The Pay Per Click Advertising Opportunity
Most IT Companies Are Ignoring
The IT industry often leans heavily on traditional sales efforts—cold calling, trade shows, and direct outreach. But why focus on these expensive and time-consuming methods when PPC advertising can generate more leads at a fraction of the cost?
Sales consultants in the IT space often emphasize the long ramp-up times for new hires—18+ months to get fully productive and even longer to break even. Coupled with high turnover in sales roles, it’s no wonder many IT businesses struggle to scale profitably.
Here’s what many successful tech companies have realized: marketing comes before sales. Instead of over-investing in traditional sales tactics, build a digital lead-generation pipeline that fuels long-term growth.
Once your IT business has a steady flow of inbound leads, you can scale your sales team with confidence. Until then, it’s far more effective to focus on filling the top of your funnel with qualified prospects who are ready to convert.
Tortoise and Hare specializes in high-performance PPC advertising campaigns that elevate your IT business’s brand visibility and connect you with in-market buyers actively searching for your services.
The Rise of Digital Advertising in IT Marketing
Digital advertising spend in B2B has more than tripled in the past 5 years. Digital advertising spend in B2B is also growing at more than double the rate (11.6%) than traditional advertising spend is (5%).
For IT companies, this shift underscores the need to pivot toward online marketing strategies. The pandemic further accelerated this trend, with digital-first buyers now conducting extensive research before making a purchasing decision.
IT businesses that under-invest in digital advertising risk falling behind. With PPC campaigns, you can meet your audience where they already are—online—making it easier to generate leads and close deals faster.
The Way People Shop For An IT Company Has Changed
There's 7.5 billion people in the world and that number is growing towards 10 billion quickly. The number of vendors a business engages with has also increased. All that's led to more and more massive scale of sales reps trying to connect with buyers.
IT buyers are increasingly fatigued with the constant barrage of cold calls and cold emails that assault them and increasingly prefer to do their own research before adding themselves to yet another salesperson's hit list.
In fact according to a 2023 survey by Cognism, only 27% of sales teams reporting calling at the best way to book meetings and only 17% of IT marketers reported cold calling as their primary customer acquisition channel.
People still want to talk to sales, and experience better buying outcomes when a rep is involved, but they want to talk when they are ready and when they have done their own research. Enter PPC.
How PPC Advertising Benefits IT Companies
Don't surrender these key digital battlegrounds to your competitors. Pay per click platforms offer you the chance to both prospect for new leads and nurture those already in your funnel.
IT PPC can help you:
- Connect with in-market buyers at the time they are shopping for providers.
- Stay top of mind with low cost display ads to get those brands touches.
- Distribute blogs and whitepapers to help educate, and attract attention from buyers.
- Distribute rich media that helps socialize your brand values and company culture.
- Capture email addresses with lead magnets for ongoing email marketing.
MSP PPC Readiness Checklist
Running PPC campaigns for your IT company can be a very profitable endeavour but it's not without its challenges.
We've helped IT companies generate thousands of leads and add millions in revenue through pay per click advertising efforts and learned many lessons along the way.
Before you start an IT PPC advertising effort we recommend you have these items in place:
- An established brand
- A quality website that already generates occasional leads
- A social media presence and quality graphics on your pages
- Reviews on platforms like Google or Facebook
- A budget of at least $5,000/month you can spend on advertising
- A budget that can sustain at least 3 months of advertising but ideally 12 so you can understand seasonality impacts throughout the year and see the big picture
Not all of these are required to launch a successful advertising effort, but customers who meet these criteria tend to realize the most success.
How We Can Help
Configure Ad Accounts
We can help you configure your ad accounts for success by installing conversion tracking, remarketing pixels, and deploying optimal settings to help you maximize PPC performance.
Create Effective Marketing Campaigns
We'll help you refine your targeting and messaging in order to create effective IT PPC campaigns that reach your target audience. We write all the copy and assist with basic creative.
Optimize PPC Performance
Launching campaigns is just the beginning. Tortoise and Hare uses our deep experience running PPC campaigns for IT companies to refine your campaigns and generate profitable growth.
Platforms We Support
Why Choose Tortoise and Hare?
At Tortoise and Hare we've helped numerous IT companies generate durable growth via pay per click advertising campaigns. We have a strong idea of what works and what doesn't in the IT sector. We've developed assets like negative keyword lists that can save you thousands in wasted spend and time spent experimenting right out the gate. Fast track your pay per click advertising efforts with Tortoise and Hare.
Ad Spend Managed
New Revenues Generated
Leads Generated
Why Do We Succeed In IT PPC
When Other Agencies Have Failed?
Some of the reasons we succeed where other agencies have failed with your IT PPC efforts:
- We only work with clients that we think we can help. Choosing our clients carefully is a big part of our success.
- We focus on the IT sector exclusively, where other agencies are splitting their time and focus.
- We specialize primarily in search engines, instead of splitting our focus into a million different areas, we keep a focus on what's most important, quality search engine traffic.
- We are technically savvy and are using our technical skills to take full advantage of what advertising platforms offer. Many agencies fall short here.
- As a small team, we're all experts, therefore you get experts working on your account, not interns.
Listen To Our PPC Advertising Podcast Episode
Listen to Hunter Nelson, founder and president of Tortoise and Hare Software, discuss PPC advertising with Taher Hamid in the podcast episode below.
Watch Our Mastering Google Ads For IT Companies Presentation
Listen to Tortoise and Hare Software founder and President Hunter Nelson talk about running paid search campaigns on Google to add leads to your IT company's marketing pipeline.
What Some Of Our Clients Have To Say About Working With Us On Their PPC Campaigns
Frequently Asked Questions About IT PPC
This answer varies on factors like locations targeted, verticals targeted, growth goals, and more. Generally we recommend a minimum of $5,000/month put towards pay per click advertising.
We have a flat fee + percentage of ad spend model. Our minimum retainer is $1,500/month.
We frequently get customers that generate a lead in their first month of advertising but it can take 3-6 months to get campaigns dialed in and performing profitably.
Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook at a minimum.
Generally it takes about a month for us to get initial campaigns and configurations completed.
Pay per click advertising use machine learning to set their bids in dynamic auctions. They are dependent on you feeding them back data on what clicks turned into "conversions". We help you set up conversion tracking for activities like:
- Form submits
- Phone calls
- Newsletter subscriptions
- Other valuable actions on your website
Apply Now For A Free
IT Pay Per Click Advertising Consultation
We offer free 1-hour digital advertising consultations via a Microsoft Teams video conference to discuss your pain points and determine if Tortoise and Hare Software is the right fit for you.
Not Ready To Reach Out Yet?
Browse some of our latest PPC advertising articles
Case Study: TNHS Generates 30 Leads In 6 Months For DC Metro MSP
What MSPs Should Know About Retargeting: Turning Window Shoppers into Revenue
GovTech SaaS Paid Search Advertising Case Study
Effective Keywords For Your MSP To Bid On
Is LinkedIn Ads A Fit For Your MSP?
