We’ve heard all the excuses before,

“Why pay for clicks in search engines when I am already paying my sales team to find customers?” 

This point of view could be costing your company leads and sales, the truth is that almost all business purchases are researched online before the deal is closed. Even if your Company has a 100% success rate when it comes to sales, I would bet that the person on the other end of the sale did at least one web search. Customers don’t have to pay to use Google, so it seems foolish for anyone to not do a little research before taking the plunge on anything from a $40 pair of headphones, to a multi-million dollar piece of industrial equipment. Even if your business development team is performing above your expectations, they still cannot reach as broad an audience as search engines.

“Customers don’t know what my product is, how could they search for it?” 

This is a valid point, expecting customers to search for the“WidgetSMART Solar Powered Lead Generator” is presumptuous. This is where smart B2B search marketing comes into play. The way to find the customers you are looking for is to target search terms that describe their needs or business problems, rather than the specific product. Terms like “Lead Generation”, “Generating Leads” and “Ways to Generate Leads” are good starting points. Going deeper, B2B search marketing and keywords can get more specific; “Eco-Friendly Lead Generation” or “Outdoor lead generation” might be good keywords to try. Digging even deeper; “Growing my business”, “Getting more customers”, or “Eco-friendly ways to increase sales” address a customer’s business issues, and your ad (and product) provide a possible solution.

“No one searches our product, and when they do, they just find unrelated junk” 

Consider this: your product, the “WidgetSMART Solar Powered Lead Generator” is shortened to “WSSPLG”. Unfortunately for you, this also happens to be the acronym for the Western Scandinavian Society of Professional Lady Golfers, and when potential customers search, they find nothing but golf related page. Fortunate for you, almost all pay-per-click providers such as Google have location specific targeting available. This way, any North Americans searching for WSSPLG will see your relevant ad sitting first position above all other results.

These are just three examples of how you can use pay per click marketing and B2B search marketing to augment your sales and marketing efforts to take advantage of one of the fastest growing, most measurable, and easy to set up marketing platforms available. For every dollar you think you are saving by not buying ads on Google, Bing and Yahoo!, you could be losing hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost sales. Don’t get left behind, just because you are not a tech company, or because you think search ads are just for B2C applications. Do a couple of Google searches and you will probably find your competitors are doing it and catching up is in order. If not, you can give yourself a leg-up by being the first in your industry to harness this powerful marketing tool.