Overview:

The rules of game of generating leads through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertisement are radically different for Business-to-Business (B2B) than they are for Business to Consumer (B2C).

The key objectives of using online marketing, like Online media and PPC campaigns for B2B businesses are - to extend their reach, and to reduce the investment on acquiring leads by substituting high-cost sales resources with online media. But, the lack of real time interaction between clients and sales people at the beginning of the process puts an additional responsibility on marketers - to develop an in-depth understanding of customer behavior, and to design the right message to address customer requirements at all stages of the buying process.

In the B2B universe, whether the client is an early Startup, SMB or a large Corporation, the decision-making process is considerably more methodical than in retail businesses, the impulsive kick has the least contribution. Moreover, in most cases the buying decision involves multiple people in the organization who can be broadly categorized as either the decision makers or influencers.  It is crucial that the online presence is designed to address both, the influencers as well as the decision makers through effective messaging.

• Ensure that customers' perception of your value proposition(s) is what you want it to be: The online world provides extremely limited time and mind share for you to address your customer’s concerns. Your landing pages need to directly address your customers’ key concerns. If you are experiencing a high bounce rate, low conversion rate or the visitors are not taking the desired actions; the chances are that there is a problem with your marketing message. You need to talk to customers, prospects and suspects to reconfirm whether you really understand how customers perceive the value of the product/service your organization offers. Make sure you are empirically testing multiple messages to come up with the right communication.
  
  
• Customer segmentation is not the same as keyword segmentation: You might have done a good amount of research in understanding various segments of your target customers and in designing the distinct landing pages for various customer segments. But that's not enough. You need to drive the right set of customers to the right landing page. More often it might be the case that the customers of different segment, whom you want to communicate different message, use the same keywords for searching your products. To address this issue, group the keywords independently based on the intent of the searchers and than map the ad groups to various customer segments. In case the same ad group maps to multiple customer segments, you might have to design a common landing page, which can direct the customers to right place.
  
  
• More visitors do not guarantee more business: It is very critical to look at the holistic sales cycle to impact the business results. A myopic view might help you in improving a portion of the sales cycle, but it will not give you the desired business results. Long tail keywords and lateral keyword themes make sense only if they are generating relevant traffic. Moreover at times just to impact the CTR (Click-through-Rate) of the ads, companies design ads that communicate more than what the business has to offer. That not only results into irrelevant visitors on the landing pages but also distorts the ad message communication for the relevant prospects. Search Marketing companies are search specialist; they know how to generate more traffic. But doing that without incorporating the domain knowledge in creating an appropriate conversion path from search to leads does not produce desired results.
  
  
• Only talking to the Decision Makers will not work: Most of the Search Marketers, who have produced great success for the retail businesses where the visitor is the decision maker and the marketers can harvest the impulsive buying, try to use the same techniques for B2B environment. Unfortunately, the desperation to generate more leads using these techniques takes away the discipline of addressing concerns of all the steps involved in business-to-business sales cycle. If you are not providing the information required by influencers, the probability of your business getting listed in the decision maker's options is very less. It usually results in increasing the number of irrelevant leads. On the other hand, it may negatively impact the quality and quantity of relevant leads significantly.
  
  
• Focus on quality rather than quantity in lead generation: If your focus remains on quantity, you would probably never take steps, which might result into decrease in number of leads but increase the probability of receiving high potential leads. Therefore number game does not work for B2B Lead generation. If you outsource your PPC campaign management to search engine marketing company, whose compensation is purely based on the amount of media spend or number of leads generated, they would inherently never support any step in reducing leads even if it means increase in the quality of leads.