10 Reasons Why B2B Marketers Should Think Before They Spend

If there was one piece of advice I would give any business looking to employ PPC for recruiting new business… ‘think before you spend‘.

Too often I inherit Adwords accounts whereby the figures are quite startling, the bare information is available and money has been thrown into the google pot with little or not thought as to what will make a campaign a ’success’.

B2B marketing, especially in niche business, is all about capturing attention. Paid Search advertising is one method whereby you can place your business, your website, in the eye of your potential clients. Predominantly, you’ll find that the ‘researcher’ is not necessarily the ‘end user’ or ‘decision maker’.

Before even thinking about launching your PPC Advertising account, you need to consider the following 10 basic rules of Adwords B2B Marketing;

• Do NOT treat “click throughs” as the KPI for your advertising. Click Thru Ratios (CTR) play a very important role in determining your adspend efficiency, but they do NOT yield results. They’re just one piece of the overall jigsaw.
• Is your site correctly setup to analyse traffic patterns and which particular campaigns are converting?
• Do not stick with one single message. Produce a range of ads and monitor their success rates
• Do not open your campaigns up to Consumer traffic. If you’re working in a niche business industry save yourself time and money by focusing on the keywords your potential clients will be using.
• Use Google conversion codes to monitor traffic through your “Contact” pages and gauge success of each campaign
• Do not make your visitors think! If they search for “Widget X” … make sure your destination link is focused on “Widget X”
• Never point traffic straight to your “Contact Us” page… give them a reason to contact you first
• Analyse your competition. You won’t see their CTR (Click Thru Rates) but you will get an understanding of who’s performing well based on their positioning.
• Monitor your budget. The first month is critical to your campaign. Your Financial Director will be breathing down your neck if there’s no uplift following the additional marketing spend
• If it’s broke… fix it. Once you start to see click levels increase cull or mend the ads which are underperforming.

If you don’t use an analytics package to monitor your site traffic, speak to your techies and have a simple and free package such as Google Analytics employed. The information provided is critical for the success of your campaign

The information you’ll gleem during the first month will give you all the necessary indicators to take your ad campaigns to the next level.

Any questions? I’m happy to discuss your requirements or to simply offer advice to make sure you’re heading in the right direction with your campaigns.