Mascola B2B Marketing Blog, B2B Advertising Agency

What You’re Getting Wrong with B2B Paid Search

Have your B2B paid search efforts hit a road block? Have your AdWords and Bing Ads campaigns plateaued and you can’t help feeling that something’s wrong? Well maybe there is! Let’s take a look at some common mistakes B2B companies make with their paid search campaigns and how you can fix them.

Ad Schedule – Showing Your Ads at the Right Times

B2B companies, more than B2C companies, should be ultra-aware of when their paid search ads are running. More importantly, you need to be sure it corresponds with when your customers will be searching for what you have to offer. A B2C company that sells, say, men’s clothing can likely see quality return while running ads at all hours of the day. But a B2B company likely only sees relevant traffic for their product during normal business week days and hours, when their customers at other companies are on the job. This will vary depending upon your market, but the idea holds true. Try running long term “Day of the week’ and “Hour of day” dimension reports. What times are you getting the most traffic and the most conversions? Armed with this info, you can adjust your ad schedule to exclude those times you’re not seeing good bang for your buck.

Keywords – Being Specific, Using Long Tail & All Match Types

Your keywords are the foundation of your B2B paid search effort. That means they can make or break your campaigns. Make sure that you’re not only focusing on the core phrases that explain your product, but also on longer, more detailed descriptions that will connect with more serious buyers.

For example, say you sell safety helmets to manufacturing companies. You’ll want to make sure you don’t just focus your keywords on basic terms like “helmet.” The term “helmet” can mean different things to different people, like “bike helmet” or “football helmet,” and can waste a significant amount of your budget on irrelevant clicks. Using more specific, long tail keywords like “yellow work safety helmet” will save you money from those irrelevant clicks and catch the customers more likely to purchase your products. And don’t just rely on broad match keywords, but also work in broad modifier, phrase, and exact match versions of your keywords to increase click through rates and save money.

Ads – Promote What Makes You Unique

The paid search landscape is a competitive place and you want to make sure you’re using your entire tool kit to bring in those coveted leads. This means knowing what sets your B2B company apart from the competition and making sure to promote this in your paid search ads. Does your company offer free shipping? Do you give discounts with bulk orders? Whatever makes your product offering seem more attractive than the other guys’ be sure to mention it in your ad text. AdWords Ad Extensions like Callouts or Sitelinks can be a great place to fit in this promotional copy without using up valuable ad space.

Testing – Finding What Works Best

One of the most common mistakes we B2B paid search advertisers make is setting up our ads and landing pages and then getting too busy with other projects to fully test their effectiveness. But testing is a monumentally important aspect of getting the most out of your efforts. Using a dedicated A/B testing tool is a sure fire way to optimize your paid search campaigns, but can become pricey. At the least you should create multiple versions of all of your ads, test different ad copy and landing pages, run them and see over time which performs better and learn why. You can run different versions of ads simultaneously and AdWords will automatically begin serving those that perform the best based on your ad settings. This can help us learn what about our ads is connecting most with our audience and optimizing our ads for that.

Re-engaging – Following Up After a Lead

Sometimes getting the lead can seem like the most important goal of a B2B paid search campaign. But of equal, if not more, importance is following up with that lead to turn them into a valued customer. Whether this translates into someone at your company manually contacting the lead or utilizing a marketing automation tool to connect with them, re-engaging after the lead is vitally important. Hopefully this re-engagement will turn the lead into a sale, or if you’re lucky, many sales down the road. But, even if it doesn’t end up converting, the process will teach you something about why they didn’t end up buying after all, and you can use this info to further optimize your campaigns in the future.

B2B Monday Myth: B2B Copy Should Be All Business

by MGB2B

This may be a myth you’ve heard debunked before. It’s not a new concept: B2B doesn’t need to be boring. And it 100% should not be. Especially if you want to stand out in a sea of B2B mediocrity.

Because even though the All-Business-All-the-Time Myth has been debunked many times, there is no shortage of stiff, unreadable B2B copy in the world today. In fact, that describes the majority of B2B copy.

Now how much you can loosen up depends largely on your audience. While you want to be conversational, you also don’t want to take any guidance from say, your favorite stand-up comedian. But most likely, what resonates with your audience will fall somewhere in between where you are now and Stand-Up Johnny’s saltiest script.

Here Are a Few B2B Copy Tips to Get Started:

Look to Your Audience First. A little research can go a long way. Talk to some of your key salespeople, staff members and customers to establish a brand voice and messaging that will resonate with your target. Once the brand voice is established, make sure that voice appears everywhere. You don’t want someone to click on an ad and discover a website that looks and sounds like a completely different company.
Write Like You Talk. Pretend you’re having a conversation with a friend. Whether your audience is reading a blog post, an ad, or your website, they need to feel like you are talking to them. They might be looking for ways your brand can help or empower them. But, just like your friends, they don’t want to hear you bragging about yourself.
Tap Into the Emotions of Your Potential Buyer. It turns out that B2B buyers are not that different from the average retail consumer. The purchasing process is not devoid of emotion; in fact, emotion is often what drives the process.
Include Calls to Action. Ads need them. Emails need them. Websites and landing pages REALLY need them. Even direct mail. The Call to Action. It’s almost like the holy grail of copy. Why? Because that’s how your prospects will know what to do after they’ve read your friendly B2B copy. That’s how you convert them. And that, most important of all, is how you’re going to know which channels work, and which ones don’t. Which brings us to…
Reevaluate and Refine. Today’s analytics can tell you a lot about what’s effective and what’s not. You can test messages almost anywhere. Banner Ads. Paid Search. Subject Lines. If you test which messages are most effective at converting your prospects into customers, you’ll be able to become consistently more effective with your messaging.

So What Now? Where Do I Begin?

Pull a few different pieces from your marketing arsenal – both online and off. Read them out loud. Have your significant other read them too. Does the copy sound strained or boring? Time to breathe some new life into your brand voice.

Does it sound smooth and conversational (but not too salesy)? Maybe it only needs a few tweaks here and there. Either way, a simple review is an exercise worth going through. You might start by hiring a professional writer or an ad agency to help you evaluate and get your brand headed in the right direction.

One thing is for certain – in today’s competitive environment, you can’t afford NOT to have effective copy.

How Hurricane Harvey Could Have Damaged This Website

by MGB2B

While they have changed it as of late, the image above was the lead message on the Walter P Moore website a few days after Hurricane Harvey made landfall. Walter P Moore is an engineering firm headquartered right in Houston. When you click on the slide, it takes you to a blog post from May about building structures that are resilient in the face of hurricane season. Which was all well and good in May.

On September 1, however, it was a little alarming to see this image without a community outreach message accompanying it. Other Houston companies like ConocoPhillips and Amegy Bank had this type of message of encouragement within a few days after the storm hit.

To be fair, Walter P Moore seems to have (rightly) placed more importance on getting into the trenches and helping out the city right away than they did on their website. It was encouraging to see a new lead slide when I returned to their website.

What We Should Have Seen on the Website Right Away:

Branding after disasters – whether natural or manmade – can be precarious. (Some are downright tasteless.) But there are a few guidelines you can follow. Doing so can ensure your business is regarded as a caring, socially responsible member of the community.

Here’s a Quick Guide to Website Updates after a Natural Disaster:

Have a Contingency Plan. Most of the time, your website won’t have any content that will offend your target audience. But when a disaster happens, that can change in a second. Make sure someone in your organization is in charge of reviewing dynamic site content regularly. This comes in particularly handy after natural disasters or major world events. This person should know your brand and business well and have direct access to your website so they can make edits. The key is to have an alternate person in charge in case Person A is unable to update your site.
Make Sure Your Website Can Be Managed by Your Staff. If you’re not already using a CMS (Content Management System), you might want to change that. Using one makes it easy for you to follow Rule #1. In a pinch, you’d be able to have any (trusted) colleague go online and make changes to your site.
Don’t Use a Disaster-Response Message to Sell. When you do post something on your site responding to a hurricane, a terrorist attack, or any type of disaster, make sure your message cannot be seen in any way as selling your products or services. This may seem like common sense, but a lot of brands ignore the rule. Don’t be one of them.
Be Sensitive to the Emotional Needs of Your Community. This should go without saying. If you can’t come up with something on your own, find a good writer to carefully craft the message you want to appear on your site. Let the community know that you are with them. This can take the form of a letter from the CEO or a simple visual that links to a blog talking about the disaster aftermath and the need for help. If it’s not your community and you want to help out, you can include a donation button on your website, so that anyone who visits can help out through your site. There are many options available.

Walter P Moore redeemed itself with both its actions and its new lead website story. Your brand can be a step ahead of the game by following the advice above. Instead of responding, just be ready for whatever might come down the pike. These days, it could very well be anything.

In the meantime, let’s send out our heartfelt support to the communities affected by both Harvey and Irma in the past few weeks. They are going to need all the help they can get.