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PPC is a great way to generate leads for a B2B business, and although you will see revenue, you’ll notice that many of those leads are not quality. That is to say, they are essentially wasting your money. In order to work toward optimizing your PPC campaigns, you’ll need to do a basic analysis of your campaigns to produce more targeted outcomes.

Try to avoid approaching your PPC campaigns as if they are different than you would in any other channel. You are paying for clicks, so you want to do your best to attract your audience to put them into your click funnel, and that is much more of a human problem than a technical issue.

Here are some fundamental questions to ask yourself when setting up your next B2B PPC campaign.

TRULY UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMER

Don’t just guess. Oftentimes, we hear folks approximate their target audience and say things like “ I would click this!” This is not the best approach and it will cause you to waste a lot of ad spend. If you’re not doing so already, you should start building buyer personas to profile your target customer.

How? Begin with data! Start by identifying your customer’s motives, demographic information, needs, hesitations, interests and preferences. Think about other brands and publications they are already consuming so that you can better accommodate them and offer a good solution for their need. As B2B marketers, we have the additional dimension of understanding our audience’s organization, position within that organization, and the challenges they face in those roles.   

Try to get to know your customer like a friend, and you’ll ultimately be able to speak to them better, write better ad copy, and create more targeted audiences to serve those ads to.

IS THE USP OF YOUR PRODUCT CLEAR?

First, it is important to note that we are all inundated with offers, and oftentimes when we are part of an organization, we are functioning under a system that we do not want to take the time or effort to change. So, when you are offering a person within an organization a product or service, it is important to give them a quick and clear understanding of your solution.

Keep it minimal and clear. Begin by simply stating that you have an effective solution to their problem.  It helps to include case studies early on in the funnel, so that they can see instances of your product’s effectiveness. This is really the practice of educating your audience. You can also use blogs, videos, info-graphics, or even webinars to really engage and provide value.

DO YOU HAVE THE RIGHT MESSAGE AT EACH STAGE OF THE SALES FUNNEL?

Finally, you want to take a look at the overarching structure of your campaign. The initial point of contact at the top of the funnel should be about attraction and reminding them that they have a need for your product. Since you have already used existing data to determine your audience’s need, use some hard-hitting copy to remind them of their problem and objectives in their position to create demand. Always start with concrete, “problem” focused messaging. 

The goal of the middle-funnel is building buyer confidence. They made it this far, so show them how easy it is to find success with your offering. As your potential customer gets deeper into your content, begin increasing the urgency with value-adds or discount offers with time constraints.

Now that you’ve generated quality leads, you can use audience-matching features that are available on PPC platforms, which will help you generate more quality leads that are similar to the audience you have already attracted. 

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