If you are not familiar with search engine marketing (SEM), it is a technique that involves using paid advertising to promote your business on search engine results pages, also known as SERPs. SEM allows you to advertise in search results, increase your website traffic, attract potential customers, and generate new sales. In fact, SEM contributed to 30% of lead generation in 2022.
As digital marketing continues its ever-evolving journey, reviewing your current strategies is important to ensure that relevant searches lead to your company's content. Discover seven ways to increase B2B lead generation and achieve better advertising performance with SEM in today's marketing world.
1. Know Your Target Audience
It may seem obvious, but B2B companies often develop product and service ads without having a clear idea of who they are targeting. Knowing and fully understanding your target audience is essential for developing accurate personas that serve as reference points for all your messaging.
Creating effective buyer personas can be broken down into five steps:
- Understand the sales cycle and all the people involved in the decision-making process.
- Focus on 2-5 stakeholders who typically participate in the buyer's journey.
- Determine stakeholder groups: Finance, Technology, Executive, Project Management, etc.
- Find an existing customer in each group who is willing to talk to you.
- Research each group on LinkedIn or job sites to learn about their key roles and responsibilities.
- With well-developed personas representing your target audience, you will be able to create more accurate and compelling ads. As your products and services evolve, so should your personas, so make sure to review them often to consider any adjustments or updates.
2. Watch Your Competition
If searching for your ads floods you with your competitors' content, you have a problem to solve: how can you differentiate yourself and get your ads to rank at the top? Competitive research should help you uncover some of your competitors' key strategies so you can find ways to use similar tactics or outperform them with your own.
You will also find missed opportunities in your own marketing plan by observing what your competitors are marketing to what is likely a similar set of potential customers, especially regarding their keywords and other SEM tactics. Make sure you are positioning your business competitively compared to similar companies.
3. Use Best Practices for Ads
Although it is tempting and easy to be flashy in digital marketing, you should keep your target market in mind. In B2B, your advertising is likely aimed at mid-to-senior-level decision-makers, buyers, managers, and business owners who respond better to a relatively conservative and professional appearance.
Best practices that ensure B2B digital ads are consistent and well-focused include:
- Relying on personas to guide language and messaging.
- Setting up compelling landing pages so readers take the next step
- Analyzing your keyword options and being selective with your choices
- Communicating with your sales team for help in the discovery process
- Ensuring keywords make sense for buyers at both the top and bottom of the sales funnel
4. Test Your Ads with A/B Testing
A great way to fine-tune your ads is to make changes based on real audience feedback. Simply put, A/B testing leverages two or more versions of an ad, collecting and analyzing data on what works and what doesn't to help you make your campaign more impactful.
Analyze the elements of your ads and identify what could be easily changed, such as a CTA, a special offer, or images. Adjust one component at a time; otherwise, you risk not knowing which changes caused a different response. Then analyze the results and use that knowledge in the next iteration of your advertising campaign to guide potential customers in the right direction.
5. Create Compelling Content
Your content should tell a story and intrigue readers from beginning to end. More importantly, you should lead your audience to interact with you, fill out contact forms, download and share your content, and become customers.
Once again, creating high-quality content depends entirely on: who are you targeting, what are their pain points, and how do you solve their problems? The more accurately you can understand and reiterate your readers' problems, the more likely your content will resonate with your audience and generate engagement.
Content types and CTAs that will help potential customers move along your buying journey include:
- Videos
- Guides
- Demos
- Limited-time offers
- Free consultations
6. Optimize Landing Pages for Conversions
When readers click on your ad, they are taken to a landing page separate from your website's navigation. In this case, most of the time we create gated content landing pages and pay-per-click (PPC) landing pages. Make sure the content on those pages matches the expectations set by the ad itself.
Some of the most effective ways to optimize landing pages are:
- Adjusting CTAs based on prior research and A/B testing.
- Refining copy to better address persona needs.
- Keeping the most important information front and center
- Combining the right images to send the right messages to the right audience.
- Analyzing user heatmaps to optimize user experience
7. Conduct Constant Keyword Research
No matter how much work you put into ads and landing pages, you need to maximize your audience by incorporating the right keywords into your copy. Even with paid ads, Google is less likely to show content if keywords don't match the search criteria.
Fortunately, there are ways to ensure readers interact with your ads. Through digital research, you can discover the most effective keywords and keyword groupings and use them in your ad content to further increase visibility. Consider using platforms like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and others to maximize the impact of your keyword research.
