B2B Bullseye

The SES: Chicago conference rolls in through its second day and continues to be a real learning experience. Murdok publisher murdok sat in on the "Targeting B2B" session and found a lot of useful information. The session centered on relationship building as the primary focus for B2B marketing. Editor's Note: Need to work on making your B2B prospects better? Check out this discussion and other events at SES on the Karen Breen Vogal, CEO of B2B advertising firm ClearGauge and she started by analyzing what's different in B2B search marketing. She broke down into six basic points: Goals - Start or develop relationships Engines - Major search and business/vertical and specific Keyword - Buying cycle and role-based Messages - Value prop/offer aligned to buying cycle and role Landing pages - Options for interactions/content/next date Tracking ROI - Show ROI pipeline, cost/behavior Unlike B2C, B2B marketing is generally a buyer-initiated medium. Decision makers and influencers at all stages of the buying cycle are utilizing the Internet to further their decisions process. They way to advantage of that buyer initiated medium is to place your desire to form a relationship into the prospect's path. Clearly, B2B search marketing should not just be the replication of the direct marketing approach. It should be more of a relationship approach. Perhaps the best advice is to always reach out and give visitors more things to do on your site and always try to get their permission to talk to become a prospect via email. The buying cycle takes time with B2B so obtaining email contact permission from the site visitor is key. Some things to know with B2B paid search include content vs. search ads. Negative keywords are important because you must take out certain words with B2B paid search. The reason you need to do this with B2B is because we are dealing with low volume searching in B2B. Daily ad caps were also mentioned because marketers with bigger ad camps will likely get the more coveted key words. This is a key factor with Google. She ended saying, "Don't do anything until you get your website analytics and measurement right. Every company in a B2B environment must be good at targeting, good at persuasion and good at conversion." Remember to focus on the entire buying cycle, to be prospect centric and to focus on the most important business metrics.