In B2B online marketing, there tends to be two very distinct worlds.
As far as traffic to your website is concerned, there is B2B content marketing and paid traffic.
While you can use both, many companies strictly rely on one or the other. Those companies that do utilize both options tend to keep them completely separate, as well. They have totally different strategies for leads depending on how they end up on their sites.
This is a huge mistake.
3 Ways Content Marketing and Paid Traffic Can Be Used to Increase Leads
Not only is it a good idea to combine your B2B content marketing and paid-traffic strategies, but it’s also 100% necessary.
Unless you are confident that every lead will convert after seeing one of your ads or coming to your site through a search engine, chances are that there will be some overlap. A lead who sees your ad may not convert, but they’ll come back to your site later. If you’re using retargeting – which you absolutely should be – you’ll be bringing back site visitors through paid channels.
So, instead of keeping them distinct, here’s how B2B content marketing and paid ads should work together.
1. Use Your Content and Ads to Inform One Another
One of the biggest problems with treating content marketing and PPC ads as completely different from each other is that you miss a lot of opportunities to improve the assets of both.
For example, any promise you make in an ad that gains clicks should probably inform your lead magnets. Those also depend on the promise of something spectacular to get clicks. Of course, you can use lead magnets at the end of blog posts and as the actual offer in ads.
Likewise, if you’ve found that blog posts around a certain topic bring in a lot of organic traffic, this should also tell you something about the prospects conducting those searches. After they read your blog post, what will they want to learn about next? Is there an opportunity to create an ad, so you can catch those prospects during their next search?
2. Create Content to Replace Your Google Ads
Google Ads should have a spot in every B2B marketers’ toolbox. While you wait for your B2B content marketing efforts to pay off, you can still earn plenty of exposure on the first page of Google by creating high-performing ads and placing well-informed bids.
With that said, you should always strive to create content that ranks on the first page of Google for popular keywords that represent buying intent from your audience.
Far too many marketers create impressive ad campaigns around these kinds of keywords and then put their content-marketing focus elsewhere. As a result, they will always need to pay for that first-page traffic.
Instead, use the last tip to figure out what kinds of content would work best for these high-volume keywords, and then continuously produce content that will help you get on the first page for free. Pillar pages can be great for this because they give you so many opportunities to create this type of content instead of repeating the same post over and over.
Also, don’t forget to turn off your ads the moment you organically rank for a certain keyword. Otherwise, you’ll end up competing against yourself for attention – never a good idea.
3. Find Guest-Posting Opportunities with the Most Potential
Content marketing and PPC ads both share one very important aspect in common: they often depend on other companies’ websites.
Content marketing works best when it involves posting on other sites to earn backlinks and greater exposure. Generally, content marketers try to get their posts published on sites they know their market regularly visits.
The problem is that these sites don’t necessarily represent visitors who are actively looking to purchase. So, while you may earn a backlink, that exposure might not be worth much.
That’s why you should place ads on industry sites, too. Then, once you see where the most conversions are coming from, approach those sites for guest-posting opportunities. This will save you a lot of time you’d otherwise spend with trial-and-error guest posts.
How to Immediately Increase Conversions for Your B2B Content Marketing
At Hushly, we’re big fans of both B2B content marketing and paid ads, especially when they’re used in tandem to generate more leads.
However, we also know that even when their powers are combined, turning those efforts into qualified leads your sales team can nurture into conversions isn’t always easy.
That’s why we created our platform. Without changing anything on your site or any of your ads, we guarantee that our software will increase your lead-gen and account-based marketing (ABM) leads by 51%.
Contact us today and we’d be more than happy to show you exactly how it works.
