5 Easy Ways to Maximize Your B2B's PPC Budget

When it comes to PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, you’re going to hear the same old adage repeated everywhere, “You have to spend money to make money.” While that’s true, it’s still important to be smart with how you spend it, especially since it’s easy to run through your PPC budget. Click costs are high, but there are several things you can do to ensure you’re getting the best possible return on your PPC costs.

1. Bid on Brand

Bidding on brand is essentially bidding on terms that are part of your brand, like your business name. This can be beneficial for numerous reasons:

• It’s highly relevant to your business, duh, it is your business
• People searching for your brand are already aware of your brand and closer to the decision stage (i.e., likely to convert)
• Branded terms are usually inexpensive
• You don’t want your competitors to bid on them
• If your business is like many B2Bs and your product/service/industry is in your company name, it will show up in results for people searching for what you do

2. Optimize Deployment

Make sure your ads are optimized for location, dates, and time of day that generate the most qualified leads. Showing your ads when your ideal customers won’t see them isn’t generating you many qualified leads or conversions, so focus your efforts only on those locations and times that demonstrate high clickthrough and conversion rates. This is particularly relevant for B2Bs; with consumer products, people may be searching keywords at all times, but with B2B products and services, your customers are likely performing their searches during business hours--target your ads for those times.

3. Use Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are keywords for which your ad won’t show. Using negative keywords can eliminate irrelevant and unqualified clicks from visitors who aren’t actually searching for your product or service, or aren’t ready to convert. This can reduce your average cost-per-click and increase your clickthrough rate.

4. Bid on Long Tail Keywords

There is typically less competition, and therefore lower cost for long tail keywords. Yes, the search volume for these more specific keywords will be lower than a more general keyword, but the specificity will attract more qualified searchers.

5. Bid on Bottom of the Funnel Keywords

If you want to maximize conversions and sales that result from your PPC activities, bid on keywords that are targeting prospects who are already at the bottom of the marketing funnel, in the decision stage. These searchers are closer to making a purchase than those searching for general awareness keywords.

If you implement these strategies and you’re smart with your PPC budget, the high cost of clicks won’t ruin your ROI, but will instead, boost it. If you’re interested in maximizing your ROI when it comes to PPC and paid search, or are interested in developing your digital marketing strategy further, be sure to get in touch.