3 Ways PPC Takes on Common B2B Marketing Challenges

B2B marketing challenges

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?

How to Improve Your PPC Lead Generation Quality

PPC lead generation

Every B2B company should be actively investing in PPC lead generation.

While there’s a lot to be said for organic traffic and building a following on social media, PPC often offers the best possible ROI. If nothing else, it’s a great way to generate leads while you’re working on that social media following and impressive Google ranking.

Of course, even if you’ve already been investing in PPC, there’s always something more you can do.

3 Ways to Improve Your B2B Company’s PPC Lead Generation

It’s tempting to rest on your laurels when your PPC lead generation strategy is returning impressive results, but if you implement the three tips below, you may be surprised by how much better you’ll do in a very short period of time.

1. Try LinkedIn Ads

Despite the fact that LinkedIn is an absolutely essential social media channel for B2B companies, in the past, its advertising platform left a lot to be desired. While B2B marketers would use LinkedIn to share posts and build their network, they would generally take their budgets to Google Ads.

LinkedIn used to lack custom audiences, had almost no metrics whatsoever, and didn’t offer goal-based pricing. Twitter and Facebook’s advertising platforms have offered these for years.

And, on top of all that, LinkedIn ads used to cost a small fortune.

Fortunately, LinkedIn Ads have improved a lot over the last year. Now, they do feature account-, web-, and contact-targeting, and sponsored InMail campaigns.

Of course, these features are made all the better by the fact that LinkedIn is a social media platform dedicated solely to business. No matter what industry you’re in, your leads are most likely on LinkedIn.

So, if your PPC lead generation budget isn’t producing the ROI you want, one easy solution may be simply reallocating some of your funds to the new paid advertising powerhouse that is LinkedIn.

2. Focus Your Ads on Securing Email Addresses

B2B and B2C ads don’t work the same way.

If your company was B2C, you could probably just run paid ads right to your product, service, or landing page. In fact, you may not even need to invest in a PPC lead generation strategy. Your buying cycle would be so short that you could simply sell someone right from an ad.

This is almost never going to work in B2B. For one thing, B2B buying cycles have actually increased in length over the past five years. Then, there’s the fact that the average B2B company has to convince 6.8 decision-makers before they can close a sale.

All that is to say that if you’re trying to close deals with a PPC ad, you’re probably not seeing success. Instead, use those ads to secure leads’ email addresses. Bring them to a page where they can download the advertised lead magnet in exchange for their email address, and then use that address to continue your marketing efforts.

3. Pay Attention to Your Most Successful Times

There is no shortage of metrics you can monitor in order to improve the success of your B2B company’s PPC ads.

Unfortunately, most marketers miss one of the most important, especially in the world of B2B: the time-parameters when your ads will be displayed.

In Google Ads, this is known as “ad scheduling.” Facebook offers scheduling-by-time, too. Unfortunately, as far as LinkedIn has come, it doesn’t offer time-specific parameters for ads, but hopefully, that will change soon.

The reason this metric matters so much is that your prospects are probably most susceptible to your ads’ offers during certain times of the day. For many of you, this will mean 9-5, Monday through Friday, when they’re at work. During their personal lives, they might not care as much.

On the other hand, your market may be so busy that the only time they can ever consider their options is when things slow down outside of normal business hours.

More likely than not, you’ll find that your openings are even more specific. For example, Mondays and Fridays might be busy, and mornings may not be good. So, you’ll find that your PPC lead generation efforts work best Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays in the afternoon.

Always check back to see during which times your ads are most successful and then schedule them accordingly. 

Turning PPC Lead Generation into Easy Conversions

Implement those above strategies ASAP and your PPC lead generation strategies will begin paying off more than ever before.

Of course, many of your fellow B2B marketers have discovered another shortcut to the results they want. Our platform is so good at earning conversions, that we actually guarantee a 51% increase in lead-generation and ABM conversions.

Want to see how?

Contact us today for a free demo.

How to Use Content to Lower Your Cost of Leads

cost of leads

Launching a lead generation strategy can be exciting, but there’s no better feeling than when it pays off and your B2B company actually has the number of leads it needs to be successful.

Sadly, for many marketers, this ecstasy is short-lived when they find out what their average cost-for-leads is. It becomes clear that, if something isn’t changed quickly, the strategy that seemed so promising may actually turn into a major problem.

3 Ways You Can Use Content to Cut the Cost of Your Leads

There’s a lot to be said about the importance of publishing high-quality content to your B2B company’s website. Sharing it on social media can be extremely helpful, as well. The right content doesn’t just help to bring in organic traffic. It can help you build authority and qualify your company to prospects, as well.

Content can also go a long way toward dropping your cost-of-leads. Whether it’s currently out-of-control or you’re just worried it may be heading in that direction, here are three ways content can efficiently clip those costs.

1. Invest in Intent Data

At Hushly, we’re big advocates for the power of intent data. As the name suggests, this is data that reflects how someone behaves online with the goal of linking individuals to particular topics of interest.

So, if you sell CRM software, it would help to know if a prospect is reading your content because they’re trying to more effectively follow-up with leads or simply increase their lifetime value. Intent data would show you this, making it easy to deliver them the most relevant content.

Without this advantage, it will not only be difficult to keep your cost of leads down, but to convert them, as well. Imagine the prospect who wants to learn about how CRM can increase lifetime-customer-value who is shown several pieces of content on other topics instead.

They might stick around.

But they may also just go back to Google to see what the rest of their options are.

2. Switch to PPC Until You Have a Better Handle on Your Prospects

Every B2B company should have a plan for securing a reliable stream of organic traffic. It’s not just a high-ROI strategy, it can also be one of the most effective methods of increasing conversions, especially with long buying cycles.

These benefits are only reserved for those companies that know how to create the kind of content their most qualified leads want.

Again, intent data will help with this.

Until it does, though, you should consider focusing more of your marketing budget on paid ads that target those prospects directly. This will help cut your cost of leads and give you a reliable ROI while you take some time to better understand what kind of content works best for your market.

3. Conduct a Content Audit

Finally, one of the simplest steps you can take toward cutting the cost of your leads is by actually looking at the effectiveness of the content you create.

Even if you were to create all of your own content, there would still be a cost involved. That’s a lot of time spent away from other important priorities.

Of course, most B2B executives are paying others – either employees or contractors – to handle content creation for them.

That’s why it’s so important that you go back and see what’s actually working and to what degree. Otherwise, you may continue to invest in content types that offer little-to-no ROI. Your client acquisition costs will always remain inflated, then, because you’re paying for content that doesn’t move the needle.

There are a number of benefits to conducting a content audit, not the least of which is that it will help increase organic traffic, something that should then help you drop your costs significantly.

However, a detailed audit will also show you what kind of content to quit creating, what kind to double-down on, and even what kind may have potential but deserves further consideration.

Cut Your Cost of Leads by Converting More of Them

Implement the above advice and you’ll quickly find your company’s average cost of leads drop. Even just switching to PPC can give you some valuable breathing room while you consider the other two.

That said, we are also very proud to offer a platform that will increase your conversions immediately. Nothing will make your leads cost less than being able to convert them quickly and we guarantee that your lead generation and ABM conversions will increase by at least 51%.

Sound too good to be true?

We know.

That’s why we would be more than happy to prove it. Contact us today to set up a free demo.