As a B2B marketing consultant before joining the WordWrite team, I never recommended the use of Google AdWords to my clients. Some did it anyway, on their own, and never reported back getting very good results. 
Google AdWords sound so enticing. Create an ad with a few keywords and when someone searches on those words, they find your ad, click on it, voila—you have a new potential customer. But, for business-to-business, it’s not that easy.
First of all, can you boil down what you do into a couple of keywords? And, are the people who click on your ad qualified buyers? Or just Internet surfers—curious but not serious.
I agree with this post by Matt Arnold, a sales and marketing professional on the Today’s Professional blog.
“This assessment of why Google AdWords does not work is based on the data I gathered. Over 90% of the respondents provided a personal email. Bad sign because our clients are businesses. My conclusion on this was if they aren’t providing a work email, the project has not been approved. If the project has not been approved, a budget has not been set or the need has not been determined. If a need has not been determined, no one is going to buy.”
In today’s business world, B2B buyers are going to do their own research by searching for companies that provide what they need and reading as much as they can before making any contact. One local marketing exec I recently spoke with said they have research showing business visitors to their website are already 60% through their buy cycle. They’ve researched top vendors, ranked the options, set requirements and so on.
So, how can you better influence the sales process if it’s a do-it-yourself buyer’s world?
At WordWrite, we believe that’s where inbound marketing becomes a better investment than Google AdWords for B2B companies.
Wikipedia says inbound marketing is: “based on the concept of earning the attention of prospects, making yourself easy to be found, and drawing customers to your website by producing content customers value. Blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, eNewsletters, whitepapers, SEO, social media marketing, and other forms of content marketing are considered inbound marketing.” In other words, talk about subjects your prospective buyers are interested in and they will find you.
Inbound marketing done right drives traffic to your website, and not just any traffic, but folks interested in what you have to offer. Sure, you need to spend time developing relevant content, but once you have, it can be posted on various online outlets and become Internet highway signage, guiding people researching products and services like yours to you.
Prospective customers delivered to your online doorstep. What more could any business owner want?
Want to learn more about inbound marketing? Download our whitepaper – Inbound Marketing 101.
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Alison Frederick is the director of business development for WordWrite Communications. You can email her directly at alison.frederick@wordwritepr.com or find her on Twitter @frederick_ali.
