In previous articles on PPC audiences, I’ve talked about the importance of audiences, who is the audience, and audience segmentation. All are necessary when conceptualizing a PPC campaign that’s using audience targeting. But once you set up the campaign, what type of info really sells your PPC audience?

If you’re a B2C ecommerce advertiser, the answer is easy: give them a deal! Countless articles have been written about using special offers in remarketing to lure customers back to your site to make a purchase. Here are just a few offers you could try:

• Exclusive deals or offers for returning shoppers
• Free shipping
• Customer rewards
• BOGO – buy one, get one offers
• Free products with purchase

There are many more. It’s fairly easy to brainstorm ideas, figure out which ones make business sense, and test them with your audience.

But what about B2B lead generation advertisers?

As usual, B2B is tricky. Many advertisers are not selling a physical product, or if they are, it’s high-consideration and not going to be purchased online in an ecommerce fashion. Offers like free shipping and customer rewards don’t make sense. What sells the B2B audience, then?

Valuable information.

Offering a valuable piece of content is a common tactic for B2B – because it works. An in-depth white paper, ebook, or guide that talks about common customer problems and potential solutions is an effective way to generate leads. Gate the content behind a form, or use data connectors like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google forms to collect contact info. High-value content is a tried and true way to get leads that ultimately turn into sales.

Free trials.

If you’re selling software or SAAS products, free trials are highly effective in converting prospects to leads. Trials let potential customers try your product risk-free for a period of time, usually 14 to 30 days. The premise is that once they get used to using your software, they won’t want to stop, so they’ll buy it. I’ve personally become a customer of more than one product this way.

Personal attention.

Nowadays, with so many things being automated, a little personal attention from a real human goes a long way. Offering a free consultation, a conversation with a specialist, or even just an appointment with sales can be an effective way to get your foot in the door. We’ve had more than one client see success with using a “contact sales” or “free consult” offer, especially for high-consideration products or complicated services that require an individualized approach.

Price quotes.

Another simple, yet effective offer is to provide a price quote. B2B products and services often do not conform to a simple one-size-fits-all price. There are nuances, service levels, and add-ons that make it impossible to even put a pricing sheet on the company website. Using a form to give a price quote is a great way to not only get a lead, but to guide the prospect into the sales funnel.

Comparison to competitors.

If you’re the market leader, or if you have a feature that your competitors lack, using a landing page with a comparison grid is very persuasive.

Whether you choose to bid on competitor keywords or not, using a comparison grid helps show how you stack up, and convince a prospect to choose you over someone else. While a grid like this isn’t an offer per se, it’s a gateway to pique a user’s interest and convince them to provide their contact info to learn more. Try it on a landing page with an offer, as an added boost.

What about you? What type of info or offers have you tried that really sell your PPC audience? Share in the comments!

Related Posts:

• Top 5 Articles on PPC Audiences
• PPC Audiences: Audience Segmentation
• PPC Audiences: Who Is The Audience?
• The Importance of Audiences In PPC

I’ve been writing a lot about PPC audiences this year. PPC audiences have been the talk of marketers for a couple of years now, and with good reason. We used to have keywords, and paid social – and the two didn’t cross paths. Now, we have RLSA, remarketing, in-market audiences for search, and loads of other great ways to combine the intent of keyword search with the targeting of paid social. Here are 5 great articles from around the web on PPC audiences.

No, Paid Search Audiences Won’t Replace Keywords by Kirk Williams. A thought-provoking post about why keyword search is still important, even in the face of so many audience targeting options.

Why I like it: “Now, before we get into the throes of keyword philosophy, I’d like to reduce the number of angry comments this post receives by acknowledging a crucial point.” It’s vintage Kirk, and still tees up the premise of the article.

In-Market Audiences For Google Search Campaigns by Dan Roberts. An excellent overview of the recently-launched in-market audiences for Adwords.

Why I like it: The post lays out the details on how to use in-market segments for search – and then points out that, while this is a cool feature, it shifts the power from advertisers to Google. Right on.

PPC Audience Targeting From Google To Social by Alaina Thompson. A detailed post on branching out into paid social targeting, with a link to another detailed article on search audiences.

Why I like it: Alaina talks about why customer match is so powerful.

Podcast: Michelle Morgan, Negative Audiences and Audience Shaping, an interview of Michelle by JD Prater. OK, this isn’t technically a post, but podcasts are cool too. Michelle goes in-depth on negative audiences and why they’re so important.

Why I like it: It’s a podcast! With Michelle, who I’ve enjoyed watching her career take off over the past few years.

Getting Started with Audience Targeting in PPC by me. OK, I wrote this – but you should still read it! This post has a little bit of everything about audience targeting.

Why I like it: I wrote it! (Just kidding!) Unlike many how-to posts, this one talks about offers as well as choosing audiences.

PPC audience targeting is here to stay. Have you read any great posts about PPC audiences? Share in the comments!

 

Related Posts:

• What Type Of Info Really Sells Your PPC Audience?
• PPC Audiences: Audience Segmentation
• PPC Audiences: Who Is The Audience?
• The Importance of Audiences In PPC

Several weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of audiences in PPC. More than ever, audiences are becoming one of the main way we reach potential customers in PPC – as important as keywords. But who is the audience, exactly?

Audiences, Broadly Speaking

Broadly, your audience is whoever is buying your product. Large B2C retailers like Amazon probably don’t spend much time defining their audience – it’s anyone with a credit card, really.

But for most advertisers, it’s important to drill down a little deeper than that. For many consumer products, the audience is obvious. People buying diapers tend to be parents of babies. People buying guns tend to be male. There are always exceptions, but you can hit 80-90% of your audience by doing some simple targeting.

B2B Audiences Are Challenging

In B2B, audience targeting is a little more challenging. There are multiple stakeholders involved – product users, executive decision-makers, administrative assistants, purchasing departments, and more. How do you figure out who to target?

Verticals Dictate Audiences

In some ways, the audience depends on the vertical. If you’re selling software, the first person to target is the end user. Even if that person doesn’t make the final purchase decision, they’re going to be the one asking for the software. For example, I’d been looking for a solution to help with ad testing for years. When AdAlysis came out, I immediately started begging my boss to buy it. I was relentless – and it paid off. But I didn’t write the check – my boss did. If I were advertising for AdAlysis, I’d go after the PPC practitioners, not the vice presidents of search who likely aren’t actively managing campaigns.

For other verticals, targeting C-level executives makes sense. Let’s say you’re a medical equipment provider who’s developed a new piece of equipment that saves time and makes a more accurate diagnosis.  You could target the end users, but it may make sense to target the hospital CFO or the finance director, who’s looking for ways to make the hospital more efficient. End users may not be aware of the product, and may be happy with the way they’re currently doing things, but if you can convince the CFO, you’re likely to make a sale.

Business Size Does, Too

Business size plays a role, too. The larger the company you’re targeting, the harder it is to get through to C-level folks – they’re inundated with marketing messages already. You may be better off reaching their executive assistant, or going lower down the ladder to mid-level managers.

Understand that when you’re trying to reach large companies, you’ll have to get creative with your audience, and with your messaging as well, to break through the clutter.

And if you’re targeting small businesses, understand that employees wear many hats. The CFO is probably the entire accounting department. The web developer is probably the graphic designer, and maybe the software/tech person too. The owner may be the CMO, CFO, and CEO all at once. These are busy people, so if you can come to them with solutions to make their lives easier, you’ll get through the door more easily.

Personas Help

If you’re working with larger advertisers, they’ll often have a detailed understanding of their prospects, and may have personas. A persona is a representation of your audience segment. (BTW – this link has a great how-to on creating personas).

Here’s an example of a persona that gyro created:

Personas help define not only who your target audience is, but how to reach them. Ideas for paid social targeting practically jump off the page – age, education, gender, and other characteristics are listed right there. Pain points that could be used for search keywords or ad copy are also there: patient care quality, accountable care, etc. Personas give you a great start in identifying your audience.

Determining who is in the audience is the first step to successful audience targeting. What are some ways you define your audience? Share in the comments!

Related Posts:

• What Type Of Info Really Sells Your PPC Audience?
• Top 5 Articles on PPC Audiences
• PPC Audiences: Audience Segmentation
• The Importance of Audiences In PPC

Happy New Year to all my readers! Every year I do a reader poll to see what you want me to write about. This year, the topic with the most votes was audiences in PPC.

It seems like everyone is talking about audiences. In the annual “what’s next for search in 2017” posts, every single one included multiple mentions of audiences and their importance to PPC.

Take this quote from Brad Geddes in the adStage blog:

And this, from Marc Poirier on Search Engine Journal:

These and other predictions posts are worth a read – there’s great content beyond that of audiences. But the point is, audiences are here to stay, and they’re big.

Julie Friedman Bacchini wrote a great post earlier this week about the demise of keywords. While I don’t think keywords are going away any time soon, we are in for a different reality when it comes to search.

For one thing, social PPC is here to stay, and audience targeting is the focal point. It’s true that you can use keywords to target social ads, but keyword targeting alone is insufficient for social PPC success. You must layer audiences onto the mix.

Remarketing is here to stay too, and it’s a great example of using audiences in PPC. In fact, remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) is a match made in heaven of search intent and audience targeting combined.

Why are audiences so important in PPC? After all, in the early days, we didn’t think about audiences at all.

Audiences bring us back to the basics of marketing. Eons ago, in business school, I learned about the 4 P’s of marketing: people, place, price, and promotion. In search, the “people” piece was historically the least thought-about aspect. Do we really care who’s searching, as long as they click and convert?

Turns out, we do need to care. Search has evolved over the years: it’s become much more competitive and expensive, for one thing. Advertisers who were happy to pay for lots of non-converting traffic at $0.05 per click are probably not real happy about that traffic at $5 per click. Search had to evolve in order for advertisers to maintain profit. And that’s where audiences come in.

Over the next weeks and months, I’ll be writing more about audiences in PPC and the various ways they can be used to take your campaigns to the next level. I’ll talk about audiences in search, in paid social, and in remarketing. I’m hoping to get a few guest bloggers on board to offer their views on audiences in PPC. And of course, as always, I want to hear from you! Have audiences become super important for you in your PPC efforts, or are you just dipping your toes in? Share in the comments!

Related Posts:

• What Type Of Info Really Sells Your PPC Audience?
• Top 5 Articles on PPC Audiences
• PPC Audiences: Audience Segmentation
• PPC Audiences: Who Is The Audience?