In the past few articles, I’ve talked about various search strategies to apply to your existing B2B search campaigns. But what if you’re starting from scratch, and you’re building your brand for the first time?
Maybe your brand is embarking on a strategy to expand into the market for a B2B product that is entirely new to your brand image? Perhaps your goal is to maintain or enhance your brand image during launches of solutions or products. Here are just a few tips to help you start out, and increase or maintain your market share and profitability through paid search.
Tip #1: Ensure Good Keyword Coverage & Messaging
It’s a basic strategy, but from what I’ve seen with some of the clients I’ve worked on, it’s something that commonly escapes attention. Make certain there is robust keyword coverage for products and solutions that have launched, especially if there is press coverage.
Create live search terms on the major engines to understand competitive coverage and SEO listings, to add or negative keywords as necessary. Highlight key features of the product or solution that match the press around your article, or what you want to convey in your copy.
If you work on the agency side or even internally, track down and synch up with the team that is delivering the press release or working on the product or solution.
I’ve learned that these teams often have done an incredible amount of competitive research and can give valuable insights and strategies into what will appeal to the target audience. If you can’t track them down, then doing your own competitive research, understanding and summarizing the content, works best for messaging.
When maintaining a brand, one example I can offer is when one of my B2B clients went through a massive public change of their company and wanted to broadcast that message. We were tasked with building a global strategy to ensure that when customers searched for the brand, paid search was active and delivering the right message. We built out keywords and copy speaking to concerns and positives about the change, and we sent customers to a page with video and content speaking to the changes coming and setting their minds at ease.
Tip #2: Cross-Sell The Heck Out Of Your B2B Offering
This primarily applies to established B2B brands that are trying to break into a different market, or trying to launch a new product to market, or complement an existing product. One easy way to accomplish this is by cross-selling on sitelinks for products you already have existing search volume.
This can be done on terms that either complement the new product, or are an older version of the product or solution for which you wish to offer a newer product. If you can, also use richer ad formats to highlight the new product such as video ads and ads on YouTube.
To give a few examples, as a primarily consumer food service provider (like a pizza store), add a sitelinks about your newly launched catering business. Or on your key brand terms, add a sitelinks about a new solution that you just brought to market.
That way, loyal customers can easily engage in your newest offerings, and customers who are searching your brand for the first time (as they’ve already learned about you before) can engage with content that they may not have learned about before.
Another simple way to help foster cross-selling is by linking on your site with banners on frequently visited content on your site. Not quite SEM-related, but if you have the ability to make site-side recommendations, it will further help your customers find their way to new solutions and products.
Tip #3: Keep The Message & Your Offering Alive
The easiest way to accomplish this is through a robust paid search strategy, as I mentioned in #1 and #2, and also through remarketing.
I divulged a few great tips in my article about successful B2B remarketing, but to expand on those thoughts: build cookie pools for all content on your site as you launch your B2B offering.
As you start off, monitor those and stay top of mind to those customers by messaging them predicated on the content they’ve consumed and what they’re interested in, based on the cookie pools they’re in. It’s an easy and simple way to drive potential leads back to your brand and build that awareness and loyalty.
When building your B2B brand, build out a robust keyword set, and pair proper messaging. Also cross-sell when possible through sitelinks and banners on your site when your brand is already built but breaking into the B2B market. Lastly, remarket to potential customers who have engaged in your site and have visited your pages featuring content about your B2B offering to help close the sale or lead.
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