SEO has never been this hard. And that’s mainly thanks to the ever-changing search engine algorithms.
To make matters worse, research by Ahrefs shows that over 96% of pages don’t get any traffic from Google despite all these efforts. If your website falls into this category, that means you’re likely not going to get any leads. No lead in B2B means no sales.
Even if you happen to gain some traffic, that might not necessarily be enough to meet your lead generation milestone. Of course, this doesn’t mean SEO is inefficient. However, you can’t leave the fate of your B2B brand entirely to SEO.
And that is where Pay-per-click advertising comes in.
In this article, I’ll break down B2B PPC marketing and share some proven, in-house tips that you can apply via PPC to scale your business lead generation strategy and sales.
B2B pay-per-click marketing is a digital advertising strategy that involves paying a certain amount anytime someone clicks your ad placements on advertising platforms, such as Google and Facebook.
Here’s how it works:
In PPC marketing:
While most advertising platforms charge an average of $0.50 to $2.00, some factors, such as your industry, keyword difficulty, and the exact platform you’re using, can influence the final cost-per-click.
For instance, Google PPC ads in the finance and consumer service sector can be as high as $6.40 dollars per click, according to Wordstream. The likes of travel and hospitality have it as low as $0.44 per click.
Businesses investing in PPC marketing get an average ROI of $2 for every $1 they put in and an $8 return if they use Google ads network. That’s a lot, but the main advantage of PPC is not the ROI generated. It is the following:
Be it SEO, email marketing, or video marketing, any of these strategies require time before bringing in good results. For example, it takes an average of three months to see your page climb up on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) after building quality backlinks and creating awesome content to boost your efforts.
Video marketing takes a similar duration. As for email marketing, you might need to wait longer as you need to build a functional email list, warm up email servers, and send your leads a sequence of emails before getting down to the main thing.
In contrast, B2B PPC helps you hit the ground running when it comes to lead generation. Your ads stay floating on Google’s page one and top bar almost immediately after the campaign launch. There is no need to wait for days, months, or any duration of time.
And the faster your page ranks high via aid ads, the earlier people see and click on it.
In the B2B industry, your relevant audience includes stakeholders, decision groups, the CEO, and other board executives who make up a typical B2B buying group.
Each of these people has distinct preferences when it comes to choosing a tool that best aligns with the company’s overall goals. And these preferences are expressed through keywords or search terms.
So, company X needs a platform that can centralize all its sales activities and unify sales reps on one dashboard.
If your company happens to be promoting a sales centralization software provider, then the first two are your main audiences. The person looking for “sales” is nonspecific and can be looking for anything else, like the definition of sales or types.
The PPC ad algorithms in place understand this and naturally reroute your ads to the CEO and the other members, thus ensuring they only reach those who need your product.
This saves you from unnecessary spending on unrewarded clicks and helps you to draw in quality leads whose demands fit in your offerings and are ready to buy.
Look at this:
Your B2B product costs $100 per month.
If you use the manual approach above, that's $4000 in revenue for a $1000 monthly investment.
Alternatively, there are analytics tools on ad platforms, such as Google Analytics, that show you conversion rate, number of leads generated, CPC, and many other things needed to measure your ROI automatically. You can also use third-party analytic tools, which give you a more personalized ROI report in one click.
Regardless of which method you use, results from your PPC campaigns are trackable and easily measurable. So, you know where your money is going and whether it’s bringing in value or not.
At the same time, PPC campaign metrics help you set your budget appropriately. You definitely don’t want to overspend or underinvest.
There are different stages in the marketing funnel—awareness or the top of the funnel, consideration or the middle of the funnel, and decision-making or the bottom of the tunnel.
In B2B, most people think ads targeting the top of the funnel (TOFU) do not really matter much. But in my opinion and from years of handling PPC marketing, it fully does matter a lot. Yes, the internet is already diluted with tons of starter information, and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel again.
However, TOFU gives you the chance to establish yourself as an industry authority. B2B upper echelons are also humans and sometimes search the internet for simplest queries such as “what is, why is, who is, how is.”
You can instantly portray yourself as a go-to industry source by promoting your product-led and data-backed pillar pages with PPC. This creates a perfect awareness of your brand product and helps your brand name stay afloat in your audiences’ minds until they have a need.
Mind you, brands that use paid advertising record 80% more brand awareness than when using SEO.
Other than that, PPC increases website traffic, though it’s not-so-good advice to use PPC just for that :)
If there’s one interesting thing about PPC over SEO, that will be: You Can Take A Break.
In SEO, there’s no break. Even just a day off is enough to drop your most valued page content from Google’s front page. And that can directly impact your lead generation and, ultimately sales.
Remember number one result on Google’s front page has a clickthrough rate of 36.5%, while the tenth result has only 2.2%. Moreover, the top result on search engines like Google gets 33% of the total traffic share. That’s how intense the competition to rank high is.
But that’s not the case for PPC. You can end your campaigns and chill for the next few months, depending on the number of leads within your funnel or budget.
Plus, you can effortlessly tweak your campaigns before and during launch, adjust to newer trends, update metrics, and do so many optimizations to improve final results. You can even bring in AI for programmatic advertising.
PPC is mainly a game of money. If you have a sizable pocket, you can literally toss your competitors even if they have been in the market longer than you.
Of course, you have to be extra careful and ensure you’re not breaking your bank. Check out our article on PPC management costs in 2024 here.
When you’re up against a more financially robust competitor, you can easily switch your strategy to keyword optimization and leverage programmatic advertising—an approach that uses AI to bid for ad spaces at the lowest and most efficient cost possible.
B2B PPC is a game changer, no doubt about that. However, your strategy determines what results you get. Poor strategy equals poor results, and vice versa.
To avoid that, let me walk you through a few steps to create an effective and successful PPC strategy.
Nothing screams failure more than jumping into PPC marketing without a clear-cut goal and objectives. That’s like walking in a dark park—you have no idea what you’re going to hit or what’s going to hit you.
The first part of your strategy should be your company’s goals and well-detailed objectives, highlighting the different touchpoints to achieving them. Most importantly, the goals should be specific, measurable, actionable with objectives, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
A SMART B2B PPC goal might look like this:
"Over the next six months, achieve a 20% increase in qualified leads from PPC campaigns targeting SMBs in the technology sector, maintaining a click-through rate of 5% and reducing the cost per lead to $50 or less, all within a monthly ad budget of $10,000. This initiative should contribute at least 10% to the quarterly sales target."
Breaking this down:
Once you have your goals ready, define a realistic budget. Depending on your company's base capital, you can create a budget that covers all your PPC campaigns for the next six months or a year. But it’s important not to break the bank.
In most cases, B2B businesses invest between 1% to 10% of their overall revenue.
Your target market is the business you want to sell to, and your target audience is the buying group of that company. After drawing out your goals, you should find out:
Collate the data obtained and create a buyer persona—your semi-fictional representation of a buyer.
Here’s a compressed example after figuring out your target audience:
“CEO Alex Johnson of Tech Innovators Inc., a technology solutions company based in San Francisco with 200 employees and $50 million in annual revenue, plays a crucial role in the buying group for a new cloud-based CRM solution. At 45, with an MBA from Stanford, Alex actively uses LinkedIn for industry insights and networking, reads TechCrunch and Harvard Business Review, and attends webinars and conferences such as CES.”
“Alex prefers in-depth whitepapers and case studies to inform decisions and collaborates closely with the CTO and CFO in the purchasing process. Decisions are data-driven, focusing on proven ROI and vendor reputation, with a preference for transparent pricing and personalized communication.”
From the data above, our ideal buyer uses proven ROI, vendor reputation, and transparent pricing in making decisions. If you leverage these points when creating targeted PPC ads, it’ll be easier and effortless to resonate with your audience.
PPC is similar to SEO in a few cases. Your ads only come up for certain keyword prompts.
Keywords are the terms your target buying group uses on search engines to find answers, compare products, or explore alternatives. For instance, if you own a multi-seller B2B platform like Alibaba, certain keywords that your B2B audience might be using include:
And if you run a sales centralization platform, your keywords could look like this:
Use keyword tools like Google keyword planner, Moz, SEMrush, and Ahrefs to dig out relevant search terms based on search volume, relevance, and difficulty. Then use the keywords obtained to optimize your search ads for appropriate targeting.
Also, note that the keywords you use determine your final CPC and overall budget. The more competitive a keyword is, the more you have to spend to bid for an ad space with publishers.
For B2B PPC, there are a lot of wheels you don’t need to reinvent. You just copy, analyze, and implement them.
Let’s say you’re in the B2B SaaS industry. The most used social media platform by SaaS PPC agencies and individual marketers for B2B lead generation is LinkedIn. If your competitors are doing well on the same platform from your analysis, you could dig out their approach to that success and replicate it.
Of course, that doesn't mean you can’t try out new things. But it’s best to first find out what’s working for others, why it is working, and how you can modify it to your advantage. When you have the floor, you can proceed to explore other not-so-notable platforms and run some experimental ads.
When analyzing competitors’ PPC campaigns, do the following:
Once done, highlight the loopholes in their strategy and leverage them for your campaign's success.
There’s no one-size-fits-all PPC platform. But sure, a few perform better than others, depending on your B2B industry. For instance, Google ads turn in $8 for every $1 invested. That’s a lot.
Others like Amazon and Bing are great options if you’re looking to target a narrower and more specific audience group that you won’t find on Google ads’ radar.
Social media platforms are a must. 52% of online discovery comes from social media, and more than 70% of B2B decision-makers spend more time on Facebook.
Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok work best for fashion, finance, beauty, and fashion departments and food B2B suppliers. In contrast, SaaS brands will benefit more from LinkedIn and Facebook.
Note that you can use more than one platform---omnichannel paid advertising.
Your goal, objectives, keywords, and competitors’ analytics data should now give you a good picture of who your ideal customers are. This picture is essential for creating content that moves the needle and resonates with your buying group.
Ad copies and other creatives, such as videos, flyers, and carousels, must all connect your brand identity to your value proposition and attract as much attention as possible.
Do these to create compelling ad copy:
Lastly, ensure consistency in content across all campaign marketing channels.
By now, you should already have a solid strategy in place: goals, audience, budget, keywords, platforms to use, tactics to follow, and content. The next step is to launch the strategy for a test run.
Conduct a mini-campaign and set your target. Leave it active for a few weeks to gauge performance properly and gather enough data for your metrics.
You might not get the best results immediately. It happens. Dig into your performance analytics, see what went wrong, and what you can do better. Implement these changes into your next ad campaigns, adjust strategy continuously, and reiterate.
According to the PPC statistics from HubSpot, 19% of businesses say pay-per-click advertising has so far been their most profitable marketing channel. To achieve similar results, follow these proven tips and practices:
After B2B buyers click your ad, they are redirected to your landing page. That’s ideally the first point of contact and essentially the best place to leave a favorable impression. But if you do it wrong, there’s a 100% chance they’ll exit the page immediately.
Do these to ensure your landing pages have a high lead retention rate:
A report from MarketingDive shows that PPC ads can be 5x more effective on mobile devices than on desktops. Moreover, there’s a likely possibility your target audience—the B2B buying group—will do more searching or social media surfing on mobile than on desktop except when in the office.
Do the following:
As humans, we love colors, motion objects like animations, and creative ideas move the needle. We also retain content represented visually better than those not. That’s why good graphics and engaging videos are essential to the success of your campaigns.
To create strong visuals:
Also, regularly refresh your ad creative to avoid ad fatigue.
There’s no assurance your first campaign will break the milestones you’ve set, especially if you’re doing everything in-house. So, you have to be open to experimenting and trying different inputs.
Create different ad formats—text, video ads, and graphic display ads. Design variations of your ad creatives, altering colors, animations, videos, and the position of CTA. Then measure metrics for each test to see which one is performing better.
Marketing covers three major stages of a buyer’s journey–the awareness, consideration, and decision-making stages.
Most times, people come across your PPC ads and website content when they are in the awareness and consideration stage. If your ads stop coming after the first time, there’s no way your brand will stay atop their mind.
In PPC marketing, the art of reiteration produces more results. So long as the audience is your ideal buyer, then you’ve got to continue popping up here and there.
Positive keywords take you right to your ideal B2B buyers regardless of the platform. But sometimes, ad algorithms might decide to display your campaigns to slightly irrelevant audiences, especially if there are expected clicks to be achieved per day.
The best way to eliminate this problem is by using negative keywords. Platforms like Google ads make it possible to exclude keywords that you don’t want to target, even if it is a variation of your main keywords.
“A type of keyword that prevents your ad from being triggered by a certain word or phrase. Your ads aren’t shown to anyone who is searching for that phrase. This is also known as a negative match.” – Google.
This approach narrows your audience's reach and possibly overall clicks. However, the few clicks you eventually get will bring in genuine and high-quality leads.
While the basics of pay-per-click advertising are more or less the same across all the B2B and B2C industries, there are still a few differences you must pay attention to:
As I said earlier, there’s no one-shot strategy for B2B PPC success. That’s why you have to track your campaigns, collect valuable data, and optimize consequent ones for better results.
Let’s discuss a few important metrics that should be on your radar below.
These types of metrics focus on your total investments, budget, and returns.
There are more metrics than this depending on your advertising platforms, but the ones listed above are crucial and must be prioritized when tracking your advertising campaign performance.
B2B PPC platforms are digital advertising platforms used for creating and managing pay-per-click campaigns. You’ve likely come across ads from a few of them especially if you use Google and Bing for surfing the internet.
One good thing about these platforms is that they provide all you need to optimize your campaigns, such as keyword research tools, analytics and reporting functionalities, and allowance for third-party APIs.
That means it can be tricky to choose the best one for your B2B PPC campaigns. To help you out, I’ve compiled a few of the most notable platforms below based on their average CPC, provision for mobile responsiveness, popularity, and ease of usability.
Google Ads platform, formerly known as Google AdWords, is the largest publishing platform with an ad share of 28%, an ROI of about $8 on every $1 invested, and a parent search engine with over 79% of traffic share. Campaigns launched on Google ads appear in search results, in display networks like Google, and in other Google search partners.
Source: Mayple
When to use Google ads: If you have a considerable budget and wish to reach a larger audience, increase search visibility for traffic, and generate quality leads.
Average Cost-per-click: $0.50 - $2
Microsoft ads, also known as Bing ads, have a lower ad share compared to Google ads and a search engine traffic share of about 10.5%. However, Microsoft is gradually becoming advertisers’ favorite because it hosts a large percentage of the older age group, which might fit into your demographics.
Source: Mayple
When to use Microsoft ads: If you want to reach the older age group or diversify your ad campaign and efforts beyond Google platforms.
Average Cost-per-click: $1.54
There are currently over 5 billion active social media users in 2024, and social media overall revenue is projected to reach $345.70bn in 2029, according to Statista. Interestingly, social media ads make up 28.8% of all paid advertising spend, tipping the scale over Google. So, it’s unsurprising to see most B2B marketers spend their time here.
When to use Social Media ads: Use social media ads for B2B PPC when targeting specific professional demographics and promoting content such as whitepapers and webinars to build brand awareness within industry communities. For instance, B2B SaaS decision-makers spend most of their time on LinkedIn, while finance and medical professionals are often on Facebook.
Average Cost-per-click: Depends on the social platform. Please check the table above.
As profitable as B2B PPC is, it takes a good knowledge of what works and what doesn't to actually pull off a successful campaign. That means it’s literally possible to throw your money in and get disappointing results. This is especially true for in-house marketing teams filled with disconnected members and self-acclaimed PPC managers.
If you want value for your investment, then you have to focus on choosing a B2B PPC agency. Why?
Psst…
No long research to find your dream PPC agency. We’re right here.
At TripleDart, our team of B2B PPC marketing specialists and managers is always available to handle your PPC campaigns.
“TripleDart has been a dream partner. The team is intelligent and responsive and delivers what they promised. We have made huge progress in our growth marketing efforts with TripleDart.” – Drew Wallace, Head Performance Marketing at SpotDraft.
Ready to find out how we achieve jaw-dropping results for our partners? Schedule a call below.
B2B PPC (Business-to-Business Pay-Per-Click) is a digital advertising model where businesses bid on keywords and pay for each clicks their ads receive. It involves creating ads that appear on search engines, social media, and other online platforms to reach decision-makers in other companies.
B2B PPC campaigns primarily focus on business decision-makers, have longer sales cycles with multiple touchpoints, and use formal, informative messaging that emphasizes ROI and business benefits. In contrast, B2C campaigns target individual consumers, have shorter sales cycles, and use more casual, promotional messaging to drive quick decisions.
B2B PPC requires specialized expertise, strategic planning, keyword research, ad creation, and performance analysis tailored to meet your B2B needs. But this experience-rich approach is not something you can get with an in-house team. At TripleDart, our team of PPC specialists has the necessary resources to manage your campaigns for better ROI and help you redirect your time to core business activities.
Join 70+ successful B2B SaaS companies on the path to achieving T2D3 with our SaaS marketing services.