10 paid ad tactics that always work in B2B
Paid ads can be both the holy grail and poisoned chalice for the B2B marketer. They’re the easiest way to get in front of your audience, especially when your brand’s not well known, but equally the easiest way to waste money.
It’s a difficult balance, especially when you add ever-changing buying habits to the mix.
So just how do you get paid ads right in B2B?
Silvio Perez, founder of AdConversion, recently joined Dreamdata’s Steffen Hedebrandt to offer 10 paid ad tactics that always work in B2B. (See Sylvio’s bio)
In this post, I’m digging into these 10 paid ad tactics:
(PS: If you don’t have time to read this article. No problem! Check out this brief and awesome summary)
The best 10 paid ad tactics for your B2B business: the list
When Silvio put himself up to the task of listing 10 paid ad tactics that always work, he had to overcome the obvious challenge of making something that’s universally applicable.
And we all know that universality is a pretty high bar to set in marketing, after all, every business faces uncompromisingly unique challenges.
Nevertheless, these 10 tactics have been framed in such a way that they can be applied to unique business outputs.
So without further ado, let’s dive in.
1. (Re)focus your targeting on your best converting segments
One of the first exercises you have to do is “double check your targeting and make sure that you're putting dollars on your best-performing audiences”.
By doing so, you eliminate wasted valuable dollars on audiences that won’t convert.
Silvio described a recent success case where one of his clients cut 60% of their budget yet generated three times as much pipeline over the month!
How did they manage this? By refocusing on their best-converting audience segments.
In theory, your best-converting audience should be your ideal customer profile (ICP).
But what if your best-performing segment isn’t your ICP?
What if your best-performing segment is not your ICP?
Well, the key here is ‘best-performing’.
Your ICP should be, by definition, be the
Silvio put a practical example to explain it:
“Let's say we're going after people in the marketing space. We're going after our ideal customer profile is people who are head of demand gen, you know senior marketing managers etc.
But within that universe maybe we see people in marketing operations or product marketing that are engaging the best. But they're not necessarily our best profile fit.
That's still related to our overall you know universe that we want to start targeting a little bit, so that we get more of our ads in front of the people that we do want to get in front of”.
Also, it’s important that when you are thinking about your target audience, you should think about which target you want to exclude. In Silvio’s words, “your angel persona or your devil persona” so that it will fit more closely with your ICP.
2. Use ad extensions to increase CTR %
Let’s face it, SIZE MATTERS.
By this I mean the size of your social media ads matters...
At least it does if you want to increase your CTR.
Social ads
Silvio has tested and retested the dimensions for his ads, and has found that 1200x1200 are the ideal dimensions for social.
1200x1200 “is longer and it takes up more space on the news feed so the bigger your ad the greater propensity for it to be clicked.”
With one notable exception: LinkedIn Ads for mobile.
For mobile-specific campaigns (see tactic 4. below) he recommends 628 by 1200 because “it's freaking massive. It just takes up almost like the entire screen”.
Paid ads
However, on paid search, you have to make sure that you are using ad extensions because they will help you to have a higher clik-through rate and consequently a better ad rank.
It’s super easy to say it, but how can I do it?
Silvio recommends three different types of ad extensions:
site link extensions
image extensions
structured snippet extensions
But especially site links, as “it adds four relevant links you're getting your ad and it just makes it bigger.”
3. Create ads that fit the channel and placement
Know your channels. Know your ad placements.
To maximise the success of your ads, you need to be acutely aware of where these are appearing to potential buyers. Context and placement matter.
Silvio sees too many campaigns fail because the ads don’t fit the channel and placement.
User behaviour and experience vary hugely depending on the channel. That’s why it’s vital to keep your ads unique to that channel and placement.
For some channels, think Google Ads, standing out from the crowd is crucial. For others, like Social ads, blending in sees much bigger success.
4. Separate desktop and mobile campaigns
In the same way as you need to adapt ad creatives to the right channel on the right device (tactic 2 above), you want to do the same when analysing performance.
“when it comes to B2B, on average I consistently see desktop outperforms Mobile sometimes as great as like 75% of conversions will come from desktop and then 25% for mobile”.
Precisely because desktop is doing better, you want to make sure that that device is getting more budget, “and that you’re maximizing your impression share on that campaign for that device versus mobile, especially if you notice the average cost per acquisition dramatically varies by device"
It is only by separating your desktop and mobile campaigns that you’ll be able to track and measure these metrics.
5. Schedule ads to serve weekdays and working hours
This is a tactic that deals with the efficiency side of things.
The idea is that you want to be reaching your target audience at the times when they are most likely to be searching for products or services like yours. In B2B, that’s weekdays during office hours.
“If you have budget restrictions, show your ads 5 days a week Monday to Friday. That will allow you to have a greater average daily spend and concentrate your efforts, right around the primer hours”
When people aren’t wearing their ‘job hats’, they’re less likely to be interested. So it’s not worth wasting valuable dollars during this time.
So when you create a Google Ad campaign exclude certain days or times if you don't want your ads to be shown during those periods.
6. Set up retargeting ads to drive brand trust
Retargeting always works, but a lot of people think that retargeting is a conversion-focused tactic.
While this is mostly true. Retargeting can also be a low-cost way to stay top-of-mind and build trust in your brand.
Silvio suggests thinking of retargeting like “a nurture mechanism similar to an email list” and if you do it in this way you can stay top of mind and create an omnipresence of your product.
7. Leverage first-party data for targeting/ exclusions
Ad platforms are “multi-billion dollar machines that are hyper-intelligent”. But, they also require “the right inputs in order to give you the right outputs”.
With third-party cookies now being sunset, feeding first-party data to the ad algorithms can go a huge way towards getting these hyper-intelligent machines to target the right audience.
Contact lists and exclusions are two really valuable features available to the B2B marketer - Offline conversions is a third, but we look at that in tactic 10 below.
By importing data on your target audience and excluding segments and accounts you don’t want to target, you empower the ads algorithm to target lookalike audiences.
Meaning, a much higher chance of conversion and all the benefits that come with that!
8. Connect ad spend to revenue
When it comes to measuring the success of campaigns (and channels), there is only one metric that really matters, revenue (and pipeline for B2B marketers, as Sales also plays a role…)
Silvio puts it more poetically, “you can have the best advertiser managing your campaigns, but if he doesn’t have the right visibility and reporting he’s going to make the wrong decisions.”
It’s only when connecting efforts to pipeline and revenue that you are able to analyse the CPA from an ad click, the ROI of your channels and the impact on MQLs, SQL, and New Business.
Or more simply, you can see which campaigns are driving actual business and which aren’t.
9. Use this 5-second test to improve your landing pages
You probably spend so much money on ads and you’re obsessed with their structure, objective, etc. But, you’ve probably forgotten about where you are sending people when they click on your ad: your landing page.
After all, you can have the best ads in the world, but if the goods are missing when the cl
Silvio offers a simple - but insanely useful - 5 second test to check whether your landing page is doing what it should be.
Imagine you’re somebody who lands on your landing page without scrolling down. In the first five seconds are they able to answer:
What do you do?
Why should they care?
What are the next steps?
10. Use Google Offline Conversions for ad channel for optimisation
Google Offline Conversions is the ultimate tool for B2B marketers to up their ads game.
Google allows marketers to feed pipeline conversion data back to Google Ads through Offline Conversions.
This helps B2B marketers measure the impact of their campaigns on down-funnel conversions. But most importantly, it enables B2B marketers to unlock the power of Google Smart Bidding by telling the Google Ads AI what high-quality leads look like.
As Silvio puts it:
“The reason why this is extremely important, just to go back to a point I made earlier, is you have these extremely intelligent machines that they know how to get in front of the right person.
If you give them the right signals they know how to find more of them they have so many different parameters in their machine-learning algorithms that they're looking at that we can't even fathom I can only imagine.
But it all depends on what are we feeding them right? Because if we're not giving them high-quality conversion data they can't make those inferences.
So setting up offline conversions is you want to make sure you're tying your CRM data back into the platform for optimisation and you're not relying on the pixel to do that for you it's extremely inaccurate.”
Silvio Perez bio:
Silvio Perez, founder of AD conversion, works with different B2B SAAS clients helping them manage and create their campaigns. As well, Silvio has a YouTube Channel with +50 video tutorials on all different topics around advertising and he wrote a book called “Google Ads Profits.”
