B2B Marketing with Google Ads
How to run an effective Google Ads B2B Marketing Campaign
Reaching your prospects at the right time in the marketing funnel with the right message has gotten harder and more costly than ever.
That's why it's important to work with a specialist that manages campaigns on these platforms every day. Digital Direct is up to date on the latest changes and strategies to ensure your campaign's success.
The solution:
Creative content is the key to cutting through the noise and engaging your prospects throughout their buyer's journey.
Google Ads B2B Campaign Types
To stay in front of your prospect, prior to them giving you their email address or other contact info, you'll need to set up a number of campaigns. These are the campaigns we use:
Retargeting Campaigns:
You'll need to set the pixels up first for these campaigns even before you're ready to run them. Most ad platforms have a minimum audience size you'll need to reach before they will even run a retargeting campaign. Here are the current audience sizes:
- Google Ads: 1,000
- LinkedIn: 300
- Facebook: 1,000
- Instagram: 1,000
So before you start any of these other campaigns, get your retargeting pixels set up and verify they are populating correctly.
Google Ads B2B Maketing: Content
Before you get too far into this process be aware that you're going to need content. There are 5-6 different campaigns we suggest you run to stay in front of your prospects. You'll need different content as well as landing pages and ad copy for each campaign. The content you use should answer the key questions your prospects have as they move through the buyers journey.
Branded Google Ads Campaigns
Your SEO efforts should have your company's website ranked #1 for most branded search terms (branded search terms = people searching for your company). You may not be #1 for all of these terms. Look at your search results in Google Search Console and see what click through rate your getting for the term and where you rank. If your company name has a popular search term in it, then Google's search results may have ads or other search results above your company. In the example, out of 445 branded searches only 20 searchers actually visited the website they were looking for.
This company's average position for it's branded search term is 7.9 and they only received 20 clicks out of 445 impressions!
Google Display: Keyword Search Campaigns
Cost per click for search campaigns can be very expensive for B2B campaigns. You can target this audience another way for a much lower cost per click via a display campaign targeting a custom audience you've set up in Google Ads. When your in Google Ads platform got to the audience manager under tools and settings. Click on Audiences in the upper left and then click on the plus sign.
You'll see a section titled Custom Segments and that is where you'll find the section for People based on their search activity.
Add your keywords. You'll need to add quite a few to get the impressions per week up depending on your target market. This means your targeting will be fairly broad and the click through rates fairly low. As with any display campaign be sure to exclude mobile apps from your placements. For more info on that, click here.
Google Ads B2B: Competitors Campaign
There are two ways to go after your competitor's website visitors. You can run a search campaign and set your keywords to match your competitor's searches. In this example, Monday.com and Asana.com bid on their competitor Trello. The cost per click for these competitor keywords is considerably less than for a keyword like "project management," which these companies all provide.
Another way is to run a display campaign based on a custom audience. Add a list of your top competitors to the same audiences section of Google Ads. Click on "People that browse types of websites." Your ad won't show on your competitor's website but will show to people who have visited it via a display ad.
Google Ads B2B Segments: In-Market Audiences
There is a good chance Google has an in-market audience for your product or service. In your campaign's audience section, click "edit audience segments" to search for available in-market audiences.
The cost per click on these in-market audiences will be much lower than a keyword-based search campaign. I have had some success with these but generally don't get many conversions on the first go-round. They do a great job of building up my retargeting campaign, so that's good.
B2B Ad Campaigns on YouTube
What's the second largest search engine online? No, not Bing, it's YouTube! YouTube get's billions of searches each month and let's face it, a lot of your prospects would rather watch a video to learn about a topic rather than reading about it.
If you have company videos up on YouTube be sure to opt out of monetizing your content. If you do opt in you're giving YouTube permission to run ads before and during your videos. That's not good.
On the flip side, if you find a competitor that allows for monetization then you can run a pre-roll ad that puts your company in front of your competitors video viewers.
You can also run a search campaign on YouTube with video or text ads that can have great results.
For a complete overview of B2B Google Ads, Click Here
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