Looking for Advice on Optimizing B2B Digital Advertising Campaigns
September 04, 2024
by a searcher from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX, USA
Hi everyone,
I', reaching out to those of you who have hands-on experience managing their company's own digital advertising for B2B purposes. I'm not looking to hire an agency at this time, but would love to hear from individuals who have successfully learned and taken this initiative in-house across platforms like Google Ads, Linkedin, or any other platforms you've found helpful for B2B advertising.
I'm not starting from scratch and have the basics down (content creation, landing pages, etc.) My main interest is learning how to managing SEO, and paid ad spend across different campaigns to get the most out of various advertising algorithms. Specifically, I'd love recommendations for:
1. Practical guides on how to effectively manage and optimize spend
2. Courses of books that focus on techniques for B2B advertising and modern tools
If anyone has a method or resource that's helped them, I'd appreciate your input. Thanks in advance!
from University of Texas at Austin in Austin, TX, USA
2. Keyword research, kw (keyword) tracking, content planning - SEM Rush is a great tool with a ton of how to info guides. You can also audit your onpage.
3. Content creation for SEO - Never been easier than it is today. But that also levels the playing field. Think about families of kws and research prompting for GPT to have it write a page or post for you and then give it the human once over to check for hallucinations, or use SurferSEO.
4. AdWords - Tons to learn here and very easy fail to ROI. Tracking (see step 1) is crucial and then limit your budget to say $1k a month (depends on niche and competition) while you're testing and figuring things out. You can let google set up the ads for you, but you'll have to make some adjustments. They will try to push you to brad match which means lots of clicks, but not lots of good clicks. For learning, maybe start with the Hubspot Digital Marketing Strategy resources? They put out a lot of good overview content that will help know what to look for when/ if you decide to dig deeper. Lots of learning resources out there, but I don't have a great up to date recommendation.
That should get you started. Digital marketing is going through a massive AI disruption phase right now which is why you'll see a lot of earlier adoption of AI tools by marketers. Fun field to be playing in (especially if you happen to be in a niche with historically lower competition but you can utilize all the new tools).
Ask your question to chat GPT and tell it to function as the head of marketing for your company with some background about your business and (bonus) then tell it to ask you five questions before it responds to the prompt. Note: (shift + enter) is your friend when typing out long prompts. AI is awesome for generating ideas.
from University of British Columbia in Canada
I’ve tried all the key channels for B2B lead generation and consistently found that SEO / Google Ads generates the biggest returns (this is my expertise so I might be a bit biased). The challenge with SEO these days is the keyword search data is becoming less and less accurate. That’s why I general start by focusing on PPC and spending time understanding how prospect search for my offering and what keywords generate the best ROI. Once I have this data I use it to prioritize my SEO efforts. In general organic traffic is the highest quality traffic and generates best ROI.
For Google Ads – I would not rely on a Google Rep for help. I found that the majority of recommendations they provided were not aligned with my best interests. In the few instances where I implemented there recommendations I saw increase in my cost per click, higher cost per acquisition and an overall reduction in ROI. Much better to find someone who is more impartial.
For display advertising we used it to nurture those already engaged with our brand. Our LinkedIn campaigns would target existing prospects (uploaded list) and prospects that had engaged with our website (retargeting campaigns). I did test going after net new customers on LinkedIn but it was very expensive. We followed a similar approach with our Google display campaigns.
As for resources – IMO it is hard to find anything good unless you have a specific problem you are trying to solve. For me the most influential resource in my career was reading Brad Geddes book on Google Ads over 20 years ago: https://bgtheory.com/advanced-google-adwords-book/. Things have changed a lot since then but the fundamental principles are the same.
Hope this helps!