028. Paid Search Campaign Types that Every B2B Marketer Need to Know

Hello everyone, this is Emilio Garcia from Demand Gen Studio. Welcome to another episode of Demand Gen Studio. Today we are going to have a very interesting conversation around pace search types, campaigns and you know, the ones that every B2B marketing need to know. And I'm really excited about this topic. It's something that I have a conversation about with usually prospects and clients especially obviously because of the importance that search has in the digital advertising space. So the general idea today is that we are going to discuss or remember what is the main purpose of the Demand gen campaigns based on paid search, what they are usually used for. And then we are going to dive a little bit into the different types of paid search campaigns that you can have on your account and what are their outcomes. And finally we are going to discuss a little bit of what are the metrics, the goals, the reasons that you might want to use each of them so you can use them on your strategy. So without further ado, let's start right away. One last thing before we start, remember if you're watching this right now, share with me where are you watching from and any questions that you might have, you can put it on the chat and if I don't answer them right away I will answer them later. And of course you can always listen to this on demand or watch it depending on the medium that you better like. So first of all, what are paid search campaigns? I have covered this topic in some other occasions, but basically these are campaigns where you have the ability to show an ad when someone is searching for a specific phrase or keyword as they are known. Obviously the most popular one is Google. And so the Google platform for advertising will be Google Ads. And while it's not the only thing that you can do there, you can do display, discover YouTube ad campaigns. Search is probably the one that is Google best known for and the most popular and usually the most expensive for almost every industry in terms of cost per click, not necessarily cost per acquisition, but definitely cost per click. It's not the only player in town. There's also the ones that come from Microsoft and other platforms that present themselves more based on search on rather than context like social media, but definitely is the most popular. Now one thing that make paid campaigns very distinctive or very special is that they are definitely based on intent. And what I mean by that is that when you show up the ad is usually because someone is searching for something specific and depending on that term that you're interested for, the intent of that person will person that will vary. And while you can layer on Top of those keywords, some demographic information that varies depending on the advertising. Most of the value and the level or lever that you have on search is based on that intent. And that's very important. That's something that makes it very different from social media campaigns where most of what you have for targeting is based on context or the person or the company that you're targeting rather than understanding. They are looking for solutions right now. So you have that understanding that is very hard to replicate on social media. And that's the reason usually search commands a premium on terms of cost because people can choose someone that is way at, at the very end of the buyer cycle or at least at the point where ready to make a decision which is obviously very valuable by itself. Now, once we have a better understanding of what is a pay search campaign, let's talk about the potential types that you can have. Because while you have intent, not all intent is made equal. And so I want to layer the different types of intents that you can cover and after this we will cover in more detail each of them. So what I consider the level of intent that is the most aligned to your own company is what is called brand search. And that's if your brand is well known or popular enough that people search for the name of your company or the name of your products or the name of your website directly and you pay for that, that will be paid search branded and is the highest intent. Because people already know your brand, they are really looking for your solution in particular. And that will be. We will explore this a little bit more, but that will be the one that is closest to your brand, closest to your potential buyers in some sense. And then going a little bit up, you have search based on the product category or if your product is within a category that is well known, there's already demand for them and there's people that is searching for the solution, but not necessarily for your particular solution, but they want to buy or they have clear intent purchase. That will be your high intent paid search campaigns, right? Because you can also have low intent which is someone that is maybe looking for solutions but is not ready to buy. They are just trying to understand. And so that will make them different. And that's usually one of the reasons that you spend also time on organic because usually for organic efforts, low intent searches are better in terms of results. And finally the one that I feel is at the very top of that level of intent while still shows intent will be your competitors keywords, right? Meaning just like branded, but in this case is for the name of the company or the products or the website name of your competition. So there's intent and it's not super clear exactly how we will dive a little bit into that one, but that will be the highest level of intent that you can target or that usually I recommend target. So you have these four types and let us dive into the first one. So when usually the question will be when do you want to use branded or brand pay search campaigns? Well, obviously there's a Brexit that needs to be covered first. And that one is that people need to know your brand already because, and this is something very peculiar of search campaigns is you cannot create inventory. There's just the inventory available, meaning people already searching for those terms that you have in mind. So it's a little bit different in social because on social, as long as you have a demographic, you can show as many times as you want. And so you can, you can increase the exposure of your brand and annoy your potential prospects. Right. In a way. But, but in search is different. Once you get to a level where you are covering most of the available searches, there's no more. Right. So the idea here is that if your brand is popular enough that people is looking for your company, is looking for your products, or a combination of both, then that will be the first thing that you have to accomplish for brand. The second one that triggers the need for those campaigns is that sometimes you might discover that your competition is bidding for your own brand. Right. So you obviously for your own brand, you, you will be number, number first on your organic results. On the serp. Very rare occasions that will not be the case. Might be because your name is shared with another company that is more popular than yours and or you are using in your brand generic terms that are well known for something else, like a thing or I don't know, I will come up with something. Doesn't apply. Exactly. But think about Apple for example, right? In theory, if you write Apple or if you search for Apple, it should also trigger the word for the, for the fruit, of course. But in any case, if a competitor is bidding for you for your brand, that's usually the way that some prospects come into and say, well, should I do that too? Because I'm losing that spot at the very top against the competition. So that will be a primary reason to start wondering about that. And finally, the other one is rather technical, is in search campaigns there's this concept of quality score and it's called the different ways, but it tends to measure the relevance of your advertising to what the person is or to the searcher is looking for. So the idea is that the search engine wants to understand if someone search for something, if your ad gets enough attention that triggers someone clicking and after they visit the page, if they wander around and take action, that will mean that the ad that was served worked as intended versus imagine the same query for some other ad that is not as enticing and the offer in the landing page or the website is not as relevant as promised. So that quality score is used in part with the bidding to determine if your ads shows at all and if they show how much you will pay compared to other advertisers. So in that sense, quality score is relevant because it affects the performance of your particular keywords, but also affects the performance of the overall of the account. The depending on the quality of all the keywords, all the campaigns that you have running and brand usually as a very brand search has a very high quality score for obvious reasons. The person is looking for your brand and your website answers perfectly to that call. And usually you will have an ad that better reflects or better presents your company rather than your competitors. So another reason you might want to explore search brand is because you want to improve the overall quality of the account. And so that will be helpful. Now the best thing that I can tell about that one is that you should always have a dedicated campaign just for your branded terms. In theory, you can have a campaign where you combine the other kinds of intents, right? The high intent, generic terms and, and the low intent and your competition. But usually brand has a limit on, as we were saying, on your exposure. Maybe your brand is not well known or is well known, but you don't want to overspend on it to a certain degree. So you should get the most competitive cost per click for your brand than any other term in theory. So my biggest recommendation here is that yes, if you have a well known brand and you want to make sure that your competition is not bidding for your own keyword for your for the name of your company, and you also want to improve the quality, create a campaign, but make sure that you have a dedicated campaign where you can control your spending so you can get to the level that makes sense for you. Usually it will be a combination of your impression share, right? So you want to grab or capture as much as possible of the performance and not overspend. One last good quality about brand search is that it will give you the baseline for your conversions, right? So not always, but usually the lowest cost of Acquisition will come from your own brand terms because people usually will be already willing to start a conversation with your salesperson or start a demo. If you are running software so that the other key important aspect of it, and it helps you to not just have a baseline of cost, but also get a lot of information that you will not get from organic because you are paying. Therefore you have access to the demographic information like location, age groups, household income. So all those variables are available for any advertiser on Google are available for your brand. So that will give you an idea of in theory how people is finding you organically too. While it will not match perfectly, you will have that ability to look at the information. And finally, the other aspect of paying for your own brand that is undervalued or at least overlook is that you can use the opportunity to present your brand in the way that you really intend to the demographic that you want to presented that way. And what I mean by that is that usually, and nowadays I think it's getting, you know, not worse, but definitely in the hands of Google. When you create a page and it get indexed, you don't have a say necessarily on the exact title and the exact description that is going to be used. You can influence it, right? Obviously the title of the page that you have for your homepage and the meta description that you put on the page that will be the best candidate for what is going to show up for your brand. But it's not 100% guarantee that it will show that way. Google have some say on how we present your page on brand search though, because you have that control over the ad. Your headline becomes a page title and your descriptions becomes that meta description. And you have multiple options also to test. That's something also that is very hard to do on organic. You will have the possibility of presenting multiple headlines with call to actions and test different ideas. The same goes for descriptions and definitely goes for all the extensions that you can use. So you can highlight pieces of content of your website that you consider relevant, then in organic will be harder to make sure that they show up that way. Meaning site links, call to call outs, call extensions, right? If you want to use a specific phone number for all sales inquiries, for example, or for inquiries for a specific product, you can better control those aspects using extensions from Google Ads rather than from organic. So while it's not for everybody brand search is definitely worth exploring because it's just beyond the fact that you are paying for something, they're already showing up. There are many. As a summary, there are many reasons you want a might to explore an option like that. And it comes to your competition, bidding on your keywords, you wanting to have a specific message to show to your potential prospects, and also getting information about your baseline for cost of acquisition and where people is coming from. So those are some of the reasons you want to do that. Now I want to move into the next type of campaign, which is the high intent. And obviously you want to explore what it is. So I usually share with prospects and clients that search. It's a channel where you can capture existing demand. And, and what I mean by captured existing demand is not necessarily for your product and solutions. That's mostly brand and it has a limit is the category itself of the products that you are within or in into your industry. So for example, if you are a software developer or an app developer, there's already a lot of people out there that is searching for a service like that. They are looking for a company or a person that can help them develop an app. It's just that they are not looking necessarily for your company. And you can tap into that stream of searchers and present yourself in front of them. And if you use the right combination of keywords, you can make that presence only for people that have high intent. A quick example using that reference of the app developer is not the same to decide to show up for someone typing app development versus for example hire an app developer or app development company or app development services. So those extra keywords at the end or those extra words make a big difference. If you go on the SERP and just type the definition of your service by itself versus showing up. You know, company services, hire or any other combination near me is very popular for products that people buy locally. You will see on the results on the organic side how different the results are, right? So if you have these big themes of the things that you solve, you will find results from Wikipedia or you will find snippets explaining what it is, right? Explaining what app development is. And while there's nothing wrong with that, that portion of the population or that portion of the searchers are already educating themselves about the products that you offer. So they have low intent. And those are not the campaigns that I'm trying to describe here. These are more the kind of campaigns that will show up when someone is actually ready to start a sales conversation or at least explore if a potential company is the right fit for them. Right? They are looking maybe for case studies or understanding a little bit better what you offer. And so if you go to that specific segment, you can have these high intent paid campaigns. And usually for what we do, those are the ones that we do the most or where we allocate the most budget, obviously, because they are the ones that bring the fastest show or the fastest way to know if there's traction behind those ideas, if there's potential behind them. Right. Especially if someone new to advertising. That's the way that we usually start to show some traction and there's potential. So as you can see here, general recommendations on those types of campaigns are that you make sure that your definition is definitely high intent. Go to SERP to the SERP to the search results and see if they are really showing up results based on people searching for the product or service and not just the definitions because that will be low intent. And in my general recommendation, if you are limited by budget, and I usually say that that limitation is not that you don't have enough money overall, it's just that usually you have multiple priorities and initiatives competing among themselves. That's what I will put most of my money at the beginning. If you don't have a big brand first, you know to tap into your unbranded search terms to. Right. So high intent is the place where I would usually start. And obviously you can present your company in the way that your offers match that idea in the terms of demos, in the terms of sales, conversations, presenting testimonials, showing the things that a potential buyer will be looking for at that stage. Now the other type, as you might guess is is the low intent paid search campaign and generally those kinds of keywords. I will suggest that I will focus rather on using Google Organic to try to index for those keywords. And the reason is that because usually the kind of results that you will see, they tend to be either reading content or audio or videos that explain to people how to do stuff or how to understand a problem or how to understand potential solutions. Very similar to what I'm doing right now, right? If you are trying to understand, but you're not ready to hire someone, you want to educate yourself. So you either listen to someone or read an article or watch a video, and those kinds of contents are better served organically. People tend to gravitate toward those when they are not ready to buy now. And the other big reason why you will want to do it organically first is because you have to create the content anyway. Even if you are trying to promote it through paid. Right. You have to have it before. So there's probably the biggest recommendation here that I the biggest Mistake that I see sometimes is that companies or organizations that don't have the content yet, right, they only have bottom of the content, bottom of the funnel content, sorry, Meaning they only have their offers like demos and conversation with salespeople. And they say, well, these other terms that are not with the highest intent, they are usually less expensive, less companies are willing to pay for those. And so we will advertise on those terms. We know that they are maybe not ready yet, but. Or they're not as mature as the other ones, but they are less expensive and we might get lucky. But the issue is that you are not going to be that relevant. But if someone is looking to understand something and your answer to that is an ad, or worse, a landing page that is trying to sell them into something, you will fail. And the price of doing that will be that your advertising cost will be higher for those terms compared to someone that already have the content. So that's probably the biggest mistake that I see. There's nothing wrong with going after low intent paid search campaigns. You can definitely do it. But my recommendation would be that you first create the content, look at the performance of those pieces organically, right on both on search engines and social media. And once you have the pieces that you believe perform the best or the ones that you think will help people the most, you can select specific pieces to promote and increase the speed of your flywheel right of the funnel that you're creating of people getting educated on your products and eventually asking for a sales conversation. So definitely, if you have the budget and if you have the content, you can put some effort here. But. But I will definitely advise against trying to make the offer something that is a high level threat for someone that is just getting educated right at the beginning. And finally, our last type of intent campaigns that you can do on search that will be bidding on your competitor's brand, right? And so the idea here is quite simple. It's very similar to your own brand. And the general idea what happens is that you have this company, usually that is the newcomer, the challenger, and you have this sort of big brand that a lot of people know about and that is almost a reference to the product or the category that you are getting into. And so it begs the question of why shouldn't I advertise using their keywords to promote my company? And so definitely something that you can do on search. There's nothing against it. Google doesn't limit you to bid for keywords that are from your competitors. The only limitation that you will find from time to time, especially for big brands, is that in the ad copy, meaning the text that you use for your headlines and descriptions. In the case of search, you sometimes cannot use the brand of your competitor because it's protected by Google itself. There's a process that runs behind the scenes where someone can request that protection and so that prevents other people from using the brand unless they are somehow commercially related, right? Like distributor or someone that advertised the brand in their name. So in those cases you will not be able to measure your competition. And probably here in that space, the space of advertising, using keywords of your competition is what I have seen the most creative ways to do so, right? Because sometimes you cannot mention your competition, but the way that you present your headlines and descriptions kind of like give it away, right? And obviously the biggest recommendation here is that you will try on your headlines and descriptions to construct the things that make you different, the things that make you better, the things that your competition doesn't have or don't provide and highlight those to someone that might be looking for them and that will make them aware of you. Now, to be very transparent here, there is a challenge with your, with your brand, with the brand of competition and is that you will never be as relevant to your searchers as your competition is relevant for them for that particular search. And you can see it on the searches for your own brand. If they were looking for your company, they will have typed your company's name, not your competition. So those campaigns are going to be the ones that are going to be the most expensive in terms of cost per click because your ctrs or your click through rates are going to be the lowest compared to your own competition, of course, because you are not as relevant. So I usually treat those campaigns more of a, as a brand awareness play, right Is you are pretty much making people aware of options when they're already maybe married to the idea of working with another company. So you're giving them the opportunity to explore a little bit before making a final decision or to explore different options even if they're already a customer, which might be the case, someone searching for support at any given moment for your competition. So as long as you are aware of that and the fact that your metrics shouldn't be necessarily leads and rather be more brand exposure impressions, even some traffic from new visitors, I will be fine with those campaigns for sure. So it's important that you manage your expectations in terms of the cost of acquisition usually will be the highest. And the other thing that is also very important is that you really evaluate what competitors make sense to make campaigns for because especially if you're using just the brand and is a big brand that has multiple product categories and services and not all of them matches what your company does, then you run the risk of showing up, you know, to people that you can never serve because you don't have the same products, right? So usually you don't have these 100% overlap between your company and your competition. And so you have to be aware of that fact and decide if it makes sense to rather focus on a specific product, right? If they have products that have name or focus on a specific vertical or product category that better matches what you offer so you can tailor those and have more success in terms of the relevancy of the traffic that you will bring to those campaigns. Very similar to my recommendations on branded search and high intent and low intent campaigns, I highly recommend that you create at least a separate campaign with all your competition terms and that you don't mix them with your brand company campaigns and your high intent keywords and your low intent keywords so you can that way you can control the budget spending because it's going to be as I was going, I was telling higher. But also because usually your bidding strategy is going to be different because it's more of a brand awareness play. Usually you go for target impression share or something like that rather than traffic and or conversions as you will do on your high intent campaigns. So that's definitely something important to cover and I think that pretty much covers it all. I hope you have found value in this conversation and again if you have any questions feel free to reach out. I usually available on LinkedIn the most and it will be a pleasure to connect and I invite you to subscribe and listen to the next episode where we will be covering more demand generation topics for B2B brands out there. Have a great day. Bye bye.