At Clicteq we’ve previously worked with some of the worlds largest enterprise software companies and along the way we’ve developed several strategies for driving more leads in the sector.
Here are six of our best tips for generating high quality leads to build your pipeline and keep your inside sales team busy.
1. Link your CRM to your Google Ads campaigns and split out converters.
If you’re not doing already, make sure that you link your Google Ads account with your CRM system so that you can track what happens to leads when they are sent to your sales team.
Not all leads are created equal. Some keywords will generate high quality leads that convert into big deals and other keywords will generate poor quality leads that will just waste your sales team’s time.
In Google Ads I have found splitting out keywords that have converted into revenue offline into their own campaigns to be very effective at improving performance.
It allows you to easily allocate the bulk of your budget to them first as well as bidding more aggressively, resulting in an increase in revenue from Google Ads.
2. Competitor bidding isn’t dead. In fact, it’s one of the most effective strategies
I have consistently seen some of the best quality leads come from competitor bidding in the enterprise software space, across several different verticals.
Bidding on your competitors brand terms is not without its pitfalls thought. So you may want to balance up the pros and cons of this strategy for yourself.
3. Single keywords ad groups, or SKAG for short, is the most effective search tactic
Most B2B advertisers that we come across at Clicteq have several keywords per ad group, costing them thousands of pounds a month in inefficiencies.
The problem with having several keywords per ad group is that you have to write more generic ads that are relevant to all of the keywords in the ad group.
Generic ads results in lower CTR = lower Quality Score = higher CPC = higher cost per lead.
Instead you should use single keyword ad groups that allow you to create super specific ad copy for each keyword.
The diagram above (an example for a cybersecurity company) shows you how the single keyword ad group structure works. As there is only one keyword per ad group you know exactly what you’re going to appear for.
You then put the keyword within the headline of your ad copy making the ads appear highly relevant to what people are searching for.
SKAG leads to higher CTR = higher Quality Score = lower CPCs = lower CPA.
4. Driving traffic to the Gartner MQ report positions yourself effectively and generates high quality leads
The Gartner Magic Quadrant reports are well respected and can be a great way to position yourself as a leader in the field in the eyes of purchasing managers. This is particularly true if Gartner ranks you higher than some of your close competitors.
I would recommend creating a whitepaper and pushing all Gartner related traffic to it to capture relevant leads.
Similar to competitor terms, the cost associated with appearing for these terms is high, as the ad space for these keywords is highly sought-after. It’s imperative that you allocate an appropriate amount of budget to this channel.
This also gives you the opportunity to create audiences of people who have visited the report on your site and remarketing to them through RLSA and display, to drive users down the purchasing funnel.
Finally you can use your ranking from the report in all of your ad copy and creative across other campaign to instill trust and differentiate your proposition.
5. Target users through competitor custom intent audiences
When promoting your top-of-funnel content such as whitepapers and webinars, competitor targeting works well with custom intent audiences.
This allows you to target people who are interested in your competitors and who Google deems to be in-market to buy based on their Google search history.
Custom intent audiences mean you can place display ads in front of a target audience who are both relevant and lower along the sales journey.
6. Use position-based attribution to determine the impact of top-of-funnel ads on your bottom of funnel activity
With any enterprise sale with a long sales cycle, the vast majority of your audience are likely to not be ready to purchase right now and will take several “touches” before they are ready to make a purchase.
If you’re running a range of different offers to people at different stages of the sales cycle (display for top of funnel users and then search activity to bottom of funnel users) then you will want to use a position-based model correctly.
Most advertisers still use last-click attribution. The problem with that is that it doesn’t give any credit to your top-of-funnel display activity which then appears to be performing poorly. Consequently you may pause it, and suddenly your other campaigns aren’t performing as well as before.
Using position based attribution gives 20% of credit to the first touch, 20% to the last touch, with the rest evenly distributed between the touches in the middle.
Conclusions
You can’t manage what you can’t measure so ensure you link Google ads and your CRM together to get a clear picture of the full sales cycle.
Targeting your competitors’ users works really well so why not try testing bidding on their brand terms and targeting their URLs with custom audiences. But make sure to use position based attribution if you do to measure the impact of your top-of-funnel activity on your bottom-of-funnel activity.
Single keyword ad groups are still working really well in 2019, so if you’ve got multiple keyword ad groups, try testing the SKAG structure.
Finally if you rank well in the Gartner report use it as a lead magnet and use your rank within your ad copy to build trust with searchers.
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