B2B Advertising Strategy For SMEs

[Intro]

 This is the B2B Performance Marketing Podcast by WebMarketer. Here to help you make the right moves with your B2B advertising. No spin, no smoke and mirrors, just honest insights from the advertising frontline.

Script:

Maelien:

We’re really passionate about helping small or underresourced B2B marketing teams.

So this podcast isn’t here to add more to your to-do list—it’s here to help you get more from what’s already on it.

Welcome back, I’m Maelien

Louis:

And I’m Louis

It’s time for your favourite word Maelie. Today we’re going to be talking about strategy.

Do you want to share a little bit about why strategy is such a bug bear for you?

Maelien:

Yeah, so, It’s not that I don’t like the word strategy, my issue’s more with how it’s used. 

And how it typically means something different to different people.

So when one person is talking about strategy, they’re probably thinking everyone is on board with what they are saying. 

But in reality, everyone else could be thinking about something different.

So, for me the issue with strategy is that there’s no default definition.

Louis:

Yeah, I get that.

To your point, I guess a good place to start is to give a bit of a definition.

Today B2B advertising strategy is going to mean the thinking behind your advertising.

So instead of just running ads, you’re carving out a specific approach – and the strategy is the rationale behind the what and the why.

And this applies if you’ve only just started advertising or if you’ve been doing it for years.

Just a note to let you know that this will be a 2 part series.

Today we’re going to be getting into a bit of groundwork and unpacking what strategy is and why it’s important.

And then in the next episode we’ll do an open book run through of our process to building strategies here at Web Marketer.

We’ve got a few case studies to talk through, where a strategy change has made a huge impact. But first let’s start with the what and the why.

Maelien:

For me, the best strategy is a simple one.

Really complicated strategies are often just a collection of tactics.

The strategy is the bit that sits at the top and ties everything together.

You’d use a strategy as a guide to decide which tactics to use and which ones to.

It’s not a 50 point checklist, it can be as simple as how you’re going to approach something and why.

There’s this LinkedIn post that Louis and I reference which was a brilliant rule of thumb for choosing the right channels.

We saw it ages ago, and I wish I could remember who posted it, so I could give them the credit.

It went something like this:

• If there’s existing demand, use search.
• If there’s no demand yet, use social.
• If you’ve got more money than time, go paid.
• If you’ve got more time than money, go organic.
  

Now obviously this won’t give you a fully fleshed out strategy, but it will definitely start you off in the right direction. 

You can assess this yourself by checking to see if there’s loads of relevant, high-intent searches.

If there is then start with search.

If people aren’t searching, then start with social.

Essentially, If there’s already demand you should lean into it and if there isn’t you have to generate it yourself.

We often talk about making sure you’re not running a hundred miles in the wrong direction.

So if you’re trying to make search work when no-one’s searching, for example, you could spend way too much time and money getting the wrong kind of traffic with nothing to show for it.

Louis:

Another key ingredient in an ads strategy is really leaning into your edge.

Too many businesses start with the audiences they can target and then move on to creating ads.

But actually the step before that is deciding who you want to speak to and what they care about – which determines what you’re going to say. 

Like we covered in the last episode where we talked about your promise.

• You might be the most competitively priced.
• The fastest to implement.
• You might have the biggest upside.
• You might be the most comprehensive.
• You might be a specialist in a specific niche where you can solve the problem better than generalists.

The funny thing is that each of these could be the edge for different businesses in the same industry.

Each one will speak to a different type of customer with different priorities, different challenges and different needs.

The most competitively price will likely get the most price sensitive customers enquiring.

The fastest to implement – the most impatient.

The biggest upside – the highest expectations.

Etc. etc. – you get the picture.

But as well as speaking to the right audience with your promise – there’s also solving the right problem through your strategy.

Whether that’s solving a problem for the business or for the customer.

Let’s run through a few examples.

We won’t name names and industries for now, but we’re looking forward to bringing guests on to share their own real-world case studies in the future.

Maelie did you want to kick us off with the first one?

Maelien:

Yeah, so one of our clients serviced a large geo that was mostly small towns.

Through conversations with the client, we learned that clients from the small towns preferred doing business with other local businesses.

So we came up with a way to position the client as a local business at scale – without having to create and maintain 20 different landing pages.

The strategy was to combine a bunch of dynamic features.

We used Dynamic text in the headlines and body copy on the landing pages and dynamic location insertion in the ad text for search ads.

We created ad groups for each town, and added a final URL suffix containing the town name for the landing page to call in.

That way when someone searched for “business type” in “town name”, the search ads would reflect the town name.

The landing page headline would also contain the town name – and so would the body copy.

So, one ad template and one landing page for 20 different towns. 

This small but powerful hyper-local strategy resulted in a 300% increase on the conversion rate.

Louis:

The next client was in a completely different industry – with a completely different challenge.

They were spending over £100 per lead when their target was below £75.

So they were looking for at least a 25% improvement in their cost per lead and they were in a hyper competitive industry where cost per clicks for the head terms (so the obvious keywords that everyone was bidding for) could be anything up to £15 / £20 each.

We quickly identified that in order to get the cost per lead down – we needed to avoid those head terms.

We started hunting for high intent long tail keywords (which are keywords that are 3 or more words long) and we found some absolute gold in their search console data.

Now, all credit to the client for the SEO work they’d already done to date here.

Because the first thing we found was a bunch of high impression, high-intent, low-ranking long tail keywords. 

And they were all questions that potential customers would ask during the buying process.

The second thing was that the client had already created pages to target these keywords organically.

And they’d also already created lead magnets – which were lead generation quizzes that answered the question people were searching for before presenting them with an online quote.

There wasn’t a lot of traffic to these pages organically, so the next step was an obvious one – scale it up using paid ads.

And that approach was a major contributor to getting their cost per lead right down to below £15 – when a lot of competitors were paying that much just for a click.

So sometimes, the perfect solution is already there – hiding in plain sight..

Maelien:

And the final case study is for a client that was doing free in-person assessments as a way to generate leads.

They’d found that these assessments closed to sale really well. Typically 1 in 3 people.

But, they struggled to get the right profile of lead.

The thing was that the client covered all of England and Wales, and they had a really specific criteria to qualify for their service

So sometimes the client found themselves travelling across the country, only to find that it was a wasted trip.

They’d tried asking for photos of the issue – which seemed like an obvious answer – but people just didn’t bother submitting them

But we knew we had to stick with the strategy of getting people to self-qualify.

If people were struggling to make the effort to go and take a quick picture, we knew we had to take the effort out of the equation.

The funny thing is here, the issue actually became the solution. Instead of them taking the photos – we would take the photos to them via an online quiz.

They would answer a series of questions, and choose options from a range of images. 

And at the end, they’d get a score for how likely they were to qualify for the service with a prompt to apply.

The idea was to take all of the effort out of the potential customers hands.

And it worked.

60% of people who took the quiz were qualified and went on to book an in-person assessment.

The close rate to sale stayed at 1 in 3 people. 

But, the biggest win here was that the number of wasted assessments came down to zero.

Louis:

So that gives you a few real-world examples of what we mean when we talk about having a strategy behind your ads.

The big takeaway is that the right strategy simplifies and guides your approach – and, most importantly, makes it more effective.

Whether your making your ads and landing page hyper-relevant to your audience, 

looking to carve out a viable approach in a competitive industry, 

looking to improve your lead quality – or any of a number of other different scenarios.

If you’ve found this interesting, in the next episode we’ll be giving you the tools to put this approach to work.

We’re going to run through exactly how we approach creating strategies for our clients as part of our ignition process here at Web Marketer.

So you can follow on and do the same for your own ad strategy.

Maelien:

If you found this useful, please leave us a review. Our goal is to remove the smoke and mirrors from the B2B advertising world, and reviews will really help us towards this.

And if you’ve got a burning question or are facing a challenge that you’d like us to explore, just let us know.

You can head to webmarketeruk.com/topic and fill in the form.

We really wanna make every episode as useful as possible, and we read every single message. 

Thanks for listening and catch you on the next episode.