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Strategic creative
The B2B industry isn’t known for its earth-shattering creative. However, strategic creative can greatly improve performance with the right users.
Use creative as a qualifying lever.
If you target broadly, use the creative to discuss your desired audience. (Think “enterprise companies” or technical language that dissuades beginners from clicking.)
Expect CTR on these ads to be low.
If you target narrowly, with tight niches, make your messaging accessible and CTR-friendly.
Take, for example, this ad for Rippling, which uses a top-line message with a reward attached.
Last, beware of popular or trendy topics (as I write this, I’m thinking of generative AI).
Unless you have more lead qualifiers in your targeting or creative, popular topics can get you lots of clicks from everywhere. But this can junk up your numbers and your CRM.
I’ll end this section by addressing a question frequently asked by our clients:
Should you use a form that forces the user to submit a company email address?
My answer is that it is a good idea to test.
On one hand, business emails are worth a lot more than personal emails.
On the other, we’ve seen decent enough performance from non-forced emails to say that they can be worth the increased CVR.
If you have a sales team ready to work leads, put them to use – just make sure they’re on the same page.
(One way around this is to use “enter business email” in the form field but accept all emails anyway – it will still get you a higher proportion of work emails.)
Dig deeper: Google Ads for lead gen: 9 tips to scale low-spending campaigns
Back-end data integration
The idea behind back-end data integration is to train platform bidding algorithms to find the users whose names most resemble the most valuable ones in your CRM.
You will get fewer conversions using this method (which is an expectation you’ll have to set with your clients and/or managers), but the leads will be of higher quality and carry greater intent.
Here’s a recent example from our client portfolio:
We helped a client bring in leads reporting a CRM-matched account later as a primary conversion.
Since optimizing toward matched account leads, we’ve seen a 30% improvement in the proportion of high-quality leads.
Leads will get more expensive using this approach, but the cost per opportunity should decrease.
Note: It’s important to keep feeding more and richer data as you find new metrics that are more predictive of revenue.
Another tactic is to get advanced and use weighted revenue to tie values to funnel events – the lower the engagement in the funnel, the more value it carries.
The caveat is that you need enough data density to use the weights.
Go with the lowest-funnel event with enough data to be useful in training the algorithm (e.g., SQLs if you don’t have enough opportunities).
It’s a starting point.
You’ll have to optimize from there as you measure and the data comes into your CRM.
Dig deeper: Lead gen advertising in the automation era: How any brand can succeed
When you combine all of those elements – basic setup, channel fluency, strategic creative and data integration – together, you can drive award-winning results.
Dig deeper: Lead gen vs. ecommerce: How to tailor your PPC strategies for success
Watch: How to improve PPC lead quality for B2B campaigns
Here’s my full presentation from SMX Next.
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