If you're a business-to-business (B2B) company, you've probably asked this question: how can I use Google Ads for my campaigns?

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You are certainly not the only one asking it. While the Google Ads interface is used for all types of targets, targeting professionals can be more complicated than targeting individual consumers.

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Indeed, B2B targets are less prevalent than advertisers, making the environment particularly competitive, especially due to a massive positioning of advertisers on the same queries. This article aims to give you keys to launch your Google Ads campaigns in a B2B context.

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Why is it interesting to be on Google Ads in B2B?

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Most of the time, every B2B purchase stems from an often lengthy consideration because the amounts invested are not negligible. Therefore, a Google search usually precedes any purchase or contract signing. It will then be a matter of price comparison, quality verification, seeking reviews, or asking for recommendations. It is therefore crucial to be present on the search engine to generate leads.

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The particularities of B2B

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Before delving into the subject, let's highlight some specificities of B2B that are good to keep in mind when defining your strategy and creating campaigns on Google Ads.

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Long sales cycles

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While in some B2B businesses, sales cycles resemble those of business-to-consumer (B2C), especially for small purchase amounts, some companies have particularly long cycles. The average duration of a sales cycle may vary from one industry to another but can last up to a year for some businesses.

Strong competition
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In B2B, keyword positioning is highly competitive, and the CPC (cost per click) is higher than in B2C (of course, with variations depending on industries). On top of that, there's a less rich B2B term library than in B2C.

Complexity
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B2B businesses often offer products or services that are more complex than in B2C. This characteristic can make targeting, creating a clear value proposition, or even SEO more challenging than in B2C.

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Keyword overlap

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Occasionally, the chosen keyword may be used both in B2B and B2C. In these circumstances, the competition is even stronger.

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We don't want to scare you, but we prefer to warn you so that you have all the elements in mind before embarking on the creation of your campaign.
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<h2 style="color: #5E469A; font-size: 2.22em; font-weight: 600; font-family: 'Cabin', sans-serif;">CREATING YOUR CAMPAIGN</h2>

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The structure

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To design your Google campaign, you need to take into account the organization of the platform. At the campaign level, define the type of campaign (Search, Display, YouTube, etc.), your objective, and the budget you want to allocate. In a B2B context, we recommend selecting the "Prospects" objective, which aims primarily to generate new qualified leads and encourage them to take action. At the Ad Group level, you define your audiences. It is also here that you can choose keyword groups, themes, and other elements to clearly define your targets. Finally, the structure of the ads includes the entire creative dimension: texts, titles, visuals, videos, etc.
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We strongly recommend, for each ad group, choosing very specific angles to explore (price, production mode, added value, etc.). At Spaag, in a Test & Learn approach, we always produce a minimum of three ad groups per campaign by diversifying approaches.

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The creative aspect

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An essential point in creating your campaigns on Google Ads is their creative dimension which includes text, copywriting, and design. Not surprisingly, the two aspects complement each other to reach your prospects. In B2B, beyond the messages and images of your ads, it is essential to associate them with a qualitative landing page. The prospect must understand your value proposition in a few seconds. But above all, the landing page must be coherent with the selected ad group. It should be simple and include the promise of the product or service in question. Limit the elements that can distract the visitor by removing unnecessary menus, pop-ups, and other distracting elements.

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Attention: the classic mistake is to systematically propose the same landing page, so do not hesitate to decline your landing pages according to the targets and filters chosen. The password is one landing page for one message.

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Keyword selection

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To help you choose keywords, Google provides a Keyword Planner. This tool allows you to discover new potential keywords and visualize their impression volumes and competition.

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To limit unqualified clicks, it is very important to be as specific as possible in choosing your keywords and keyword groups.
Our tip: also think about adding negative keywords to your campaigns. These are keywords that prevent ads from appearing when they appear in a query. This increases the chances of generating qualified leads.

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The audience

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Once you have the structure, the creatives, and the keywords, all you have to do is define your audience. To define your audiences when creating a Google campaign, keep your Personas in mind. If you haven't already done so, you will need to develop a profile for each of the different targets that interact with your business.

On Google Ads, you can not only define audiences based on demographic data and interests, but you can also choose from a catalog of audiences created by Google. Within this catalog, there are affinity audiences that target individuals based on their habits, interests, and passions, and market audiences that target individuals based on their purchase intentions.

It is also possible to select a target based on themes (also defined by Google), locations, or keywords. You can define similar audiences, which target a similar audience to visitors to pages and sites that interest you. Try to vary the types of targeting for each of your personas.

For "push" formats (Display and Video), always keep your funnel in mind and take into account the engagement level of your audiences to define your ads.

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Strategic Elements

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Personalisation

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For each audience, you must design a personalised message based on the ad, the characteristics of the audience and its position in your acquisition funnel. The more specific your advertising approach, the greater your performance in terms of lead generation will be.

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Retargeting

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The Google Ads network offers sufficiently precise retargeting options to allow you to maintain privileged and relevant contact with your prospects. The most common retargeting strategy is to re-target visitors to your website. We particularly recommend varying your retargeting ads based on the pages visited. For example, introduce a price in your ads to visitors who have visited your "Plans & Pricing" page.

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Again, since B2B sales cycles are generally long, do not hesitate to integrate a nurturing dimension into your retargeting. Offer your prospects high-quality content for free to position yourself in their minds as an expert in your field and gain their trust.

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Le multipoint de contact

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In B2B, it is essential to create a relationship with each prospect over the medium to long term, especially for the longest sales cycles. The keystone of a B2B acquisition strategy is the multipoint of contact. The goal is to create an entire conversion ecosystem by ensuring that your target hears about your business from different sources or in several ways. For example, if an individual clicks on one of your ads on Google, they should receive an email with a suggested article, then an ad should appear later on Facebook, etc. It is also essential to clearly identify where each of your prospects comes from to create an ecosystem consistent with their stage of advancement in your funnel.

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Personalisation and retargeting are part of this multipoint contact approach.

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Tracking Your Leads

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Adopting a multipoint contact strategy can make it difficult to identify and trace the origin of a lead or even calculate your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost).

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To remedy this, you can use Google Analytics, for example, to centralise all the data from your advertising networks and redistribute it in your data conversion tools such as your CRM, CMS, or Analytics.
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You will thus have a multipoint contact attribution system that will allow you to:

• Automatically capture the source of all your conversions and leads using integrations
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• Instantly collect interactions from potential customers outside your advertising campaigns and identify their source
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• Directly access your attribution system on a single interface
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• Simply understand your conversion ecosystem and the different contact points of your best or least qualified leads
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Once you become familiar (or if you are already) with the Google console, you can create your Google Ads strategy by analysing your competitors.

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