9 Essential Principles For Successful PPC Strategies - B2B Marketing

Skydiving looks very simple when somebody else does it.  Beautiful skies.  Amazing views.  Adrenaline rushing!  So cool!

...Until you get up there.  Then things change.  All of the sudden the skies don't look as friendly.  The landscape below can be deadly.  Every detail matters a lot.  

The reality is that it never gets easy, especially when there may be an ambush waiting for you when you land. 


PPC looks simple as well, at least from the surface.  Load up the keywords, come up with an ad copy and a landing page, define your bids, and leads should be pouring in!

The reality is very different though.  Results are often disappointing. Time is wasted. Budgets are spent.  Bids are placed.   Yet there is no meaningful amount of leads. 

What's wrong with this picture?

Complexity.  Google Adwords have become an incredibly difficult platform loaded with an incredible amount of features.  Anything from defining the types of matches for your keywords to figuring out the right grouping for the best results and quality scores to what kind of words to use in the ad copy to what day and time to advertise, which geographies, and many other factors.

Competition.  A crowded market is like a battlefield.  It is likely that your competitors have dedicated at least as many resources and funds for Adwords as you have. Plus they may have a decent agency.

This makes a huge difference because a really good agency has best practices, specialized resources, and a privileged access to Google.  It would be almost impossible to win the game without similar resources.

Funds.  CPC increases every month in many competitive industries.  With more players and more money spent by each vendor, the cost of conversion goes up.  Even more importantly, the entry barrier goes up significantly.  This means that even with $10K per month you may not get meaningful results.  You may need a significantly larger budget and a rock star agency plus a great in-house resource to succeed.  

Lead Costs .  Even then, the cost of each lead may prove to not be worth the investment. 


This is a dark, yet a realistic picture I painted to instill reality into inexperienced marketers itching to try this solo and to help marketing professionals ground overly eager executives itching to see their company name and specific messages on the page 1 of Google search engine quickly. 


Bringing a parallel to military, it is the same as sending amateurs to fight a Special Forces unit and expecting amazing results.







 





9 Best PPC Practices


Yet, PPC programs do work.  Below are 9 recommendations on building a successful PPC program in B2B space.

1.  Define Your Goals. What are your goals?  Are you you looking to generate leads, increase brand awareness, or both?  It's critical to have a clear set of goals start.  Set realistic expectations for the initial success and growth afterwards.  

2.  Define Your Target Lead Types.  This is one of the most critical steps.  Define what kind of leads are you expecting to generate.  If you skip this step and start getting lower quality leads, your conversion economics may not work and you may end up spending a fortune on acquiring traffic that doesn't convert.   Check out recent research on this topic from Industry View (see the chart below).

 


3.  Reality / Economics.  Find out what are the CPCs for your target keywords.  Multiply by the conversation rates to calculate the expected cost of acquisition.  Add 10-15% for agency fees.  Is this number feasible for you?  If not, PPC may not be the right channel for you.  If it is, define the max amount you are willing to spend on each lead.  Calculate the delta you are willing to pay for the brand awareness.

4.  Find a good agency.
This is a tough one.  There are lots of OK agencies and terrible ones.  Things to look for is experience in your space, ability to assign an experienced resource, desire to spend enough time with your account, willingness to start with a smaller investment, an ability to show early results, and willingness to work with you if the initial results are not there.  Expect and be ready to go through several bad agencies till you find a good one.  
5.  Internal Resource.  You should expect to have an internal resource focused and later maybe even dedicated  to this program, because an external agency is never going to be as knowledgeable in your space as somebody from your organization. To be effective, this has to be a joint internal/agency effort.

6.  Start small.  
Start as small as it is feasible.  In some industries that may not be possible. Work with your agency to see what's the minimal investment that can yield meaningful results.  Then add a delta for experimenting.  In some cases this can be as high as 60%. 

7.  Time and resource expectations.
Budget time for experimenting with keywords, ad copies, landing pages, etc -- until you start seeing a steady flow of leads.  It may take anywhere from a week to a few months.  It is a common mistake to expect an immediate impact.  There are at least 20-30 parameters that can impact the results.  It will take time to identify these, fix them (sometimes multiple times), A/B test, and start seeing the impact.

8.  Expand. Expand into new keywords, geographies, PPC programs, etc. This will help you find the most optimal channels and bring down conversion costs. 

9.  Ramp up organic programs.
At the end of the day, you can't win a battle with just a single type of a weapon.

PPC is just one way to generate leads.  It is expensive.  It's complicated. As a result, very often it is not a scaleable way to generate leads.  

While you can sometimes make PPC economics work for you, you can get significantly better results when you apply the knowledge and expertise gained from PPC to your organic efforts, like SEO, content marketing, and social marketing. 

In our case, only 25% of our highest quality leads comes from PPC.  The rest come from organic efforts, like content marketing, social / community marketing, SEO, etc. 

Best of luck in your lead generation efforts!

4 Key Inbound Marketing Takeways from MozCon 2013

Me with Rand Fishkin

I finally found a little time to write about MozCon 2013.

2,500 attendees.  First of all, I was blown away by the number of people at the conference.  It was estimated to be around 2,500 people.  Kudos to Rand and the Moz team with their ability to build a great company, solid product and a strong community around it.

Inbound Marketing vs. SEO.  I think it is symbolic that SEOMoz has changed its name to just Moz.  With each Google algorythm change, SEO is transforming from standalone tweaks to a major component of every aspect of core marketing.  

SEO-influenced Marketing Areas.  Below are a few of strategies where SEO is merging with traditional marketing and transforming it into inbound marketing.

- Keyword definition, and updates <SEO-driven>

- Messaging <SEO-optimized>

- Content strategy <SEO-driven>

- Web page building + on-page optimization<SEO-defined>

- SEO-optimized PR and AR

- Social and community activities

- Link building

Agencies vs. In-House Teams.  Lacking official statistics, I would say 95% of attendees at MozCon were agencies.  Very few in-house teams.  I see two trends in that area:

• Agency-centric.  Many companies are outsourcing SEO, PPC and other inbound marketing activities to agencies.  I don't think it is a smart model since agencies usually don't have the core market expertise, since they typically don't interact with their customers' customers.  This limits their effectiveness and significantly reduces results.
• Agency-fication. Companies with more advanced inbound teams are going deeper into SEO, PPC, content marketing, etc.  In a nutshell, they are building agency-type expertise, often leapfrogging their competitors who rely on the first model.  They just use agencies for technical advice.  This model can produce significantly better results, but requires a completely different Marketing team DNA.
   

Tools and New Practices.  What was really cool about MozCon -- you discover new tools and best practices for improving inbound marketing.  These can make a huge difference in generating leads and conversion ratios.  

Four best tracks from the conference:

• 1. Win Through Optimization and Testing.
     Kyle Rush had practical advice for planning, implementing and updating A/B testing in many aspects of online marketing.
  2. How to Be a One Person Link Building Army
     Mike Arnesen went over some extremely efficient techniques and tools for building high quality (and Penguin-safe) links with limited resources and budgets.
  3. 2013 Ranking Factors
     Very technical presentation for advanced SEOs.  Good data based on the research done by Moz.
  4.  Simplifying Complexity: Three Ideas For Higher ROI.  Really interesting and meaningful content about various inbound marketing channels, attribution and visualized ROI for complex marketing campaigns.  I personally didn't care about the presentation style with lots of profanity and posturing, but the underlying content was great.

Finally, an advice for fellow marketing executives.  I would highly recommend personally attending the next MozCon show and/or sending a team member responsible for lead generation or online marketing.

 

SMX West 2013: Where are the Big Cheeses?

Here is to another great SMX conference!  This time in San Jose, CA.

For me, SMX is a great venue to get up to speed with the latest inbound marketing developments  -- from SEO to Content Marketing to PPC.

This is my second SMX after the one in NY.  In both cases, I left with interesting new ideas, strategies and techniques.  Some of these have made a difference for us, helping to get an unfair advantage against much bigger competitors in terms of high quality leads and as a result, in a higher  number of closed deals.


Here are some of my key observations from SMX 2013:

1. Morphing Inbound marketing .  Once upon a time, it was as simple as just having good content and a decent landing page. With more and more companies generating lots of content (both good and bad), effective inbound marketing is getting really complex and demands more and more resources.  At this point, it requires pretty sophisticated SEO, dedicated content marketing, SEO-optimized, PR, metrics, tools, graphics designers and web coders.

Each element is a science to itself.  And many of them are morphing and merging, opening new opportunities and creating new complexities.

For example, traditional PR is becoming an SEO-optimized PR that is turbocharged with smart content marketing, delivered using social and community marketing, using social network-fueled journalist and blogger targeting and "help a reporter" tools.

Sounds complicated?  It really is.  It requires the right talent, experience and budgets to succeed.

Does it work?  Absolutely.  Done right, it is a high quality lead generation machine.



2.  SEM- what is the right balance?  

Are you still managing PPC yourself without an agency help?  PPC is getting more sophisticated and complex every month.  If you are in an industry with many competitors, you have to pay lots of attention on technical things like bidding, grouping, segmenting, mobile vs. desktop, etc.

You have to manage other things as well, e.g. messaging, ad writing, designing / coding / updating landing pages, A/B testing, competitive analysis, etc.

Can in it be done in-house?  Yes, if you have a sizable, dedicated and experienced team.

For most of us...- get a good agency!  ... And have team member that will focus on messaging, copy, A/B testing, design, etc.

Why?  Because the agency doesn't know your industry.  It may waste lots of time and money with no results, if you outsource that part.


3.  Where are the the Big Cheeses?  With the way marketing is evolving, one would think more CMOs and Vice Presidents would come to SMX to learn about the inbound / content / web / search engine marketing.  Yet, there were very few executives.

The good news is that there were many bright and innovative junior and mid-level marketing professionals.  I think these folks are shaping their future, obtaining and perfecting skills that would make them really successful as next-generation marketing executives.  

5 Practical Steps For Increasing Website Conversion Rate

Congratulations!  Your web traffic is good!   Now what?  How do you convert visitors into business?  The 5 approaches below came as a result of my own experience of running marketing in several companies, as well as from the practical feedback from my marketing colleagues.

1.  Understand your traffic.  Most likely your web traffic is coming from many different sources.  For example, some people may be visiting your site as a result of reading a blog; some - from a banner ad at a community forum; some may be responding to an email.  Each traffic type has unique characteristics that are important to understand:

• Function.  IT Manager vs. CIO vs. BU Manager, etc.
• Buying cycle.  Research phase (traffic source: just read a magazine article, realized had the same challenge) vs. shopping for a solution (source: read a customer testimonial at an industry forum while looking for a solution to a known problem) vs. ready to buy (source: responding to a price promotion.)
• Topic / Trigger.  Visitors came to the web site after reading a blog entry on a nasty Trojan Horse vs. an article about disaster recovery vs. a  promotion on your product, etc.  

2.  Multiple landing pages.  Each traffic type requires a unique conversation with a category of prospects  (based on function, topic, etc).

For example, let's say you have a group of IT managers that came to your web site as a result of reading a blog entry on the complexity of managing file servers.  Sending them to the main page may disrupt that conversation.  Most of them may feel tricked and will probably end up leaving.  Instead, a simple landing page continuing the discussion, perhaps explaining how this complexity can be solved with a practical implementation, would retain them and encourage to continue exploring the site.

It is important to have as many landing pages as necessary for a meaningful traffic segmentation (based on unique types of conversations) and driving them to a logical conclusion (more info, trial, contact, purchase, etc.)  Many content management and marketing automation tools (like Marketo,) can help in accomplishing this quickly and easily.

3.  Unique messages.  Each landing page requires a specific message to continue the unique conversation started at the lead generation phase.  The message should take into account all the factors from above.

For example, if visitors are coming as a result of reading an article on the risk management in CIO Magazine, you want a landing page with an "executive" look and feel, focused on best practices for solving this problem, and not getting into too many technical details.  It is also a good practice to speak to several of your CIO customers to craft this message.

For a number of webmasters coming from a blog entry on solving Apache web server performance issues, you may want to have a landing page that is be fairly technical and specific.  Again, I would suggest talking to a couple of webmaster customers to craft the message.

4.  Unique elements.  You probably already have a collection of elements, such as videos, podcasts, white papers, blogs, customer testimonials, etc.

Each landing page needs the elements that are appropriate for its audience.  The best way to find right elements is to talk to your existing customers fitting the profile.  This can be an eye opening experience.

For example, one of my customers told me that most of the elements we were planning were irrelevant for him.  He told us that many SMB IT Managers typically look for product screenshots first.  If they like them, they continue browsing.  After verifying this point with a few other customers with the same profile, we ended up giving screenshots a very prominent position on the page.  Very quickly it became the most visited element for the whole site.  The landing page ended up having a great conversion rate.

Another very successful element we added as a result of a direct customer feedback was a "sandbox" for a cloud product we were marketing, where IT managers could play with the product in a "sandbox" environment.

5. Unique call to action.  For this step, it is important to understand prospects' phase in the buying cycle.  If they are just researching, a big red "BUY NOW" button will most likely turn them off.  However, "watch a video" or a "free trial" may work well for them.  Alternatively, if the traffic is coming as a response to your "30% off" promotion, you may want to have the "buy" button in a more prominent location.



These are just 5 ways of increasing your web site conversion rates.  These steps require a bit more planning and execution from your marketing team than usual.  However the conversion rates and revenue results are well worth it.  

There are important steps like monitoring, measuring, and adjusting pages and campaigns that I did not discuss in this entry.  I will try to cover these in a future hack marketing blog entry.

Please feel free to leave your comments and suggestions of other conversion approaches that have worked for you.