B2B Manufacturing Tech: 0-2 SQLs to 10-12 SQLs Per Month

When I started working with these guys, they only had Google Ads running, and it wasn't performing well. Their ads were being run by a PR Agency as part of some bundle deal.

They're a B2B company selling a product that typically goes for 7-figure annual contracts. They CAN afford to spend big money to acquire SQLs. Their problem wasn't efficiency - it was that they were getting garbage leads and none of them would turn into SQLs. They also had a super low conversion rate.

Oh, and they have a pre-set marketing budget of $30k/month that never changes no matter the results because of some complicated "people up high problems". The money has to be spent one way or another, so it's about spending this money AND finding SQLs.

Their Google Ads account was setup horribly. Like super mediocre stuff: Search Partners on. Performance Max optimizing for form submits with no OTP, CAPTCHA, or spam detection filters. 5 different campaigns with a super unconsolidated ad account.

Their conversion rate was 2%, which is terrible for a simple form submission. The problem was they were sending traffic to their homepage. This company sells to multiple industries - commercial, governmental, and consumer. But their homepage was all consumer focused and mentioned nothing about commercial or governmental.

They also had another issue. Lots of people would submit the form but turn out to be personal inquiries. Someone looking to get this product for a science lab or in-home experiments. Literally what we're NOT after.

They didn't have any content or use cases for governmental or commercial on their website, and we were months away from having something put together.

First, I fixed Google Ads. Consolidated everything into 2 campaigns - a cold traffic campaign and a brand campaign. The cold traffic campaign was running on broad match.

And even though lots of people think broad match is the enemy, it actually isn't. In this case, broad match got me to show up for keywords people were searching in CHINESE. I don't speak Chinese. Neither do they. Google doesn't even operate in China. But there's a good chunk of Chinese companies in the US who were searching for my client's product in Chinese. If I had exact or phrase match, I would've never showed up for any of those keywords. Lots of those turned into SQLs btw.

Once Google was fixed, we still had a conversion rate problem. My solution was to build them a landing page only for Google Ads. The objective was to: Increase conversion rate. Disqualify personal lead form submissions. Tell people they have use cases for commercial, governmental, AND consumer (not just consumer).

The landing page was a huge success. Took the conversion rate from 2% to 7%. We were able to see which search terms drove the personal queries and negative matched them.

I also implemented offline conversion tracking for qualified leads and converted leads. I integrated their CRM with Google Ads via Zapier so that whenever a lifecycle stage change happens in their CRM, it hits Google Ads. Now we're optimizing for qualified and converted leads instead of just garbage form fills.

The other thing I did, and this took me MONTHS to persuade them on, was run Facebook Ads. Their idea was that their target market is so unique and high up there that Facebook/IG didn't make sense.

My pushback was that the CEO of a Fortune 500 company scrolls through IG Reels before bed. And so does the product developer, the entire C-Suite, and all the decision makers.

I finally convinced them to let me launch FB/IG Ads. And it was insane. Some months it would generate results at like 25% of the cost per SQL from Google. Some months it would match it. Some months it wouldn't produce any SQLs at all. Year to date it's 30% cheaper to acquire SQLs on Facebook/Instagram compared to Google. Which is insane.

We went from 0-2 SQLs per month to 10-12 SQLs per month. Still spending the same $30k/month.

Google Ads campaign structure (consolidated to 2 campaigns, broad match). Landing page with proper qualification and messaging for all industries. Offline conversion tracking (CRM integration via Zapier). Launched Facebook Ads channel (30% cheaper per SQL than Google YTD). At the time of writing this, the next step is to launch LinkedIn for these guys. I'm generally not very optimistic about LinkedIn. It's very much a long-term play rather than direct response style where I can get leads and immediately show value like I can with Google and Meta. We'll probably run this test for 3 months. I'll come back and update this once I have the results.