B2B Digital Marketing
B2B (business to business) marketing requires a whole different strategy than B2C (business to customer) marketing. Using digital marketing strategies that are designed for B2C companies is not recommended for B2B companies and will likely result in a loss of opportunity and wasted budget.
Bounce Rate is not a meaningful matrix in B2B marketing.
In B2C marketing, Bounce Rate (how many people
click on an ad or on a listing on Google’s SERP and then leave it right away) is often an important metric. If you are selling 10-dollar lipstick
and paying a dollar a click and 95% of the clicks bounce then you need to do something different because your ROI is low.
However, with B2B marketing it could be a mistake to eliminate an ad that has a 95% bounce rate if 5% are converting.
B2B sales tend to be worth a lot more money than B2C sales. If a company that makes antennas sells a whole array to T-Mobile, that’s going to generate hundreds of thousands now, & likely in the future as T-Mobile prepares to move over to 6G.
Bottom Line: For B2B, even though the Bounce Rate is high the ROI also has potential to be very high. You can read more about this strategy here:
Focus on Goal Value and
not Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is another matrix we don’t place too much value on for B2B marketing. We focus on Goal Value, where we assign value to different conversions on the site giving lower value to top of the funnel conversions and higher value to bottom of the funnel interactions.
This data is as close to the bottom line as we can get from Google. Because with B2B marketing, we don’t have the luxury of an e-commerce site where we can literally see how many sales came in vs. spend giving us a concrete ROI.
Since standard marketing matrices such as Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate are used differently for B2B marketing it is critical to hire experts with many years of experience doing marketing for B2B companies.
Analyzing Data
Another very important thing for B2B marketing is to analyze the actual data. Google’s reports are only step one. Our clients report to us how many quality leads came in since Google Analytics can not know the quality of the lead.
How many quality leads were generated this month? What is the trend? Are leads going up or are they going down? How does October this year compare to October last year in terms of leads?
This is critical for success since with B2B marketing relying just on Google Analytics is a mistake.
Sales Cycle
However, it is also critical to understand the sales cycle before saying, “I raised the budget in September 2022 by 100% why am I not seeing an 100% increase in leads?”
B2B marketing involves taking a longer sales cycle into consideration. Products are often expensive and purchasing decisions may require various approvals throughout the company.
It is not as simple as needing new shoes, seeing an ad for a sale on Adidas and then buying the shoes. Or even getting distracted in the middle of shoe shopping and then being reminded about those Adidas the next day when an ad with those exact shoes shows up.
So for B2B companies it’s important to take the sales
cycle into consideration and analyze performance only
after the sales cycle time line has elapsed..
Google Estimates
If you’ve ever run a campaign on the Google Ads platform you will notice that Google often will give you estimates. If you spend X dollars then you will receive Y conversions at the price of Z. Or your ad is estimated to show 100 more times if you increase the budget to $20 a day. These estimates can be helpful when determining how much
budget to give each campaign. Especially when there is ample budget.
However, B2B markets, especially ones that are
niche, often have inaccurate estimates so Google’s estimates are useless. This makes it critical to work around this and figure out the
right amount of budget needed so that budget won’t be wasted but at the same time opportunities won’t be missed.
SEO Tools
SEO Tools such as Spyfu, Majestic, Ubersuggest
etc. will also not be accurate for niche markets.
One of our clients had a budget of $1400 a month yet the SEO tool estimated that they were paying $200. This showed us that the budgets they stated for our competitors were also meaningless.
Tools can be a big help for the layman. But you need an expert when the tools aren’t giving you accurate data.
Google Ad Campaigns Need
to be Set up Differently
Another thing, B2B ads require a special ads setup so that budget isn’t wasted.
In our experience, there are some click happy countries. They click a lot but rarely become high quality leads.
So target them and all the budget is spent with little gain.
Of course, your company may be different. So make sure to test this. Exclude these countries and
lose the little gain or separate out these countries so it doesn’t take up the whole budget. Little can be worth a lot of money for B2B companies.
Expensive Keywords
There are expensive general keywords that are nice to have, but not so nice when budget is limited.
And they may be expensive because Google wants to increase bids even though there may not be a lot of competition.
You may want to use your ad to filter out unwanted visitors.
Unfortunately this works directly against Google’s algorithms. They reward ads with lower bids when there is a high CTR which increases their revenue.
What do you do then? Pause them completely? In this
case you have to use Google’s algorithms against them. In order to this properly, you need expert digital marketers.
Negative Keywords
With B2B marketing, negative keywords are critical especially because you need to filter out B2C clients that you don’t want spending your budget.
If you are selling bubble wrap wholesale, you don’t want your average Joe who is sending one package to click on your ad, so you need to filter out the searches that are not going to lead to a conversion.
This blog post has lots of ideas of negatives to add
to your B2B campaigns.
SEO Opportunities
Niche B2B markets come with their PPC challenges, however, they also have unique SEO opportunities that should be taken advantage of.
If your company and 3 others in the world produce a service then it’s especially important to write about your topic. The best would be if the articles are
written by someone on the team with a PhD since Google respects PhDs since it adds credibility. However, if that is not an option anyone on the team who is capable of writing high-quality articles should do it. The article should be about a topic that is relevant to your business.
This is not for sales. This is to help the Organic Search of your site.
We have done this for clients and have seen the client’s website climb from page 3 of the SERP to page 1. We have even gotten to positions 0 and 1 — the most sought after positions on the search page.
For more competitive topics, the climb on the SERP is usually slow. But with B2B niche markets we have seen dramatic climbs by simply using our SEO techniques.
B2B companies can also benefit from designing resources that help the general public browsing the web.
No, I am not interested in putting budget into creating resources that won’t lead to sales, said many of our B2B clients. However, we convinced them of the importance.
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The point of every piece of content on a site isn’t necessarily to sell. Some of the content is to boost the site’s Google ranking which at the end of the day means that when a potential lead googles keywords that you offer, you will be more likely to show up than your competitor.
If you’ve read all the way down to here, you get the point. B2B digital marketing is a specialty. You need a marketing company with lots of experience specifically marketing B2B companies. Here at AIMS Digital, we have been marketing B2B companies since 1998, the infancy of the internet. Contact us to get a free site consultation.
