As any salesperson will tell you, there's nothing like a warm lead; someone that has the money budgeted, and is looking to buy soon.
In most B2B marketing roles, the core responsibility is to generate and capture demand for products and services. To my knowledge, there is no better avenue to capture demand than via search advertising.
It's a win-win.
Citizens are looking specific goods/services and businesses pay an nominal fee to get their 15 word message in front of them when they're in the buying cycle.
As such, I recommend that everyone implement tiered search bidding.
Of course, the internet can help you at different stages of the buying process, from basic product awareness to product trial. But, adoption is ultimately what counts.
So, the next SEM campaign you run, attach phrases like quote, purchase and buy to each of your keywords and bid higher for those words. I like to call it tiered search bidding, whereby I have three bid sets; the lowest amount for generic, industry-wide product terms, a medium amount for product-specific terms and most for product-specific terms with buying words.
If you see good or bad results with this technique, let me know via e-mail at craigrentmeester at gmail dot com. I'm interested to see if this works in other industries.
