The Internet has made life easier than ever before for B2B marketers. Before the World Wide Web, successful B2B marketers were often the ones who simply figured out how to get past the gatekeepers at a company, so they could get in front of a decision-maker. Even then, it was usually a lot of work to lock in a sale.
That being said, the Digital Age is not without its own B2B marketing challenges. The Internet has made it easier for everyone, meaning successful marketers are now those that have figured out how to overcome those challenges better than the army of competitors they’re up against.
More and more, they’re doing this with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
3 Common B2B Marketing Challenges You Can Overcome with PPC
Marketers who love PPC really love PPC. They’ll sing its praises for days and swear they’d give up without it.
For those who haven’t used PPC at all, it can be a little hard to take seriously.
So, let’s look at three different B2B marketing challenges that everyone has to deal with and how paid ads can help overcome them.
1. The Long Wait for Organic Traffic
We’ve talked before about how you can use content marketing to overcome common B2B marketing challenges, but that approach still takes time. Unless your company faces very little competition, ranking well in Google is usually an uphill climb. In fact, according to Neil Patel, a good content marketing plan still takes about two years to pay off.
Do you have two years you can wait before seeing an ROI on all the content you publish?
It’s not that it won’t be worth the wait, it’s just that there’s plenty you can do in the meantime to drive traffic to your website. Specifically, you can use paid traffic to attract leads. While it’s not “free traffic”, it’s better than no traffic at all.
2. Addressing the Individual Decision-Makers at Companies
Easily one of the biggest B2B marketing challenges is trying to address the many decision-makers that have to sign off on your solution before their company will invest in it. The average company a B2B business markets to includes 6.8 such decision-makers.
What makes this challenge even more daunting is that most of these employees have completely different priorities. For example, the CTO may be interested in your software because it will solve their company’s cloud-related problems, but the CFO is far more interested in the payment plan you offer.
Trying to address this challenge through content marketing usually produces lackluster results. In that last example, blog posts may work really well to nurture the CTO into a lead. However, there probably isn’t a great blog post idea – much less several – that would win over the CFO. Literally, all that person cares about is what it will do to their budget.
For those kinds of one-issue stakeholders, PPC is perfect. This is especially true when you can literally target the individual via LinkedIn Ads, so you can speak directly to their concerns. Instead of wasting time and money creating content that won’t convert, you just need one landing page and the right ads.
3. Measuring Marketing ROIs
Most online marketers really enjoy sitting down to put together their winning strategy.
Unfortunately, almost no marketer enjoys being forced to figure out whether or not their strategy is actually working. It’s relatively easy to tell if conversions are coming in and if those conversions are creating a net profit, but that’s a lot different than trying to get clear about the actual ROI you’re seeing.
Plus, content audits are becoming progressively more common throughout B2B industries. Companies that carry them out will enjoy a huge advantage over those that don’t, meaning you better get on the bandwagon.
Of course, the longer you’ve been posting content, the longer they take.
Again, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t invest in content marketing, but you won’t have to go through this same issue with paid ads. Your ROI couldn’t be clearer, and you can modify your ads as you go – much simpler than a full-blown audit.
How to Overcome the King of B2B Marketing Challenges
Paid ads will absolutely help you get around the three B2B marketing challenges we just listed above. For many marketers, that’s enough reason to invest in them, even if they still have some heavy lifting to do in order to lock in the conversion.
That’s where Hushly comes in.
Companies like Intel, Juniper Networks, and Unisys rely on our platform because it locks in leads. In fact, we guarantee you’ll see lead generation and ABM conversions increase by no less than 51%.
If you’d like to see how, just contact us today?
