In today’s ever-changing market, B2B companies are constantly seeking innovative ways to increase brand awareness, reach their target audience, generate leads, and drive revenue. While B2B marketing can be challenging, paid media can be one of the most powerful weapons in the B2B marketer’s arsenal. Paid advertising not only offers precision targeting to find the right audience but highly measurable results to quantify those efforts.
But how exactly do you leverage the power of paid media for B2B success? In this post, we’ll explore the strategies and tactics that can help your business thrive in the digital age.
Case Study: Setting G&W Electric Up for B2B Success
In the constantly changing landscape of B2B marketing, real-world success stories serve as beacons of inspiration and guidance. Let’s use a compelling case study to unveil the secrets behind a remarkable B2B success story. Read on to discover how G&W Electric, with the help of Unfair Advantage, formulated an effective paid media strategy and transformed their B2B marketing efforts.
BackgroundG&W Electric is a B2B client offering innovative power system solutions and products worldwide to utility companies as well as commercial and industrial companies. Having both a niche offering and a long sales cycle they came to us needing more effective ways to reach their audience and be able to track their customer journey through multiple touch points.
Strategy Unveiled
When G&W Electric came to Unfair Advantage over two years ago, their primary goal was simple: Drive lead generation at efficient cost levels. Even though they had been working in Google Ads, the account was not reaching these goals. Since they recognized Google’s immense reach and understood there was plenty of room to expand, they brought in Unfair Advantage. Our first step was to analyze their account and we then presented them with a total account structure overhaul.
Our strategy was simple: expand G&W Electric’s presence on the platform efficiently and effectively in order for them to achieve their marketing goals.
Google Expansion
We always start with research. The Unfair Advantage team conducted extensive research to identify G&W’s ideal B2B audience utilizing the data collected by historical performance in Google Ads as well as within Google Analytics. This process helps us determine not only audience targeting but the keywords we should be targeting to find these prospective customers. Some questions we ask during this process for any client include:
What does this customer look like?
Geographically and demographically
How do they search for what they need?
Do they know what they need?
What time of day are people most likely to convert?
We quickly realized G&W had been just barely scratching the surface and from our research we generated a keyword list of terms used across the purchasing funnel by G&W clients and prospects. We included a mixture of both brand and “generic” keywords to capture users throughout the buying funnel.
Brand keywords were utilized to capture users already familiar with the G&W Electric brand and their product offering. These users were likely further down the purchasing funnel.
Generic keywords were utilized to capture users who might not be familiar with the G&W Electric brand and are just starting their research journey. These were highly relevant industry-related keywords that would capture users looking for relevant solutions/products that G&W offered.
We also wanted to ensure our keyword strategy was not too broad. We had to think critically on how to anchor our strategy to our audience and industry. For example, keywords like “electrical equipment,” while highly related to G&W Electric, in the world of Google search queries could easily match to users searching for things like household appliances, motors, HVAC systems, etc…
The new campaigns were designed to create a more well-rounded, full funnel approach, increasing visibility and driving more traffic to the G&W Electric site.
Tracking and Analytics
Before we launched the new campaigns, we ensured tracking and conversion reporting was set up properly, one of the most crucial steps in paid media. When we first got the account, Google was primarily optimizing off a secondary conversion action, resource downloads. While resource downloads are important and can drive results, not all the G&W Electric downloads were gated (meaning they did not ask for user information). Driving traffic to pages that do not capture user information is a missed opportunity for further remarketing efforts (users who filled out a form but did not convert further) as well as for the sales team to contact those interested users to further drive them down the conversion funnel. These types of leads also typically live in the top of the conversion funnel.
We ensured all primary conversion actions were added to the account for proper tracking as well as made updates to landing page targets by ensuring all users were driven to “money pages.” Money pages refer to a page where a form fill exists or there is another opportunity for the client to “make money.” Adding high value conversion actions to the account is also important when thinking about Google’s optimization algorithm. We want to ensure Google recognizes the priority order of conversions and optimizes towards high-value form fills submissions over users who just download a resource and are never seen again.
The Result
After rebuilding the Google account structure, we then expanded reach and targeting out to a full funnel approach. Once all the pieces were in place, we saw results quickly. With proactive account management, regular performance monitoring, and continuous optimizations, our expansion efforts resulted in an 11,800% increase (not a typo) in primary lead volume year-over-year, from 2 leads generated in 2021 by paid media efforts to 238 leads. Additionally, we saw cost per lead decrease from $2000 to $73, making the expansion efforts highly cost-efficient.
G&W Electric’s paid media expansion serves as a testament to the potential of paid media to generate results for B2B companies when executed with precision and purpose.
Wondering if having an Unfair Advantage would help you achieve your business goals? Contact us today about getting a free digital marketing audit!
In addition to learning more about our paid media services which can help your business grow, check out another B2B paid media success story, read a B2C paid media success story, or look at this case study on using paid social for B2B success!
