Then, of course, implement conversion tracking – you’ll thank yourself later when the leads start rolling in and you can understand user engagement in more tangible ways.
Remarketing Strategies for Niche B2B Products
Activating campaigns based on visitors to specific pages or taking certain actions on the site helps reinforce the message or bring a 1 2 combo. For example, provide a message that creates demand by explaining that you empathize with their problem and then remarket them with an offer to seal the deal. Remarketing allows you to create specific segments of your niche audience with more relevant messaging. It’s like rekindling a spark with old flames, only this time, it’s with potential customers.
Analytics and Continuous Improvement
Last but not least, let’s geek out on analytics. Implement a variety of additional tracking tools custom fit to your specific industry’s needs to understand and improve marketing efforts based on campaign performance. Make sure your conversions are connected to your CRM (like HubSpot or Salesforce) so that you can know what is driving opportunities and revenue. Regularly review and optimize based on the data at your fingertips. Stay informed about industry trends and be ready to adapt your strategies to keep that PPC machine well-oiled.
Ready, set, go
These are some of our thoughts on how to make Paid Search work efficiently and drive results for your B2B niche products and audiences. Know that with paid search, “the devil is in the details”, the details being how to manipulate the native platform settings and triggers within the Google Ads platform itself (or Bing, etc). A simple “button click” can be the difference between quality and “cheaper” quantity. You need a team that knows the difference and treats the platform and your ad dollars like it was their own. In summary, remember you must speak the language of the audience, set clear goals and have one call to action per initiative, then fine-tune your approach based on the analytics.
If you feel like your B2B PPC program is wasting budget and should be driving more impact, Contact Enilon for your free 15 minute consultation to learn how we could help you drive more revenue through paid search this year.
