PPC campaigns generate sales leads for start-up B2B service firm

• Consistent trickle of leads which have converted to high value, new clients.
• Client acknowledged that he ‘built the business off the back of the PPC campaigns’.
• PPC didn’t just drive commercial leads, but helped the client build their 50+ strong team of (self employed) ‘Associates’.

Bailey & Associates, now known as ‘Leadership Services Limited’ was founded in 2018 by former IT consultant, David Bailey. The business supplies C-Suite Fractional IT Directors, CTOs, CMOS and CIOs to small and medium sized businesses across the UK. Effective lead generation was key to the business’ success and so they reached out for help to run some PPC campaigns.

PPC campaigns for service based businesses present volume vs value challenges

B2B consulting services fall into the category of specialism that doesn’t generate much search volume for the terms used to describe the service. Another challenge is that the only available keywords don’t adequately describe the service well enough, or the service description is not the language used by the people searching. So a term like, Fractional IT Director (and variants) has too low of a search volume to be able to rely on the keyword to generate sufficient leads.

Long tail keywords and phrases covering similar and related services

We had to improvise to find a way into this market. Our approach was to create a wide range of long tail keywords, covering similar and related services, such as IT consultant. The issue was that the client didn’t like being labeled as a ‘consultant’ as it implies that they don’t like getting their hands dirty and that they are expensive. We understood the client’s concerns but explained that we could bid on this term, but make it explicitly clear of the differences between what Leadership Services do versus the traditional view of an IT Consultant. The client agreed and the PPC campaign started.

This approach paid off, and the result of this approach is that the ‘Consultant’ keywords drive over 80% of the total traffic and total leads and so far, there have been no problems in terms of expectations of the service. By effectively communicating the client’s specific service through the combination of our ad text and the website content, we were able to generate sales leads that met everyone’s expectations.

Granular account structure that covered over 30 different categories

We devised a comprehensive and granular account structure that covered over 30 different categories (ad groups) to target the different variations of the services the client offers. All of these were matched up with ads specific to each keyword to ensure a high CTR due to relevancy.

We utilised only modified broad match keywords and exact match – splitting campaigns so that there were 2 versions of each, one for BMM and one for exact whilst excluding the exact match keywords as negative keywords in the BMM campaigns in order to paint a true picture of each keywords individual performance to allow us to both monitor performance and optimise the account to a level of fine detail.

We utilised the benefits of localised targeting and appearing local

Leadership Services offers its services nationwide. However, we are all too aware of the benefits of localised targeting and appearing local to our clients. So we also ran with a geo-targeting campaign which focused on key target areas for the client. The client was able to place IT Directors that were local to those clients.

PPC has been Leadership Services’ primary form of marketing since it started. We’ve been able to demonstrate how effective it can be at generating a steady trickle of leads that convert and in attracting new associates to deliver the growing demand for fractional C-Suite services.