Moderator: Detlev Johnson - Search Rank
Karen Breen Vogel - Clear Gauge talks about B2B Search Marketing, the “considered purchase”
Clear Gauge focuses a lot on their optin email efforts. An example of why you need to be holistic in Internet Marketing. Considered purchase: what is different? Goals are to start or drive relationships. They believe that the Internet is more of a relationship medium. Engines: major se’s and b2b focused verticals. Keywords: buying cycle and role based. This is the major difference, emphasizes buying cycle, buying cycle, buying cycle! The major difference between B2B and B2C. Messages: value proposition and offers aligned to buying cycle and role. Landing pages: options for interactions/content/next date. Must give them options since you do not know where they are in the buying cycle. Tracking ROI: Show ROI Pipelines. B2B people think of pipelines. Listed thing people may be doing. Including educating themselves, ID various solutions, etc…they are at some point in the buying cycle, so your goal is to place your desire to form a relationship into the prospects search path. Paid versus natural., be relevant, but filter the prospect in the messaging of your PPC campaigns. Use negative keywords and other methods of pre-qualifying clicks. Measure and optimize valuable business behaviors such as where the clicks come from and the following behavior. Goal si to be able to communicate again via email. Many variables that im pact paid search: campaign groupings, ad groups, content vs. search ads. Kws, negative kws, ranking positions, match types, bid price gaps, daily ad caps, bid prices, message titles/descriptions, display URL’s, multiple messages (A/B testing), Conversions. Google emphasizes placing higher priority on campaigns with higher daily ad caps. Guy with biggest budget will get most activity. Raising ad caps is a good signal to G that you are in the game to stay. Key Pillars: Find (kw list research, root term methodology, Case study: tactics (went from 47 to 1600 terms) versus results (400% increase). Second pillar is engage: use operative keywords (similar tho theory of “latent” keywords from the (Monday session). Matching strategy important in order to expand audience. Landing page relevancy is important in order t put visitors into your pipeline. Instead of just telling them that solution is “X,” you should tell them you understand their problems and have solutions. Last pillar: measure value. Tracking highly valued activities, optimization logs, continuous improvements, pipeline visibility. Advanced tracking architecture…gives example of a spreadsheet that covers many aspects of the web site and its users’ activities, in order to discover which keywords work best. Equating things such as optins and downloads to measure where they are in the buying cycle. Also uses scenario groupings of certain pages that work together to create a good end result, need to take corrective actions. A good sales person will walk out of a bad sales call and immediately try to discover what happened wrong, and then address that on the next call. In summary, must focus on entire buying cycle, engage all prospects at all points, be prospect-centric: use problem, not products messaging. Focus on most important business metrics. Optimize your program to what you care the most about: do not optimize to traffic or clicks, but instead to actual business results.
Paul Slack - WebDex Appreciates us showing up on the first session of the last day. Agenda: B2B sales cycles, who to target, how they search, developing an Internet marketing strategy. B2B sales cycle: Figure out who is making the decision. Uncover the need, research possible solutions (they will do typical due diligence at this point), pair down to short list of vendors, go to bid, make decision. SEM is involved in both research and decision of short list. Enquiro study of SE buying funnel. Awareness 8.7 consideration/research 68.3, 42.6 decision, purchase 28.2. This is why it is so important to be present on the Internet during the second two stages. Influencers and decision makers will use SE’s differently. Influencers: website needs to be an “influencers-catcher>“ use specific words, they are more likely to respond to ca call to action, will typically “bite” on comparison matrixes, webinars, trials, demos, etc… Sources of content important to them: spec sheets, white papers, product pages, newsletters. This allows you to communicate effectively with the influencers. These things make the influencers’ jobs easier by giving them the info to download and show to their boss. Gives an example of a white paper written that was about a certain compliance issue, and now it is number ne at G for a search of that issue. Very targeted to people that search for this exact solution to their need for a software. Also, the white paper uses a conversion form to gather info at first (giving up info to get info is accepted). 17% conversion rate for this form. Decision makers: different because they are late-cycle. They search for validation. High level searches of 2-3 words instead of the 4 word phrases influencers tend to use. Less likely to respond to a call to action. Look for sources of content. They purchased the term “Sarbannes Oxley” for a client, and the positioning in PPC for that term makes the client look like “one of the big boys.” Very high level landing page geared more towards the decision maker. Developing an Internet Marketing strategy. Website don’t exist for their own sake, but to fulfill a specific purpose and to satisfy specific consumer needs. Define goals and objectives, understand audience, understand conversion activities, know budget, use measurement, refine and make changes for improvement. Circular pattern: define, refine, measure (repeat). (Technical difficulties - presentation computer locks up.) They use a spreadsheet in order to get as much info from clients/prospects as possible regarding their goals and prior activities. They determine a qualified lead is defined as someone with a eed and a budget. The more you can define this, the better chance you will have at success. Use their COA goal as a benchmark, and determine that they will be happy as long as you can stay below that. Then you can determine how man y accounts the website needs to close in order to match or improve on other marketing activities. Then figure out based on the conversion ratio, how many visitors are needed. To sum it up: “Begin with the end in mind.”
Christopher Grady - Merak Communications Has done all SEM in house, thus invited to speak from that perspective. Four main issues: Turning business hurdles into SEM advantages ID kws and engine sin b2b2, biggest kw targeting mistakes, and Monitoring activities that lead to buying.. Turning hurdles into strategic advantages: disadvantage, you cannot actively sell a mail server, advantage: they do use the Internet to find a solution (a replacement for their faulty mail server. Identifying engines and kws used in B2B: conducted behavior usability studies and continue to find out info measuring sales cycle and after purchase. Kw analysis study included study of terminology used by competitors, related forums and usenet, technical books, categorical terminology, terminology used in mags and newsletters., wrote custom DB application to help with task. Ended up writing a kw ref guide for use by all their content writers to refer-to. This corporate dictionary helps them have the best possible kws constantly infused into new content. One big kw targeting mistake was accidentally ranking for the term “email.” since the product is B2B they fielded about 70 useless calls a day. They found that their largest customer found them using an 11 kw search, second largest used a nine kw search, etc…they actually ended up finding non-optimized pages. Largest customer used a core keyword and then a list of requirements. They have used a forum to help their communications with customers. Found that monitoring closing rate based on pattern of downloading and subsequent behavior.