SaaS PPC Strategy: The Complete Guide

When creating your pay-per-click (PPC) marketing strategy, you have two options: invest in a SaaS PPC agency to do all the hard work for you, or do it yourself.

Fun fact: PPC ads aren’t just auspicious for B2C brands – they can be the B2B brand’s best friend too. And that includes your software-as-a-service business.

Whether or not you opt for external help in this department, once your campaign is live, you will still need to both understand and nurture your ad during its campaign life to see how it is performing and ensure that you’re not going over budget.

For those new PPC ads, it can seem like a minefield. But relax – we’re here to help you every step of the way.

Case Study: Cybersecurity Company Sees 284% Growth in Number of Closed Customers with PPC

PPC For SaaS: Why They Work So Well

In the ever-changing world of digital marketing, it is important to stay informed with the advertising game in order to always be one step ahead of your competitors. But because digital marketing trends are constantly shifting and evolving, that can be challenging.

This is where PPC can be a significantly useful tool within your go to market strategy.

PPC does the brunt of your marketing for you while ensuring your website is more visible than your competitors (therefore keeping a healthy flow of web traffic) and ensuring your ads are being displayed in front of the most lucrative audiences.

SaaS brands harnessing PPC ads can rest in the knowledge that their marketing goals are being smashed by this strategy. But there’s a catch.

While PPC ads do a fair bit of the legwork for you (as well as providing easy-to-understand key performance indicator data), you need to ensure your campaign itself is superior to that of your competitors’.

Saas PPC Strategies: Getting It Right

To ensure your PPC strategy is on to a winner, it is wise to adhere to the following tips.

Lead Scoring

Many SaaS brands implement a customer management system (CMS) or a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, which can be ideal for storing lead information.

But it’s important not to expect your digital tools to do everything. Especially when it comes to lead nurturing or lead conversion. Once the lead’s information is safely stored into the system of choice, it’s critical that the lead is then followed up. Hence, lead scoring.

When it comes to lead scoring, there are two options available:

Quantitative. This ‘scores’ your lead from 1-10 (or in other systems, 1-100, et al) in terms of how granular you wish to be with them.
Qualitative. This is also a scoring system, but is based on three categories: low, medium, or high.

You will need to settle on the right scoring option for you. Once you’ve done this, you can focus on building and optimising your campaign happily with your scoring system in place to better regulate your leads.

Once you’ve scored your leads, again, it is foolish to then just leave them be. Instead, you will need to focus on connecting them via your KPI data back to your campaign (as well as key words, devices, etc) to better store this accurate info. Your data will be the most accurate representation of where your leads are coming from, so don’t forsake it.

Be Credible

This is especially applicable for brands looking to draw in leads via a search engine. First impressions account for everything, so it’s important that a lead’s first impression of your brand is that it’s legit.

A good way to do this is working in alignment with any well-known, reputable clients you have. One option would be liaising with them to incorporate your logo on their site, or get involved with an affiliate program.

Another option is case studies or testimonials from them. This is arguably the best method of proving your credibility. Other options include featuring any awards you’ve won, recognition from media outlets, and seller ratings.

Be Aware of the Difference Between Quality Over Quantity

Especially when it comes to your lead conversions.

It is important to treat leads as people and aim to convert them into profitable clients (ideally for life). The importance of maintaining clients for life is obvious, but also, from a PPC point of view, it will also mean that your CPA (cost per acquaintance) is lower and will save you a lot of money.

Calculate Your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) Accurately

Again, this harkens back to resisting the urge to focus on quantity over quality. And because you’re an SaaS brand, you will typically operate with longer sales funnel goals – this means it’s even more vital that you correctly calculate your CLV because you can use the figure to influence further Lead generation strategy.

To decipher this sum, you need to multiply the average customer lifespan with the customer value. Once you’ve done this, you can then compare the figure with your CAC (customer acquisition cost) to discern the expected return-on-investment for your PPC ads.

Make Sure Your Landing Page is User-Friendly

This means optimising it, if need be. You will want to make sure that your lead has everything he/she will want right there – because they won’t be willing to go exploring the rest of your site for it.

Just think, wherever they land needs to chauffeur them through the next part of the funnel. When optimising the landing page, envisage both your audience and your ad’s objective. This will increase the chance of conversion (either now or later). Rule number one is make sure that your CTA (call-to-action) is easy to find/identify.

Lead By Your Objective

Your PPC campaigns – like all of your other campaigns – should always be objective-led. This means building your strategy around your objective. This will increase lead-gen, encourage lead conversion, ensure your budget is well-spent, and guarantee your brand is visible and well–perceived.

Always craft your objective around what action you want your audience to take. Be more specific than just driving traffic or increasing sales as a whole. These are too generic.

Your objective will also help you choose the right keywords when setting up your campaign, as well as the content and message behind the ad.

Case Study: How We Helped Kodo Survey to Generate 167% More Leads in 3 Months Using LinkedIn Ads

Use PPC For Retargeting/Remarketing

Harness the leads you already have (that have converted/have interacted in the past) for remarketing and targeting them at different levels of the funnel. This can be done by focusing on the micro-details that go hand-in-hand with conversion.

PPC ads can be great for remarketing with the objective of conversion, or just brand re-awareness. These leads will already be on your radar from previous ad campaigns.

Build Your Ads Around Your Audience – Not The Other Way Around

Before you begin building your campaign, you need to be 100% clear on who your target audience is (and why).

No matter how big the budget or how well-crafted the content is, if you’re not targeting the right leads, your ad is as good as useless.

Instead, you need to tailor every aspect of your ad around your audience (particularly keywords). You can then create a bidding strategy that is in-keeping with your budget and your audience, and content that your audience can relate to. A demand generation strategy will help you capture the attention and interest of your target audience, creating a desire for your SaaS solution and ultimately driving conversions and sales.

Outbid Your Rivals

This means doing some research and bidding on the keywords your competitors are focusing on – especially if your objective is to build brand awareness.

This method is otherwise known as building brand comparison pages and creating content that focuses on why you are the superior option, and is especially effective when targeting leads at the earlier stages of the funnel when they’re doing brand/product research.

You can bid on keywords that are centred around comparisons/alternatives to keep lead focus on your brand.

Negative Keywords

Finally, the last key focus is the importance of negative keywords and audience exclusion when building your campaign.

While positive keywords are, of course, imperative, having a list of keywords you wish to exclude can help you get on your audience’s radar and to optimise your campaign as a whole. These keywords will ensure your ad doesn’t show up when they are searched for in a search engine.

As for audience exclusion, this serves to filter out any prospects that aren’t considered entirely lucrative (i.e.: likely to convert). This means you won’t be paying for your ads to be viewed by potentially irrelevant audiences.

Failure to focus on these two aspects will likely mean you’re wasting your budget and not getting a good return-on-investment. Your historical data, as well as brainstorming from the perspective of your audience, will help you create a good list of negative keywords, and buyer personas can help you weed out the irrelevant prospects.

Conclusion

PPC is a match made in heaven for SaaS brands, and once you understand these fundamentals behind campaign building, you can expect to wholly capitalise on your ads.

If you’d like to learn more about how we help B2B SaaS and Tech companies grow their MRR through paid advertising, contact us online or send us an email today at info@getuplead.com to speak with someone on our team.