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Pay Per Click is awesome. Previously, I talked about how PPC can be a profit magnet for your business. One of the main reasons for that is that you can validate your research and marketing strategies very quickly. SEO is very important, and must be part of your online marketing strategy, but it’s not as fast typically.
As an inbound marketing tactic for online business, Pay-Per-Click is a popular option. If you execute a PPC campaign(s) well, the effectiveness for you and the potentially massive amounts of data (clicks, bids, conversions, impressions) it provides – can be very valuable.
You must know how to read the data, optimize for it – and make it actionable via (updated) changes.
How can Business-To-Business Pay Per Click marketing work for you?
(This is a follow up from the previous post about SEO for B2B)
The lessons learned from organizations can be modeled. Marketing Sherpa provides insights from their 2011 B2B PPC Marketing Benchmark report (sample available).
1) How does a PPC program get executed: in-house or outsourced?
In a similar fashion to SEO, many organizations choose to perform PPC work in-house. Some outsource completely (12%), and a slightly smaller percent use an internal/external combo team.
PPC provides a lot more flexibility as mentioned earlier, and allows campaigns to be tested and turned on/off based on metrics/success.
Businesses know the value of testing a PPC campaign for keywords and ad text to learn what they can use in an SEO program.
2) Is B2B PPC effective as a business tactic?
In the study, 57% claimed PPC to be “somewhat effective”, and 23% said it was “very effective”. The fact that you can drive traffic and test for result fairly quickly (relative), may sway these results. Especially when you combine the “expert” factor. Many organization I come across (to a high degree) have very poorly structured campaigns. (It’s also likely true that the ones that are functioning well would not need assistance, so I don’t see those). The level of efficiency of researching, building and running a PPC program is going to be heavily reliant on knowledge of the staff. It makes sense to inclued PPC early in the discussion, and run test programs.
3) What PPC tactics are being used?
PPC allows fast testing of multiple, specific copies of ad text (A/B), and pages can be tested faster for conversion than SEO, for example.
4) What is the effort level of Pay Per Click Marketing for B2B?
Testing landing page copy, and variations of landing pages are typically the most involved with a PPC campaign. Structuring campaigns and working with bidding strategies is additional work that require “street smarts” and Google knowledge.
5) What are the highest returns on effectiveness of PPC tactics?
If you are new to PPC (adwords) you may not know that highly targeted campaigns are top on the list for success. The relevancy factor and cross campaign targeting will propel you forward. We can see below that the creation and management of highly targeted ad groups provides a high level of effectiveness for PPC.
This is a short overview of key areas of B2B Pay Per Click management. These learnings should help you in 2011, as you sit down to discuss PPC for your organization.
What do you think?
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Entrepreneur Magazine says Jon Rognerud is one of the most sought-after Digital Marketing Experts. His clients extend from high-end brands and middle-tier businesses in both B2B and B2C. His SEO website optimization book, "The Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your Website" from Entrepreneur Press is in bookstores now.