In the B2B business realm, paid search advertising is often ignored. After all, for most of these businesses, it represents a fast way to lose money.
It isn’t easy to succeed at paid search advertising in the niches that most B2B companies target. The smaller market you have, the more difficult it is to find profitable search terms. Even if you find a good keyword, transforming the clicks into actual conversions and sales is challenging.
While all the above is true, paid search is one of the most effective ways to grow your B2B business when done properly. In fact, for many of our existing B2B clients, results from paid search are their top source of not only leads but sales.
Finding Success with Paid Search
If you want to market your B2B business successfully, you have to understand the difference between B2C and B2b marketing. One of the main differences is the sale value.
For example, on average, you can expect an e-commerce transaction to be worth between $85 and $120. Even factoring in repeat business, you can make up to $250 per each customer. This means that if you have a profit margin of 50%, the CPA has to be under $125, and that’s just to break even. However, with a B2B company, the lifetime value of most customers is between $20K and $200K.
This means that if your profit margin is just 10%, you can have a CPA of more than $1,000 and still see a significant ROI.
Utilize Your LTV
You may wonder how LTV affects the paid search campaigns you create. The bigger your profit margin, the more wiggle room that you have to figure out what you need to do.
This is an important factor because even campaigns that are well managed are very rarely optimized from the start. When you have a well-designed PPC campaign, you can save quite a bit of money during this typical learning curve. Just remember, though, optimizing your performance with these campaigns is something that requires time and effort.
Finding Your Audience
In some situations, who you believe you are targeting is not who you are really targeted. Unlike a B2C company, which usually knows its audience and what keywords to use to produce results, this is usually more challenging for B2B companies when it comes to finding the proper keywords for your industry or niche.
Niche marketing is challenging. It makes it more difficult to figure out what keywords your audience uses when looking for the service or product you offer. If you want to get in front of the best audiences, you may choose the wrong search terms. Now is the time to start researching the options and finding the best keywords.
Creating an Effective B2B PPC Campaign
When it comes to creating an effective B2B PPC campaign, keep the tips and information here in mind. Doing so will help ensure you get the results from your efforts desired and that you don’t waste your money.