B2B Small Businesses Lead Generation with Google AdWords

I met yesterday with a group of accomplished sales professionals and business owners from Vancouver. Industries such as Telcom, Insurance, Mortgage Brokers, and a chain of specialized fitness stores to name a few.

The question was the same from most of this group – we don’t have 100 hours a month to devote to this, nor do we have unlimited budget, but we need to know how to get online lead generation working for us.

The answer starts with Google AdWords:

1. It’s easy to control costs (maximum daily budgets)

AdWords gives you the unique opportunity to pay only for clicks, and to tell you exactly how many of those are turning into leads. On the simple side of things, you can estimate the value per lead and adwords will show you if you’re in the black or not.

If you are running an e-commerce system, realized revenue can easily be matched to a specific campaign and thus you can always see which campaigns generate the highest ROI.

If you are B2B, it will be important down the road to track ROI of specific campaigns by integrating AdWords with a CRM system like salesforce.com this way you can tell exactly how much forcast and realized revenue is coming in for every dollar going out the door.

TIP: I like to look closely at customer’s average deal size and profitability for a specific campaign that we’re targeting, so before I get going I can understand what our target “Cost Per Acquisition” should be.

2. No overhead to start seeing results

In competitive markets, a small business webiste may never crawl to the top of the search engines, even with 100 hours a month in Search Engine Optimization, link building and content generation. It is possible to lay out 100K just to get there!

3. You only pay for very targeted clicks

If you are looking for people in your local market that are looking today fora mortgage, AdWords will deliver those people in a lot less passive way direct to your website (ideally to a landing page) we will talk about that in a later post.

“elliptical trainer” “first time mortagage” “mortgage broker, Vancouver” (+ regional limitations)

4. Again, contrary to any myths out there, you only pay for clicks.

As our markets get more competitive and customers are constantly getting inundated with information, many SME’s are finding their costs are just too high on AdWords. The reason for this is largely due to lack of targeted ad text and realavent landing pages that drive conversions.

Most customers I look at that say AdWords isn’t working, (while there can be a variety of issues in their account), the biggest thing is lack of realavent, targeted landing pages, with clear calls to action.

Many customers have had conversion rates below 1% on cost per click of over $2.00 for a small business that’s selling a $2000 item, $200 just to get a sales lead is a little tough to swallow.

So now that you understand why AdWords can help you generate leads for your business, you’ll need to learn about landing pages..

Stay tuned for landing pages 101 and a free webinar on best practices for landing page optimization.