Jesse Templeton

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Marketing seems simple. Do you have a great product or service? Great, go tell people about it.

But reaching potential customers is far from simple. And when your customers are other businesses, this adds another layer of complexity. Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is distinct from business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing. 

To reach decision-makers at other businesses online, is it better to use search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine marketing (SEM)? Well, to quote a famous marketing expert: ¿Porque no los dos?

Let’s look at how a B2B SEM campaign can augment your SEO efforts and generate the specific leads your organization covets.

What Is B2B Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?

B2B SEM is a digital marketing strategy based on paid advertising on search engines (Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc.) and social media (LinkedIn, Reddit, etc.). Successful B2B SEM efforts increase an organization’s visibility and generate leads by placing targeted ads for relevant keywords. These search engine ads appear above organic results to capture potential customers actively searching for business solutions, combining pay-per-click (PPC) with SEO for immediate and long-term results. 

SEM can be crucial to B2B marketing because purchasing cycles often start with online research, making it vital for connecting with businesses seeking solutions to their problems. 

SEM vs. SEO

What’s the difference between SEM and SEO? In short, SEM is paid; SEO is organic.

Search engine marketing involves paying for ads to appear on search engine results pages (SERPs). You can pay for a Google Ad or an ad on Bing, Ecosia or any other search engine. It’s perhaps the easier form of search marketing, but it also requires more investment. For paid search to succeed, it’s still necessary to find the specific keyword that will reach your target audience to attract qualified leads.

B2B search engine optimization provides another method of lead generation. Attracting organic traffic is often an integral part of any content marketing plan. B2B SEO doesn’t require any payment to place ads, but it still costs time, effort and perhaps money if you work with a digital marketing agency. An effective SEO strategy often requires keyword research, content creation, link building and technical SEO.

Key Elements of a B2B SEM Strategy (and How It Differs from B2C)

Achieving success with a B2B search engine marketing strategy can be tricky. This may seem unfair — if you’re paying for the ads, shouldn’t this guarantee results? Well, as everyone from your financial advisor to your palm reader will tell you, there are no guarantees.

However, with the right groundwork, you can craft a B2B SEM plan that not only boosts brand awareness and generates leads, but does so in a cost-effective manner.

PPC

Pay-per-click is a digital advertising model where you pay a fee each time a potential customer clicks on your ad. For a B2B SEM, the main platforms for pay-per-click (PPC) are Google and LinkedIn, though there are other potentially beneficial avenues, especially for targeting niche audiences.

An effective PPC campaign can capture high-intent buyers looking for specific solutions. The great thing about PPC is in its name: pay per click. If very few people click your ad, that’s a bummer, but it won’t be an expensive misstep. PPC also incentivizes both the business advertising and the platform hosting the ad to generate as many clicks as possible.

Copywriting

Copywriting is the art of persuasive content creation. I know this because I’m doing it right now. (Hello, how are you? Thanks for reading.)

For a B2B search engine marketing campaign, effective copywriting must address the specific pain points and business goals of your target audience. All good copywriters tailor their content to each client and their objectives, but B2B copy requires the right balance of emotional triggers with logic and data to build trust and encourage a click.

Campaign and Account Structure

You can do a little keyword research and guess at the best wording and placement for a Google ad – and you might succeed. Once or twice. But repeated success requires more planning and structure than that.

With an organized framework for your ads, grouped by themes like product lines, industries or intent levels, you have a process to guide your whole campaign. A clean structure leads to effective ad spend and increases the odds of the right person seeing the most relevant ad at the right time.

Bidding

Bidding is the process of setting the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for an ad placement. In B2B, a good bidding strategy should focus on quality over quantity. While B2C can benefit by simply reaching as many eyeballs as possible, B2B more often relies on ads reaching high-value decision-makers rather than casual browsers.

Landing Pages and Conversion Optimization

A landing page is a destination that displays product or service information, or content about your company (such as an “Our Story” page). PPC advertisements often link to landing pages, as opposed to blogs or “Contact Us” pages. 

A well-designed landing page often requires collaboration between copywriting and user experience professionals. The goal is conversion optimization: using the right layout, messaging and design to make it as easy as possible for a potential lead to take action. This could be contacting your company, arranging a demo, downloading a form or making a purchase.

Conversion Tracking

What happens after a customer clicks your ad? Well, they might contact you or buy something, or they might not. But how do you know? 

Conversion tracking provides the data and analytics that define the success or failure of your strategy. By carefully tracking the right metrics, you see exactly which ads are generating the desired return on investment (ROI).

A/B Testing

Once you have a conversion tracking methodology, you can test different ads to see how they work. A/B testing, or split testing, involves running two versions of an ad or landing page simultaneously to see which one performs better. This often works best by controlling variables and getting granular. By changing one aspect at a time — such as a headline or a button color — you can make data-driven decisions to improve your results.

How To Create an Effective B2B SEM Strategy 

Now you know all the pieces of the B2B search marketing puzzle. But how do you put them together?

Let’s look at some steps you can take to maximize your digital marketing efforts.

Map Keywords to the Business Buyer’s Journey

Whether it’s B2B SEO or SEM, the initial impulse is to find the keywords with the most traffic. While it’s necessary to at least consider these options, moving beyond high-volume terms is often the better play to capture the B2B buyer’s attention. Categorize your keyword strategy by intent, focusing on solution- product-aware queries, such as comparing “most important cloud security services” to “what is cloud security.”

Implement Precision Targeting

Consider integrating LinkedIn profile targeting with Google Ads or using IP-based exclusions to ensure you spend your ad budget on the specific industries, company sizes and job titles that fit your ideal customer profile.

Optimize for High-Value, Low-Friction Conversions

B2B leads rarely buy on the first click. Rather than taking a hard-sell approach, consider using your SEM to drive downloads of high-intent assets, such as white papers or ROI calculators. This can achieve more than pushing potential customers to “contact a sales rep” right away.

Align Ad Copy With B2B Roles

Write headlines that address the pain points of specific stakeholders. Who within these businesses is likely to contact you? And what problems are they trying to solve?

Finance cares about ROI, IT typically cares about integration and the C-suite might focus on scalability.

Deploy a Dedicated B2B Remarketing Funnel

Again, recognizing that business leads rarely make impulse purchases is key to effective B2B marketing. You can use remarketing lists for search ads to bid more aggressively on users who have already visited your pricing page or engaged with your case studies.

Measuring Success for B2B SEM

By this point, you know what it takes to make B2B search marketing successful. But is your paid search working? How can you find out?

Here are some tools and techniques you can use to measure the success of your SEM strategy:

  • Google Ads tracks direct campaign ROI. Monitor high-intent lead conversions and integrate offline conversion tracking to see which keywords eventually lead to revenue. And while Google Ads shows you if your marketing spend is efficient, Google Analytics shows if your website content is actually persuasive enough to compel a B2B buyer to act.
  • SEMRush measures your competitive share of voice and keyword gap, allowing you to see how your organic and paid visibility for industry-specific terms stacks up against your primary B2B competitors.
  • Keyword Tool IO helps you gauge your strategy’s reach by surfacing long-tail, autocomplete-driven search queries that specific B2B buyers might use.
  • Screaming Frog can verify the technical integrity of your SEM landing pages by auditing for broken links and slow load times that might be sabotaging your quality score and ad placement.
  • Crazy Egg measures the post-click user experience by using heatmaps and scrollmaps to identify where B2B prospects drop off on your landing pages, helping you optimize forms for better lead generation.

Generate the Leads You Need

Ultimately, B2B SEM is about precision. That can make it feel like a science — an (often) overwhelming process of fine-tuning ad placement, messaging and numerous other variables.

But there’s also room for creativity. As long as you can support your efforts with evidence, it can pay to be unorthodox sometimes. And if it ever feels like too much, there are always digital marketing agencies out there willing to help.