New year, new marketing strategy! If you are a member of a business-to-business company and are scratching your head wondering what approach you should take with PPC in 2023, these four tips may give you the push you need to develop a master plan.
Focus on High-Volume Keywords
For Google Ads, the main premise of your targeting is around keywords, which means that it is very important to perform proper research first. If you have never performed keyword research before, here is what we suggest you do to get started:
- Compile a list internally of terms that are most relevant to your products and services and be sure to add in variants of similar terms (ex: machining company and machining business). Go as broad as you can.
- Use the Google Ads keyword planner to see if terms from your list have high search volume, and what types of competition they face. You will be able to narrow down your list from here to make it more specific.
- Either use a tool such as SpyFu to see if your competitors are targeting these terms, or do it manually by searching for the terms yourself and seeing what ad results are in the top three.
- Once you have decided what terms make the most sense for you, divvy them up into different groups and decide what types of campaigns you want to try based off of the types of keywords Google Ads allows:
- Broad match – Your ads could show for searches that Google thinks are related to your keyword, but may also include searches that don’t contain the keyword. Example: fat-free diet ideas -> diet books.
- Phrase match – Your ads could show for searches that Google believes includes the meaning of your keyword if it is deemed to be implied, and search queries can be a more specific form of the meaning. Example: hiking boots -> comfortable hiking shoes.
- Exact match – Your Ads could show on searches that are the same meaning or intent as the keyword. This option gives you the most control over who sees your ad. Example: men’s shirts -> shirts for men.
- And once you have a finalized list of terms, be sure to then also create a hefty negative keyword list that will let Google know what types of terms you don’t want to show for. Some examples of terms on negative keyword lists include “jobs,” “salaries,” “tips,” “idea,” “beginner,” and more.
Improve Your Quality Score
For the keywords you target in your ad groups, Google will give you a score for your landing page in correlation to your ads and keywords. Higher quality scores can lead to lower costs per click, and who wouldn’t want that?
4 Things You Can Quickly Fix
- Page Variants – Are all your ad groups using the same landing page? Even if your keywords are very similar, it’s a good idea to make different versions of your landing pages to target different terms to help boost scores.
- New Copy – From your headers to the body text, there are always opportunities to edit your copy to improve it with more specific keywords as you craft new page variants.
- Fix Images – Load time is actually a factor in your quality score, with one aspect that is often a culprit of slow loading pages being images. Check how big the photos on your landing pages are and see if they can be resized and converted into optimal formats: WebP, JPEG, or PNG
- Remove Scripts – Something that often makes landing pages load really slowly as well is a large amount of unnecessary coding on the site. You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights test to see if you have any lingering code on your site that is making your pages slow.
Explore Other Platforms
While Google Ads is undoubtably the most popular way to do pay-per-click marketing, there are still plenty of other channels out there!
Whether you want to retarget people who have already visited your website, narrow your focus to specific job titles, or just promote some of your social media posts, there are various channels that can provide some new ways to generate leads.
Here are some tips and examples for some popular networks:
Makeover Landing Pages
Besides the things you can do to landing pages to improve your quality score for Google as we talked about above, you also should work to improve your landing pages for customers as well.
As you look at your landing pages, put yourself in the shoes of your ideal customer, and ask yourself these questions:
- Does the landing page give direct information about the main keyword, such as what it is, its features, and why customers should choose you?
- Is there an easy way to make a purchase or contact the business?
- Is the text easy to read? Is there too little or too much white space?
- Is the color scheme high contrast and visible on different screens?
- Are there busy interruptions on the page, such as auto-playing videos or pop-ups?
These questions are a great way to take a step back from being a marketer and think like a consumer for a moment. From this POV, you can then begin addressing some design features that could be preventing the people who click on your ads to take action.
Pro tip: We really recommend trying Unbounce to make custom landing pages with loads of great features!
Want to Read More Tips?
Here are some similar articles from our blog that can help B2B companies with PPC:
- Ramp Up Paid Social with These 5 Tips
- 5 Ways to Save Money in Google Ads
- Reasons Why Your Facebook Ad Campaigns Could Be Failing
- Which Paid Channel Is Best for Your Industry?
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