When a prospect clicks on your ad and is taken to your landing page, what’s a reasonable action to ask them to take?
Thankfully, most marketers recognize that it’s not reasonable to ask prospects to make a purchase just because they clicked on a single Google ad. This is especially true in B2B, where products and services are typically complex, expensive, and high stakes.
However, many B2Bs will present post-click prospects with a form on their landing page to “contact us” or “talk to a product specialist,” which commits those prospects to receive a call (or several hundred calls) from a salesperson.
That strategy might work in some circumstances, such as when people arrived at your ad by searching a branded search term. Those people are much more likely to fill out a “contact us” form because they already know your brand.
But is that a reasonable ask of people who arrived at your ad (and your landing page) through a non-branded search?
Probably not.
Focus on delivering value, not making conversions
In these types of cases, you can undo all your hard work by being too aggressive and sales-y right off the bat.
Instead, you need to give these people the space to get to know you better by:
- Answering their questions. What questions do prospects usually have? What objections do you typically encounter at this stage of the customer journey?
- Telling them something new. What do prospects need to know at the discovery stage of their journey? What differentiates your product or service from others on the market?
- Providing them with helpful resources. Do you have resources you can share to help prospective customers with their decision-making? Getting a lead to input their email to download a white paper has a lot less friction than getting them to input their email to set up a call.
In short, you need to do what you can to grow brand awareness and build trust in your expertise by putting value-added content on your landing page.
When viewed through this lens, a reasonable action is not to “speak to a product expert.” It’s to “register for our webinar,” “visit us at X trade show,” or “attend a demo.”
Keep your content focused
You also want to keep the content on your landing page focused and aligned with your ad. Too often, I see landing pages that try to serve every possible target market—but by doing so end up serving no one.
When your ad and landing page are well aligned, the person arriving at your landing page from your ad will know, immediately, that they’re in the right spot.
How will you know if your approach is working?
How will you know if you’re hitting the mark with your ads and post-click offerings? Take a look at your engagement metrics.
Metrics such as time on site, pages viewed per session, and other measures of content consumed can tell you if you’re on the right track. Because why would someone spend five minutes on your site watching a video if they weren’t a prospective customer?
And if your engagement metrics are low, then that’s a signal that you need to do a better job of qualifying your leads through long-tail keywords or by tweaking your ad messaging.
You probably already have the assets you need
Does this mean you have to create a whole bunch of new content to foster this engagement? Not necessarily. Often, our B2B clients have existing assets we can use or repurpose.
Still, some assets perform better than others, for example:
Video
Good: A video showcasing your new and shiny product is great.
Better: A case study video that shows a happy customer using your shiny new product—and describing how it’s helped them achieve their goals and look good to their boss—is golden.
For example, we have a client that shared a four-minute video with us. The video describes their new factory, product, position in the market, history, and plans for the future. That’s all well and good.
However, they also shared a video with us where one of their customers, in a specific industry, describes how our client’s product helped them scale their output. Now that’s a powerful asset to share with website visitors!
Webinars
Good: A webinar showcasing your new and shiny product.
Better: A webinar showcasing your new and shiny product that focuses on one application or industry vertical. You’ll get fewer attendees but deliver more value. It’s also easier to align this content with a targeted ad campaign.
Display Network assets
Good: Your existing Display Network assets.
Better: Maybe there’s something new you could try? For example, one of my team members recently raised the idea of creating animated assets for ads. We haven’t done animated Display ads in about 10 years, however, they might be a great fit for one of our clients, particularly on LinkedIn. It’s an idea worth testing.
Not all prospects are the same
For B2B advertisers, it’s important to remember that not all traffic and leads are the same. Visitor intent can differ depending on where they are in their research and buying cycle.
So if you want to engage them, you need to make sure that your ads and landing pages are built to serve the segments that are most important to you—and not take the blanket approach of just asking everyone to fill out your “contact us” form.
