“Buy” clients can work.
Turns out not so good in the long run.
Direct response digital ads (like paid search) are among the best conversion channels.
As always. In the history of time.
It’s not a joke. google it
It’s the best way to spend money today to generate income tomorrow. (Or even for the next 2-3 months.)
But here’s why this can set you down a dangerous path if you’re not careful, and actually lead to a higher CPL in the long run.
1. Over-relying on paid acquisition for long-term growth
There are some giant implicit issues for B2B brands with payment media:
Auction-based networks, such as Google Ads, will remain more expensive in the long run. While you may be able to improve ad spend optimization in the short term (A/B testing creatives, graphics, audiences, placements, timing, etc.), you’re unlikely to significantly control or reduce long-term ROI time limit. deadline (as your competitors continued to increase their CPC bids). Part of that is because you’re forced to compete head-on, head-on, in a red ocean bloodbath for a tiny fraction of only 5% of prospects “on the market” at the time (more on that next section). To top it off, you’re dealing with the Law of crappy click rates (where the minimum required spend and performance of a channel traditionally falls in the long run anyway) and it becomes more expensive to compete in the long run. And complex, consultative buying processes with sophisticated buyers aren’t just “click and convert,” they often require multiple back-to-back ads or funnels before they pay you a cent.
Look at any chart of CPC and CPL costs over not just one year, but over the last 10, and you’ll quickly see a similar trend:
Means of payment (in established categories) increase in the long term. Clicks and response rates for ad creatives tend to decrease over the long term. Thus, your potential ROI and profit margins also decrease in the long run.
This is not new either.
B2B CPCs and lower click-through rates have been vilified on this very site since 2007.
This is not because B2B marketers are stupid. It’s actually the opposite. It’s that transactional sales or impulse buys are low-priced easy to generate “click + convert” B2C sales.
So why is this of particular concern to B2B brands today?
Because it forces you to realize that you’re going to have to find, explore, test and scale other channels if you want to continue to grow your income from 7 figures to 8 figures, then 9 and 10+ as you grow. ladder
To add insult to injury, payment media is also incredibly capital intensive:
You have to load a huge budget, every month, month after month. This is likely to only continue to increase over the next five years from now. In order to squeeze income over the next few months. So hopefully you can break even on each client within about 6 months. To make a profit and be “repaid” 6-12 months later (assuming the customer sticks around that long too).
So. If you live in a world where your Paying CPL is close to ~$5000/each… you should probably find some better alternatives ASAP if you want a long term, scalable growth engine.
I no a temporary bandage that works (somewhat/luckily) for a year or two, but becomes cost prohibitive in 5 years or more.
In other words:
Your budget that should be going to other channels so you can grow the pie next year (hello, SEO!) continues to be cannibalized today and tomorrow and next month by paid ones. Just to keep the lights on and the numbers in the right direction, for now! Despite declining margins and rising customer acquisition costs for the rest of next year.
I’m not saying don’t do it if it works. Obviously you should!
But you also can’t be surprised two years from now when it “works less well” and “costs more money” and you should have explored other channels, faster, two years earlier (like today!).
Especially when these other channels, like SEO, require you to lay the right foundation to move the needle more than 2 years from yesterday.
This problem only gets worse over time, allowing your smart and well-funded competitors years of moat construction that you will have to recover hopelessly and uselessly later with a higher premium.
2. Rely on big brand market leads, at the end of the funnel
In fact, it’s pretty obvious when a B2B brand has “relied too much” on paid media for too long.
He looks like the heaviest bodybuilder who LOVES arm day, only to wear baggy pants to cover his weak base of embarrassingly disproportionate chicken legs.
Except in SEO, it’s often upside down.
This is what I mean:
Fire up your favorite keyword research tool, plug in your site’s URL for organic rankings, and let me know if any of these red flags sound familiar:
Your home page is one of the most trafficked pages on your site. This means you rely too much on brand-aware people and ignore the other 95% of people outside the market who should and could need you months and years from now. Your home page is cannibalizing other unbranded queries for business terms (more on this chestnut below). Which often means you get little or no traffic to the very pages on your site designed to educate and convert customers. And the top five MOFU or TOFU rankings do little or nothing to help you prepare your pipeline years from now or reduce ad costs with better multi-channel targeting.
Or basically this:
what is going on here
You have a lot of funds, where you are only reaching the small subset of potential customers, versus the larger, broader, larger, deeper pool of potential customers who will undoubtedly need you in the future.
Now let’s add this problem to the last one.
Marketing channels don’t really exist in silos. Unlike the marketing teams themselves who manage them. (How’s that for irony?)
Let’s say your marketing team starts allocating 10% of their paid SEO budget as a “proof of concept” to “go live.”
well I suppose.
good enough Not really.
Why SEO:
It takes a long time, when the ROI is compounded more in the long term (more than 12 months) than in the short term. Unlike your paid ad budget (which is a hamster wheel that you’ll need to keep growing over the long term), it should require a bigger advance investment for you no need to spend that much in 5+ years (as an overall % of total marketing budget.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of intro calls over the past 15 years tell me this is disappointingly common.
In other words, spend 10% of your paid budget this year on SEO.
It’s not really enough to move the needle on next year’s results and give your team (and bean counters) certainty which will overtake ads anytime soon (as the primary method of generating customers).
So what happens?
They cut the budget in the second year and deprioritized SEO/content/etc.
And you’re back on the paid media hamster wheel in no time.
“Because SEO and content didn’t really work for us.”
Uh huh.
3. Search intent cannibalization and content structure mismatch leading to low or no profitable rankings
By now you should be noticing the cascading effect of these errors.
The first problem leads to the second, which now leads to the third.
A self-reinforcing negative spiral if ever there was one.
Like a stressful job (yours!), it leads to shortcuts in nutritious eating habits, which leads to lower energy and sedentary behavior, which leads to weight gain, which leads to worse eating habits and an even worse lifestyle sedentary and a weight gain in the coming year. , and the one after that, and the one after that.
This is how this third error combines the first two on your site.
Your product page ranks for “many keywords”.
Yay?!
Except it’s not actually properly optimized to target any of them.
So the chances of ranking in the top three for any of these keywords are slim to none (to impossible).
In other words, your “pretty good” rating is lying to you.
Based on SERP CTR averages, it means you’re unlikely to ever see anything higher than ~5% of potential traffic. Or, it’s not enough to “move the needle” for the bean counters to give you more budget.
Open the organic SERPs to see why you’re still not in the top ten and notice that exactly NONE of the following results are product pages, instead listing comparisons and UGC or tool reviews:
Do you think this is unique? Just a single moment in time?
think again
Let’s look at this same “alternatives” style query idea, for a completely different brand in a completely different space, and see what we see:
Spirit spirit!
This time, the intent match is slightly better. At least it’s community pages or UGC that collect rankings on that specific website.
But obviously, these are not optimized for search. Absolutely not.
Because that’s not the main reason this company has these on their site in the first place.
So they’re almost taking those “pretty good” ratings by accident. A total coincidence.
Kind of a happy accident? For sure.
However, is it a “winning” strategy to rank in the top five for those pages to actually end up with 70-80% of people searching for those keywords?
And then show those people a page perfectly positioned to convert profitable leads into potential buyers?
No. not soon
Conclusion
Paid media works well for generating B2B leads.
But that’s also part of the problem.
Because if you not more relying on means of payment, to the exclusion of all else, sets you up a slippery slope to a higher CPL in the long run.
It eats up the lion’s share of your marketing budget, makes sales lazy because they just wait for leads with credit card in hand forever, and makes your executives think they can keep underinvesting in everything else about your brand.
I this has a hastily disastrous effect Yes i when try to get the SEO and content farming process in place that you should have done years earlier.
All marketing channels become more competitive over time. All marketing channels become more sophisticated over time. And so all marketing channels also get more expensive to begin with over time.
SEO and content, however, when done right and unlike most marketing channels, can reduce your CPL within 5-10 years.
But only if you really invest correctly today.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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