7 Ways to Increase B2B Lead Generation With SEM

If you’re unfamiliar with search engine marketing (SEM), it’s a technique that refers to using paid advertising to market your business in search engine results pages, also known as SERPs. SEM empowers you to advertise within search results, increase website traffic, drive leads, and generate new sales.

As digital marketing continues its ever-evolving journey, reviewing your current strategies is important to ensure relevant searches lead to your company’s content. Discover seven ways to increase B2B lead generation and have better ad performance with SEM in today’s marketing world.?

How to Increase Your B2B Lead Generation with SEM

1. Know Your Target Audience
2. Look at Your Competition
3. Use Best Practices for Ads
4. A/B Testing Your Ads
5. Create Compelling Content
6. Optimize Landing Pages for Conversions
7. Perform Keyword Research Consistently

1. Know Your Target Audience

It might seem obvious, but B2B companies often develop ads for products and services without having a clear idea of who they’re talking to. Knowing and fully understanding your target audience is essential to developing accurate personas that serve as reference points for all your messaging.

Creating effective buyer personas can be broken down into five steps:

1. Understand your sales cycle and all the people involved in the decision-making process
2. Distill your focus to 2–5 stakeholders who are typically involved in your buyer’s journey
3. Determine buckets for your stakeholders: Finance, Technology, Executive, Project Management, etc.
4. Find an existing customer in each bucket who would be willing to talk with you
5. Research each bucket using LinkedIn or job sites to understand their key roles and responsibilities

With well-developed personas to represent your target audience, you can create more accurate and compelling ads. As your products and services evolve, so should your personas, so be sure to revisit them often to consider any adjustments or modernizations.

2. Look at Your Competition

If you search for your ads and get inundated with content from your competitors, you have a problem to solve: how can you differentiate yourself and get your ads to have top billing? Competitor research should help you uncover some of your competitors’ top strategies so you can find ways to use similar tactics or beat them with your own.

You’ll also find missed opportunities in your own marketing plan by looking at what your competitors are marketing to what is likely a similar set of potential leads, especially regarding their keywords and other SEM tactics. Make sure you’re positioning your business competitively compared to similar companies.

3. Use Best Practices for Ads

While it’s tempting and easy to get flashy in digital marketing, you must keep your target market in mind. In B2B, you’re likely advertising to mid-to-high-level decision makers, buyers, managers, and business owners who respond best to a relatively conservative, professional look and feel.

Best practices that ensure digital B2B ads are consistent and focused include:

• Rely on personas to guide your language and messaging
• Set up compelling landing pages for readers to take the next step (more on this later!)
• Analyze your keyword options and being selective with your choices
• Communicate with your sales team to help inform the discovery process
• Ensure keywords make sense for buyers—both at the start and end of the sales funnel

4. A/B Testing Your Ads

A great way to fine-tune your ads is to make changes based on real audience feedback. Simply put, A/B testing leverages two or more versions of an ad, gathering and analyzing data on what’s working vs. what’s not to help you make the campaign more impactful.

Dissect elements of your ads and identify what could be easily changed, such as a CTA, special offer, or imagery. Adjust one component at a time—otherwise, you risk not knowing which changes led to the different response. Then analyze the results and use that knowledge in the next iteration of your ad campaign to shuffle leads in the right direction.

Keep reading for more ways to increase B2B lead generation and have better ad performance with SEM.