The biggest hole in paid search marketing strategies?

October 1st, 2007

The amount of money being spent on Google adwords and other paid search marketing today is significant, including a lot of small businesses. One of the key success factors is that it’s relatively simple to execute. Maybe simple to execute, but not necessarily simple to get results, especially in B2B marketing.

Getting a click through to your site (at the right price) is not necessarily the key challenge: it’s getting a result from that click. A lead, and preferably a qualified one.

So what is the biggest hole in most b2b paid search strategies?

I’d argue that it is the landing page (the page the ad clicks through to). Although significant dollars are invested by companies to get their ads on the top of the list, once a potential customer clicks through, they end up on the home page which doesn’t do anything for them.
Jon Miller has an interesting business in Marketo, which provides B2B marketing automation software and shares some great tips in a guest post at Online Marketing Blog: Ten tips for lead generation landing pages.

Read the post, but the ten points in short are: (my “bolding”)
1. First Impressions Matter

2. Have an Offer

3. Remove The Navigation

4. Use Graphics Wisely

5. Make Your Content Scan-able

6. Only Ask What You Really Need

7. Capture Implicit Information

8. Have Reasons to Give Valid Info

9. Say Thank You

10. Test… But Don’t Over Test

If you are currently investing in paid search and you don’t follow these guidelines currently, I bet you’ll improve your results by taking this to heart.

(photo courtesy Astrovine)