Guide to Scaling a B2B Company With AdWords
This guide is for you if you’re trying to grow a business that has business customers.
A business, in this context, doesn’t have to be a for-profit enterprise. The common theme is that your customer wants to use your product to help them do their job better, as opposed to using your product for fun or necessity.
Why AdWords for B2B?
Why use AdWords to try and grow a B2B business?
90% of searches — including business search terms — are made on Google. Over 40% of all new ad spend on the internet goes to Google for a reason.
If people search for your product category, it makes sense to show them your product when they‘re actively searching.
The trick is to show your ads to only qualified business searchers, and not waste expensive clicks on non-qualified people.
An Important Distinction —Prospecting vs Retargeting
Most of this guide focuses on prospecting, or how to get net new customers. There’s two things this guide doesn’t focus on.
Branded Search — This means bidding on your own brand name so other people can’t pay to show in front of your company name search results. Most companies end up doing this, but there’s no difference here for B2B companies vs B2C companies.
GDN or Youtube Retargeting — This is serving display ads on the Google network to people who have already visited your site. This is important to increase overall conversion rates on your site, but is outside the scope of this article.
What makes B2B paid search different than consumer focused paid search?
There are two key ingredients to successful digital B2B advertising:
Potential customer intent
Potential customer level of qualification
Someone using Adwords to sell consumer goods, like kitchen toasters, only has to worry about intent. If a searcher wants to buy a toaster, they can do it, no matter who they are. There may be some preference variation (blue toasters vs red, etc.) but by-and-large if the intent is there you can convert a good amount of those searchers.
B2B Adwords advertisers have to add qualification to the mix. For example: If you’re selling commercial coffee grinders to coffee shops, you sure as heck don’t want to pay Google for clicks from people buying personal coffee grinders for their home kitchens.
How do you ensure customer intent and qualification? Choose your keywords carefully.
How to choose keywords that work for B2B
As shown in the above examples, it’s all about separating signal from noise in your key terms. You have to pick keywords where a high percentage of searchers are key decision makers and stakeholders, and a low percentage of searchers are consumers using similar terms.
Match Type
There’s three main keyword match types in Adwords:
Broad Match — Google serves ads to anyone searching for search queries similar to your keyword.
Phrase Match — Google serves ads to anyone whose search query contains the phrase you choose exactly.
Exact Match — Google serves ads only when the search query is exactly your key terms.
There’s a few other query types (Like Broad Match Modified, etc.) but this is the basics. Broad match usually gets you too many non-B2B clickers, and exact match often doesn’t get enough volume. Phrase match tends to work best for B2B to get the right mix of specificity and volume, but all three types have their uses.
With that in mind, there’s three common categories of keywords that fit these criteria and work for B2B:
Terms of Art
Terms of Art are phrases that only people in certain professional contexts use. These can be great for B2B, because you know anyone searching for them is likely in your target audience.
Some examples:
“SMB” is a term of art for Small and Medium Businesses. Small business owners would rarely search for themselves as “SMB”s. People targeting SMBs, like list brokers or other B2B tool companies, would use that term in searches.
Say you build a complex form builder for bigger companies. A term like “Collect Customer Information” wouldn’t be good in search, because it could be used by a really broad range of people, like someone who wanted a form for their personal website. “Collect First-Party Data” is better, because it’s likely only to be searched by people working at larger companies.
A company working in the real-time operations space could use phrases like “Incident Management”, “Continuous Delivery”, and “On Call Rotation”.
Every industry has many examples — you just have to find the ones for yours.
Specific Technical Use Cases
You can often get pretty far in B2B paid search by just covering keywords of specific B2B use cases that your product or service specifically solves.
There are thousands of examples, but below are some common formats with specifics replaced with generic words:
“Widget monitoring app”
“New Technology X Integration”
“Specific Industry Subset Technology Tool”
Competitor Bidding
You can always bid on your competitor’s brand names, and they probably bid on you. Anyone searching for your direct competitors can probably use your product as well.
Negative Keywords
Negative keywords lets you exclude searchers who use terms that don’t relate to your product. It’s easy to see why this would be helpful for B2B.
Example: If you’re selling commercial bakery ovens and using Broad Match keywords like “bakery ovens” to find searchers, you might want to add “Home”, “Residential”, and “EZ Bake” to your negative keyword list. This will filter out home buyers.
Every week you can improve your negative list by using the data Google provides on the search queries your ads were shown for.
Should you use demographic data?
Advanced AdWords users know that Google lets you filter searches by the searcher’s age, income, interests, etc. However, this usually doesn’t really help in B2B, since Google’s data is mostly not good enough.
Some demographic data that can actually affect results in my experience is age, if your target customer trends older or younger, and geography, if that matters for your business.
How to make winning SEM ads for B2B
There’s a lot of guides out there to make effective Adwords ads, so I won’t into general ad tactics here. The biggest difference for B2B ads is qualification.
If it’s possible for non-target searchers to use the search terms you’re using, make sure to make your ad title explicitly qualify users.
Example:
Imagine you’re selling a software for preschools or other child care centers. A lot of the searchers that child care center operators use will also be used by parents, who won’t qualify for your products. You’re targeting the keyword, “Preschool Software”.
Bad headline: “Preschool Made Easy” — Any parents that happen to be searching for personal software, like at-home preschool learning videos, will click this.
Okay headline: “Preschool Software” — Better, but you still are going to get some bad clicks.
Good headline: “Preschool Management Software” — Management is a boring word — perfect!
Optimizing for Conversion
In general, if you’re working with an ad tool that has algorithmic targeting, its better to optimize towards the conversion you want. Modern algorithms are *really* good at finding more of the same kinds of people for you.
In B2B marketing on AdWords, its often a harder decision because your campaigns are split between many keywords, each of which may have different user behavior.
Rule of thumb: If a campaign has 30+ conversions per week, definitely optimize for conversion. Optimize for the furthest down conversion in your funnel that has that many conversion per week.
If your campaign has less than 30 conversions per week, test both bid per conversion and bid per click. I’ve seen both work at this scale.
Go Scale Your B2B Company
That does it for the basics of running effective campaigns to acquire business decision makers with AdWords.
Test keywords that fit your specific B2B audience’s intent
Make ads that appeal to your specific customer.
There’s quite a bit more to the whole funnel — your email nurture, sales follow-up, etc. — but this will help jumpstart the top of your funnel with Google ads.